A Race Apart: Children in Late Victorian and Edwardian Children's Books

Abstract

A Race Apart:Children in Late Victorian and Edwardian Children's Books Dieter Petzold (bio) The years between 1880 and 1914 are the very center of what is often referred to as "the Golden Age of Children's Literature." These decades witnessed not only an unprecedented output of books for children, but also the emergence of a considerable number of "classic" children's books, which were, and to a certain degree still are, cherished by children and adults alike. There are, of course, many interrelated factors involved in this phenomenon. One of them is certainly the development of a specific attitude towards the child among the general (i.e., middle class) reading public, an attitude which in a handy catch-phrase has been termed the "Cult of Childhood." Such a phrase can be illuminating, but we should not trust it too far, since it also tends to obscure specific details. Even if we look closely at only some of the books written for, or read by, children during that period, we find not one monolithic conception of the child, but rather a confusing variety of attitudes toward, and opinions about, children, sometimes clearly pronounced, sometimes only implied or obliquely hinted at. This variety is certainly the impression left by Gillian Avery's classic accounts of child figures in nineteenth-century children's books.1 Other critics have tried to impose some kind of order on the conflicting data by relating the child figures of various authors to certain tendencies in the intellectual history of the Western world. Thus Leslie Fiedler and Peter Coveney connect the growing interest in, and idealization of, childhood with the development of Romanticism, while David Grylls stresses the existence of two conflicting, and competing, conceptions of the child throughout the nineteenth century: on the one hand the puritan/evangelical view of the child as a vessel of sin, which dominated the early decades but lingered on during the rest of the century; on the other the Romantic celebration of the child as a model of innocence. Even more fundamental dichotomies are developed by Robert Pattison, who sees the changing history of the conception of the child in terms of the Augustinian and Pelagian ideas of man's nature, while Bixler tries to explain late Victorian children's literature by placing it in the tradition of two kinds of pastoral writing. All these models are certainly useful and illuminating. Like all models, however, they suggest one particular point of view to the exclusion of others. The suggested dichotomies—rationalism or evangelicalism vs. romanticism; original sin vs. the perfectability of man; georgic vs. bucolic pastoralism—tend, by virtue of their broadness, to obscure some of the outstanding qualities of the specific period with which we are dealing; in particular they obstruct our view of the peculiar threshold situation of the late nineteenth century. To say that the decades before the First World War are a period of uncertainty and anxiety, in spite of their seeming complacency, is to state a commonplace; yet it is often assumed that not much of that sense of restlessness is conveyed in the field of children's literature, a field which is thought to be notoriously conservative. If, however, we look closely at the pictures of childhood offered in late Victorian and Edwardian children's books, we can find some attitudes which differ quite sharply from those dominant in mid-Victorian times. I suggest that this difference is the result of a very general change of perspective. The late Victorians and Edwardians continued to idealize the child to a large extent, but they did so increasingly for different reasons. The mid-Victorian debate was about the child as a moral being: the child was regarded as essentially sinful (and, hence, in need of moral education) or as essentially innocent (and therefore to be protected and adored). While the mid-Victorian frame of reference continues, it is now overlaid by another view: the essential difference between the child and the adult is the former's freedom from social obligations and his amoral status. A recognition of the new focus on the individual's independence from, rather than obligation to, God and society, then, puts...