Intangible Children: Longing, Loss, and the Edwardian Dream Child in J. M. Barrie’s The Little White Bird and Rudyard Kipling’s ‘“They”’

Abstract

It is often assumed that J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan (1904) was the founding fiction of the Edwardian literary cult of childhood, but Barrie’s own novel The Little White Bird (1902) and Rudyard Kipling’s short story ‘“They”’ (1904) are among earlier Edwardian texts that reveal that the ‘cult’ was already thriving before Peter Pan landed on the stage to became its most enduring symbol. Dappled with longing for children lost or never born, who manifest fictionally as intangible dream children, The Little White Bird and ‘“They”’ give early and intense impulse to the very Edwardian desire to capture children on the page. They also reflect the period’s fictional foregrounding of relationships between child characters and bachelors or bachelor-like men.