ABSTRACT
In a notorious anecdote recounted in Book 2 of Emile, Jean-Jacques Rousseau takes it upon himself to correct the caprices of a spoilt boy. More than 100 years after the publication of Emile, one of nineteenth-century England's most fervent admirers of Rousseau, George Eliot, published another account of the moral education of a spoilt child. The task that Eliot sets herself in recounting the story of Gwendolen Harleth is to demonstrate how a spoilt child can be led to understand the insufficiency of a life based solely on the gratification of personal desires. Eliot also has to account for why Gwendolen is spoilt, and in doing so she makes use of a metaphor which has its own history. There is a developmental or evolutionary aspect to Spencer's thought which is absent from Rousseau, so that by allowing the discipline of natural consequences to act on the development of the child, one is contributing to the development of the race.
