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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 July 2009
In 1820, Hawthorne wrote “The Gentle Boy,” the story of Ilbrahim, who, too pure and fragile to survive the cruelties of the world, dies young. “His gentle spirit … from Heaven” chastens his “fierce and vindictive” mother, teaching her true religion. Here, in one of the earliest stories of the saintly child, we see the basic pattern for hundreds of stories that were the favorite reading of nineteenth-century America—the confrontation between an innocent child and. a corrupt society, and the demonstration of the ultimate power of innocence. For the modern reader, the saintly child stories offer a valuable insight into the tastes of our recent ancestors: they enjoyed the most heavy-handed sentimentality, the crudest pathos, a sickly religiosity, and a trumped-up mysticism. And sex, though banished from these works, frequently sneaks back into the stories—albeit unconsciously—often in incestuous forms.
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