Adoptive Reading

Abstract

Consider these characters: Oswald Bastable (and his five brothers and sisters), Sara Crewe, Tom Sawyer, Anne (of Green Gables), Rebecca (of Sunnybrook Farm). Orphans all, at least in the nineteenth-century sense of the term, and also voracious, impressionable, and, to use the parlance of our day, interactive readers. Acting out scenes from their favourite novels and poems and ‘tak[ing] them to illuminate the world’ (the phrase is Jonathan Culler’s) is not in these novels, quixotic behaviour they need to grow out of but rather a reading strategy that allows them to find a kind of family, a community and a sense of belonging. What is more, their ‘active, invested, adoptive reading’ (Stauffer 95) enables them to survive in both domestic and economic terms. This chapter therefore seeks to shed light on the way that childhood reading was constructed and construed in the period we celebrate as the Golden Age of children’s literature and to uncover the connection between that kind of reading and the way these classic texts for and about children contributed to the era’s valorisation of the nuclear family, even as they depict and celebrate decidedly non-normative forms of family.