Artful Dodgers: Reconceiving the Golden Age of Children's Literature (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Artful Dodgers: Reconceiving the Golden Age of Children's Literature Martha P. Hixon (bio) Artful Dodgers: Reconceiving the Golden Age of Children's Literature. By Marah Gubar. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Conventional critical wisdom has long held that the Victorians were wedded to the Romantic idea of the inherent innocence of children and other "primitives" and that, consequently, Victorian writers often incorporated an idealized child in their works, a child that must be forever isolated from the "real" adult world in order to remain pure and incorrupt. Children's literature critics in the late 1980s and early 1990s applied this theory of the "cult of the child" to Victorian children's authors as well, advancing various arguments regarding how Lewis Carroll, J. M. Barrie, Francis Hodgson Burnett, and their contemporaries not only perpetuated this ideal in their child characters but also attempted to coerce their child readers into conforming to that naïve ideal. The account put forth by these critics held that these authors conceived of childhood, both in fiction and outside of it, as a nostalgic place of escape from the anxieties and uncertainties of adulthood, and that they tried their best to maintain that innocence both within and through the books they produced for children. Gubar's book is a refreshing answer to this simplistic thinking. Gubar unabashedly takes on Jacqueline Rose, James Kincaid, Humphrey Carpenter, Jackie Wullschläger, and others, presenting an incisive, wide-ranging, and grounded argument that writers of the Golden Age of children's literature were "far more skeptical about Romantic primitivism than this account suggests," and that "on the contrary, they generally conceive[d] of child characters and child readers as socially saturated beings, profoundly shaped by the culture, manner, and morals of their time" (4). Gubar does not reject the "cult of the child" paradigm outright, conceding that idealization of children did indeed exist in Victorian thinking, but she contends that the critical assessment regarding Golden Age literature "must be reconceived to reflect the fact that … the Victorians and Edwardians frequently manifested a high level of critical self-consciousness about the whole problem of representing, writing for, looking at, interacting with, and worshipping children" (viii), and they were vitally concerned with the power imbalances inherent in the relationship between adult author and child reader. Artful Dodgers is a strong first salvo in the corrective effort that Gubar calls for, an exploration of the ways in which these authors more often than not posited fictive situations that examined how adult-child interactions could promote agency for [End Page 240] their child characters (and thus, the readers who identified with them). The "artful dodgers" of her title are those children who are savvy enough to effectively collaborate with the adult world into which they are born rather than live in glorified isolation from it. Following an introduction that lays the groundwork for her new reading of Golden Age literature along the lines noted above, Gubar organizes her argument into six chapters. Chapter 1, "The Rise of the Child Narrator," considers the ways in which early Victorian authors for children utilized child narrators in their texts. Gubar notes this area has "received virtually no critical attention" (39) because scholars have overlooked the experimentation of women writers early in the century, focusing instead on Dickens's Holiday Romance (1868) and E. Nesbit's The Story of the Treasure Seekers (1899) as the period's examples of adult appropriation of the child's voice to tell the story. Such selectivity, Gubar observes, leads to generalized conclusions regarding the overt and covert colonization of children by the Victorian authors who wrote for them, a view that Gubar demonstrates is undercut by Juliana Ewing, Maria Molesworth, Diana Craik, and even Nesbit herself, all of whom routinely assumed their child readers were able to recognize and resist underlying didactic messages in books and who utilized child narrators that their readers would both sympathize with and critique rather than wholeheartedly embrace and emulate. Chapter 2 focuses on Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island as an "anti-adventure story" rather than an imperialist text that adheres to the Robinsonade paradigm celebrated by popular adventure story...