SOURCE: Ruwe, Donelle R. “Benevolent Brothers and Supervising Mothers: Ideology in the Children's Verses of Mary and Charles Lamb and Charlotte Smith.” Children's Literature: Annual of the Modern Language Association Division on Children 25 (1997): 87-115.

In the following essay, Ruwe argues that Mary and Charles Lamb use the depiction of siblings in Poetry for Children to expose patriarchal influence in poetry, while Charlotte Smith's representation of siblings argues for a removal of this patriarchal authority.

We can assert two indisputable truths: one is that there were not mere dozens, nor even hundreds, but actually thousands, of women whose writing was published in Great Britain in the half century between 1780 and 1830 that subsumes the Romantic period; and the other is that until very recently we have known very little about it. What that says about the sociology of literary criticism is obvious to any reader and therefore need not occupy...