Ventures into childland: Victorians, fairy tales, and femininity

Abstract

U.C. Knoepflmacher. 1998. Ventures Into Childland: Victorians, fairy Tales, and femininity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. $35.00 hc. xxi + 444 pp. Lynne Vallone Texas A & M University U. C. Knoepflmacher's long-awaited and big new book packs a wallop: a lavishly illustrated, intricately argued, and vast overview of seven Victorian authors who within a short span of only twenty years (the early 1850s to early 1870s) wrote some of most enduring fantasies for children, Ventures into Childland puts children's squarely at heart of Victorian literary history. Knoepflmacher may indeed have written, as he notes himself, the most comprehensive history (literary and cultural) yet written about so-called golden age of children's literature (xiii). But such putative boasting is not really misplaced. There's not another book out there like this one. Clearly whatever Knoepflmacher has ever thought about Victorian and his seven authors-Lewis Carroll, Juliana Horatia Ewing, Jean Ingelow, George MacDonald, Christina Rossetti, John Ruskin, and William Makepeace Thackeray-can be found in each chapter of multiple sections that taken together, resemble nothing so much as masterpieces of Victorian fantasy themselves. very engaging preface addresses reader politely yet directly-May I detain you? (xi)-and goes on to offer a cogent and useful introduction to book's issues, as one might well expect. But opening pages reveal something more, too, something just as valuable to readers of this book: a glimpse at refugee child behind scholar whose privilege to live out his childhood was denied so many other children by Nazi regime. Knoepflmacher's personal dream-child-an anonymous Polish Jewish boy from Warsaw ghetto, 1941-offers a gentle corrective to sentimental (male) fantasists-or anyone-whose desires to preserve a prepubescent childhood can be read as cloudy nostalgia. central argument of book pits Golden Age male fantasists (Ruskin, Thackeray MacDonald and Carroll) against female writers who followed (Ingelow, Rossetti, and Ewing). Knoepflmacher's interest here follows fruitfully upon work he began with Nina Auerbach in Forbidden Journeys: Fairy Tales and Fantasies by Victorian Women Writers (1992). Knoepflmacher describes male authors who fixated on little girls or girl-boys and wrote stories of loss and a desire for reunion with maternal: The image of an arrested girl allows each elegist to idealize his own lost childhood (12).The female authors reacted against such regressive fantasies and aggressively insisted-even within wonder tales where maternal is celebrated-on reinstatement of real and necessity of growing up. It may be surprising to learn that Knoepflmacher finds male writers to be primary sufferers from pervasive ideology of separate spheres that helped to organize nineteenth-century English life rather than female authors who lived restrictive oneness just about every day of their lives. Ruskin, Carroll, MacDonald and Thackeray were all inspired by daughters or particular girl-friends-not so Ingelow, Rossetti, and Ewing, who wrote for all children who were meant to grow into adults. There is little such personal investment in miniatures to be found in fiction of female authors. For Ingelow, Rossetti and Ewing, realities of gender binaries were just too great to ignore or to elide through fantasies of arrested development or aesthetic death. …