With her book Imaginary Citizens, Courtney Weikle-Mills, a recently tenured professor in the English Department at the University of Pittsburgh, has quietly emerged as one of the most brilliant scholars in childhood studies. Although this book will be of obvious interest to scholars of early American literature, and those interested in children's literary history, its relevance stretches more broadly to establish links between childhood, reading, and citizenship.

Weikle-Mills begins her study by pointing to the fact that American citizens (in their “infant nation” rebelling from the Mother Country) have often been aligned with children (1–2). This fact points to a long-standing ambivalence about the meaning of American citizenship, especially as children came to be understood as lacking the rational attributes necessary to the full exercise of citizenship.

The title of Weikle-Mills's book and the central theme animating it is the notion of “imaginary citizenship.” This notion refers to a relationship between individuals and the state that most self-evidently applies to children but which has implication for all those in the nation's borders. As she writes,

Children, literature, and reading are central to Weikle-Mills's argument about imaginary citizenship.

The rise of the novel, we learn, coincided with attention to developmental theories suggesting that children were unable to exercise full citizenship, but also recognizing the importance of children's reading. Between 1641 and 1642, Massachusetts adopted the first law barring those aged under twenty-one from being elected to office and a literacy law requiring that children learn to read the Bible and recite the catechism (32). Although Puritan children were taught to read at a very young age so that they could comprehend the Bible, reading also empowered children, even as Puritan society upheld an authoritarian model of child rearing. As Weikle-Mills notes,

Children's citizenship became the model for expressing other forms of limited citizenship, leading both to “a broader preoccupation with childhood in literary texts” and the development of literature written specifically for children (9).

Using Locke's ideas about children's natural citizenship – that children are “born free” although they are not yet ready to exercise their freedom – as the basis for explaining how childhood came to be used as a rationale for limiting civic freedoms, Weikle-Mills suggests that literary texts became a core arena for expressing claims to citizenship on the part of children, and, by extension, on the part of others who were defined as childlike, including slaves and women (14).

Weikle-Mills draws upon Etienne Balibar's notion of a “citizen-subject” to explain the way in which “a fantasy of children's free and equal birth” rationalizes citizens’ right to participate in the making of laws and running the government (20). However, in a republic the consent which citizens (as opposed to subjects) give to those who rule them is largely imaginary. In other words, “Children's imaginary citizenship helped create the idea of a responsible, consenting citizen, while also highlighting the limitations of this concept and the need for supplementary narratives about citizenship” (26). Although Weikle-Mills considers the emergence of children's literature as a category of American literature, her attention to the implied child reader (and, when archival evidence makes it possible, actual child readers) is less an exclusive examination of children and books and more a discussion of how all readers were to some degree addressed as children.

The book's first chapter examines novels of conversion that “depicted young children adopting religious beliefs independently of their parents” (27) at a moment when children were increasingly being denied church membership and political status in general, presaging a divergence between literary and legal notions of citizenship. Chapter 2 focusses on the rise of what Weikle-Mills calls “affectionate citizenship”: children's affection for their books made reading a logical form for expressing affective attachment to the nation (20). Chapter 3 looks at child readers of the novel (and childish readers of and characters within the novel, especially women). The following chapter deals with the theme of economic citizenship, an ideal that expressed a tension between the capitalist marketplace as “depersonifying, dehumanizing, and alienating” (138), in effect disempowering adults and making them into children, and “[i]maginary versions of children's economic participation [that] helped Americans to claim that social goods could result from economic growth” (136). This tension, we learn, was often resolved through sentimental literature. The book's final chapter considers the striking increase in books about nature after 1825: “Many of these stories make the case for children's natural citizenship by suggesting that civic virtues already exist in the plant and animal kingdoms” (172). Weikle-Mills argues that such books took on “political significance” in relation to “Emerson's arguments that children must learn to read the book of nature to be self-reliant citizens” (192).

Weikle-Mills's conclusion, centered around the Fourteenth Amendment and the Pledge of Allegiance (in which “the child, who is already a natural citizen, nonetheless pledges his allegiance to the imaginary symbols of nationhood and thereby perpetuates the fantasy that nature and nation are compatible” (214)), reiterates both that revolutionary conclusion of the Fourteenth Amendment that childhood and citizenship were not incompatible and the fact that the amendment “did not fundamentally change children's participation rights or even the participation rights of other excluded citizens” (207).

Grounding her analysis in close reading and historical contextualization of a wide range of texts, both canonical (The New England Primer, Sarah Fielding's The Governess, Tom Sawyer, Washington Irving's Sketchbook) and others now largely forgotten (e.g. Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote (1752)), and incorporating archival evidence and careful reading of marginalia, Weikle-Mills's book is an important contribution to American studies, reminding us of how childhood as a category enriches our understanding of individuals’ relation to the nation. The writing is dense but eloquent, and the arguments are complex but rewarding. This is sure to be a book that is read and referred to for years to come.