Late Victorians Research Articles

E. C. Stedman and the Invention of Victorian Poetry

CRITICS HAVE LONG DESPISED GENTEEL TRADITION OF THE AMERICAN nineteenth century. According vast majority of American literary histories written since 1915 (when Van Wyck Brooks published his polemic America's Coming of Age), genteel tradition (and nineteenth-century America more generally) derived its poetic norms and ideals from forms, imagery, and language of foreign sources, and expressed a sentimental, bourgeois ideology at odds with subversive work of truly great American writers. Only after liberating Modernist revolution of early twentieth century would America have its own poetic tradition. As Andrew DuBois and Frank Lentricchia tell story, to many appreciative American readers at end of nineteenth genteel writers were synonymous with poetry. Other readers-Eliot, Frost, and especially Pound among them--saw things differently, saw these late Victorians, this genteel filling day's major magazines of culture, saw these fat old hens styling themselves as wise old owls ... saw these men squatting out inadequate eggs of day, their poems. Against this intolerable situation, modernists made their attack. When feathers finally settled, a handful of expatriates and scattered nativist and homebody had already proved that young century might be an American century, for poetry at least.... The day was won by this historical movement, this modernism. (1) The Modernists, then, resented not only boring of genteel writers but more significantly cultural control they exercised, and by breaking power of this cabal, Modernism effected much more than a revolution in taste. In other words, key target of Modernist rage was not genteel poems but genteel poetics, a system of values, which DuBois and Lentricchia indict without really specifying. But phrase displaced late Victorians is telling: not only do genteel poets hold on a set of values hopelessly out of date (hence late), they also mistakenly endorse a tradition that is not even theirs (hence they are displaced Victorians). Looking Britain, Victorian American cabal endorsed a sense of American poetry that only (and weakly) met terms of a foreign poetics, and in so doing they missed vital work being created at home, so that only in twentieth century would real American literature (Walden, Moby Dick, Leaves of Grass) be recognized. Besides being generally incorrect, this thesis fails acknowledge an important implication of its terms, namely that from America might be creative and productive as well as derivative. Americans did not look eastward an autonomous or pre-existent field or discourse of Victorian poetry; rather, their looking eastward called that field into being. In other words, Americans did look Britain during Victorian era, but these Americans did not imitate, they created Victorian poetry. Rather than merely adopting pre-existing British poetic models as paradigms for American poetry, American writers helped create those models by theorizing and defining Victorian poetry. (2) The first modern critical work on field--the first work treat nineteenth-century British poetry as a field, separate and separable from poetry of earlier times and places--was Edmund Clarence Stedman's 1875 Victorian Poets. Shortly after its publication, Stedman wrote Moncure Conway that it is first attempt thus far survey whole course of recent British poetry, from rise of Tennyson, down latest aspirants, upon a consistent method--with analysis of period, etc., etc., including careful study into both works and lives of leading poets. (3) Not only was first professional book on subject, prior the prefix 'Victorian' had not previously become familiar (LL, p. …

Sitting on "The Outer Skin": Somerville and Ross's Through Connemara in a Governess Cart as a Coded Stratum of Linguistic/Feminist "Union" Ideals

INTRODUCTION In her study of of and Irish identity, Catherine Nash notes increasing pervasiveness of the West in popular travel accounts of throughout boom years of professional tourist industry during 1880s and 1890s. The late Victorians' growing taste for primitive fueled interest in region, and late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century travel accounts of that Nash details are further seen to take part in process of romanticization whereby became an almost barbaric but tantalizingly exotic other both within and without Ireland. (1) This overt primordial gloss, however, becomes dynamically problematic when viewed within its discursive framework of travel-writing's British entrepreneurial imperialist values. In his preface to an anthology of travel narratives on from 1800-2000, Glenn Hooper notes that: an ever increasing number of travel accounts reflected discourse of British imperialism of early and mid-nineteenth century, discourse which was to flower supremely in 1880s and 1890s. The nineteenth century was stamped by rhetoric of empire, and many of its trav ellers mirrored, and in some cases passionately articulated, empire politics. (2) The idealized purity of Ireland's western corner was posited by ensuing travelers as unique representation of untainted Irish authenticity that was simultaneously celebrated by Irish-Ireland movement and patronizingly denigrated by British empire politics. The exuded Irish authenticity for educated and avid tourist alike, largely bypassing ever-increasing cultural split between sensitive traveler and tourist. (3) Moreover, common iconic fodder employed in both political and cultural circles gradually encouraged establishment of an authentic discourse on of Ireland. This textual dialogue was inscribed in travel writing of period, and Melissa Fegan suggests that travel writers appeared to see themselves as successive editors of text Ireland and that assumed stability of this text produced diachronic generalisations more often than synchronic truths. (4) As result, travel book became palimpsest that was over-written by succeeding travellers who preserved and added to its anachronistic interpretations. (5) Subsequent to this layered narratorial process Martin Ryle argues that by early twentieth century of was decisively recognized both as a unique place within Ireland, and as quintessentially Irish. (6) Its cultural status had become so time-honored and anchored in its physical geography that any exposition on subject was deemed almost redundant. It was into this maelstrom of cultural certainty that Somerville and Ross launched their own definitive account of in 1893, arguably attempting to reverse trajectory Fegan describes above. In this light, Through in Governess Cart becomes an endeavour not only to re-write but also to re-fashion ubiquitous images of of extolled in popular and commercial travel writing. (7) It was Ross's evident abhorrence of an intolerably vulgar guide to Connemara published in Dublin in early 1880s and detailed in letter to Somerville in 1889 that provided extra stimulation that she and her writing partner needed to embark on their own travel narrative of Ross's native Irish district. (8) The two travel writers' retaliatory tactics against perfunctory Dublin guide, The Midland Great Western Railway of Tourists' Handbook: Through and of Ireland, continually push against grain of nineteenth century's kitsch and colonial image of as preserved in many popular commercial accounts of region. Interactions with local people in these largely factual and functional guides, such as Charles and Adam Black's and Thomas Cook's, are few and far between. …

Functions of Victorian Culture at the Present Time (review)

Reviewed by: Functions of Victorian Culture at the Present Time Richard Menke (bio) Functions of Victorian Culture at the Present Time, edited by Christine L. Krueger; pp. xx + 195. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2002, $44.95, $19.95 paper. All calendar-obsessed Victorianists must have suffered a trauma in the first years of our new millennium: suddenly, more than a century separated us from the period we studied. Responding to this transition, the essays in Functions of Victorian Culture at the Present Time explore and reaffirm the afterlives of Victorian culture within our own, with varied but sometimes provocative results. The subjects and approaches of the pieces here are at least [End Page 328] as diverse as in most edited collections; the book uses five section headings in an attempt to organize eleven articles. Yet all of the essays here are clearly written and refreshingly modest in length—although it's probably not realistic to hope, as Christine L. Krueger does in her introduction, that the book will reach many undergraduates or much of a "wider audience" beyond "Victorianists and Victorianists in training" (xiii). Since the articles tackle such different topics, it seems appropriate to discuss the most intriguing among them in terms of the general ways in which they stage the encounter between Victorian culture and our own. One of the most popular approaches to the conjunction between the Victorian and the contemporary is simply to interpret particular present-day cultural developments and norms from a Victorianist's point of view. Miriam Bailin's witty "The New Victorians" reads neo-Victorian interior decoration through both the cultural fantasies it encodes and the real Victorian décor it displaces—for instance, stuffed or skinned domestic pets as objets d'art. Sharon Aronofsky Weltman analyzes recent dramatic representations of the story of John Ruskin and Effie Gray, concluding that—as compelling as they may be on stage—these adaptations ultimately affirm their audience's complacent sense of remoteness from a caricatured Victorianism. And Ellen Bayuk Rosenman offers a splendid two-for- one, an argument about the representation of fine objects in both Victorian novels and their recent adaptations on film and television. Her "More Stories about Clothing and Furniture: Realism and Bad Commodities" begins by skillfully scrutinizing Victorian novelists' careful disengagement from vulgar detail even as they delineate the object-world in which they set their fictions. This paradigm then helps Rosenman explore the different relationship of our sumptuous historical costume dramas (many adapted from Victorian fiction) to the world of commodities they lovingly present for viewerly delectation. Some of the most ambitious contributions to the volume offer critical reflections on the stories we tell about history, time, or identity. Simon Joyce's astute "The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror" examines the late Victorians' (and early Edwardians') treatments of contemporary history as the pattern for a future anti-Victorianism as well as for the twentieth century's rhetoric of rupture and return to Victorian values. In a somewhat related vein, Ronald R. Thomas reads the story of the much-ridiculed Millennium Dome as a postmodern echo of Victorian efforts to exhibit and reorganize time and space via the Great Exhibition and the establishment of an international prime meridian centered on Greenwich's Royal Observatory. Other essays analyze the emergence of particular Victorian identities in the service of contemporary cultural critique. In "Wilde Americana," Jesse Matz rereads gay history through Oscar Wilde's trip to America at the dawn of corporate identity and modern marketing. Matz's audacious alignment of Wilde's prototypical gay identity in the years after his 1882 visit and the consolidation of corporate personhood (in the 1882 Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad decision) struck me as exciting but a little sketchy; more convincing are his analyses of Wilde's lessons in self-promotion and his critique of present-day alliances between corporate marketing and sexual identity. Krueger's own essay examines the place of storytelling in Victorian legal reform around the new figure of the juvenile delinquent. Her account helps explain the prominent reformer Mary Carpenter's acceptance of sensational jailhouse "memoirs" that turned out to be manifest fictions—and provides a caution to present-day...

BOOK REVIEW: edited by Christine L. Krueger.FUNCTIONS OF VICTORIAN CULTURE AT THE PRESENT TIME. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2002.

Reviewed by: Functions of Victorian Culture at the Present Time Richard Menke (bio) Functions of Victorian Culture at the Present Time, edited by Christine L. Krueger; pp. xx + 195. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2002, $44.95, $19.95 paper. All calendar-obsessed Victorianists must have suffered a trauma in the first years of our new millennium: suddenly, more than a century separated us from the period we studied. Responding to this transition, the essays in Functions of Victorian Culture at the Present Time explore and reaffirm the afterlives of Victorian culture within our own, with varied but sometimes provocative results. The subjects and approaches of the pieces here are at least [End Page 328] as diverse as in most edited collections; the book uses five section headings in an attempt to organize eleven articles. Yet all of the essays here are clearly written and refreshingly modest in length—although it's probably not realistic to hope, as Christine L. Krueger does in her introduction, that the book will reach many undergraduates or much of a "wider audience" beyond "Victorianists and Victorianists in training" (xiii). Since the articles tackle such different topics, it seems appropriate to discuss the most intriguing among them in terms of the general ways in which they stage the encounter between Victorian culture and our own. One of the most popular approaches to the conjunction between the Victorian and the contemporary is simply to interpret particular present-day cultural developments and norms from a Victorianist's point of view. Miriam Bailin's witty "The New Victorians" reads neo-Victorian interior decoration through both the cultural fantasies it encodes and the real Victorian décor it displaces—for instance, stuffed or skinned domestic pets as objets d'art. Sharon Aronofsky Weltman analyzes recent dramatic representations of the story of John Ruskin and Effie Gray, concluding that—as compelling as they may be on stage—these adaptations ultimately affirm their audience's complacent sense of remoteness from a caricatured Victorianism. And Ellen Bayuk Rosenman offers a splendid two-for- one, an argument about the representation of fine objects in both Victorian novels and their recent adaptations on film and television. Her "More Stories about Clothing and Furniture: Realism and Bad Commodities" begins by skillfully scrutinizing Victorian novelists' careful disengagement from vulgar detail even as they delineate the object-world in which they set their fictions. This paradigm then helps Rosenman explore the different relationship of our sumptuous historical costume dramas (many adapted from Victorian fiction) to the world of commodities they lovingly present for viewerly delectation. Some of the most ambitious contributions to the volume offer critical reflections on the stories we tell about history, time, or identity. Simon Joyce's astute "The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror" examines the late Victorians' (and early Edwardians') treatments of contemporary history as the pattern for a future anti-Victorianism as well as for the twentieth century's rhetoric of rupture and return to Victorian values. In a somewhat related vein, Ronald R. Thomas reads the story of the much-ridiculed Millennium Dome as a postmodern echo of Victorian efforts to exhibit and reorganize time and space via the Great Exhibition and the establishment of an international prime meridian centered on Greenwich's Royal Observatory. Other essays analyze the emergence of particular Victorian identities in the service of contemporary cultural critique. In "Wilde Americana," Jesse Matz rereads gay history through Oscar Wilde's trip to America at the dawn of corporate identity and modern marketing. Matz's audacious alignment of Wilde's prototypical gay identity in the years after his 1882 visit and the consolidation of corporate personhood (in the 1882 Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad decision) struck me as exciting but a little sketchy; more convincing are his analyses of Wilde's lessons in self-promotion and his critique of present-day alliances between corporate marketing and sexual identity. Krueger's own essay examines the place of storytelling in Victorian legal reform around the new figure of the juvenile delinquent. Her account helps explain the prominent reformer Mary Carpenter's acceptance of sensational jailhouse "memoirs" that turned out to be manifest fictions—and provides a caution to present-day...

Restoring the Balance: Women Physicians and the Profession of Medicine, 1850-1995

Acknowledgments Introduction: Restoring the Balance? The Professionalism of Sarah Dolley, M.D. Gendered Practices: Late Victorian Medicine in the Women's Sphere Maternalist Medicine: Women Physicians in the Progressive Era Redefining the Margins: Women Physicians and American Hospitals,1900-1939 Getting Organized:The Medical Women's National Association and World War I New Directions: The Eclipse of Maternalist Medicine Resisting the Feminine Mystique, 1938-1968 Medicine and the New Women's Movement Conclusion: Reconciling Equality and Difference Notes Index

The State of the Union: Sexuality in American History

Books reviewed in this article:Merril D. Smith (ed.), Sex and Sexuality in Early AmericaBeryl Satter, Each Mind a Kingdom: American Women, Sexual Purity, and the New Thought Movement, 1875–1920Sharon R. Ullman, Sex Seen: The Emergence of Modern Sexuality in AmericaM. E. Melody and Linda M. Peterson, Teaching America about Sex: Marriage Guides and Sex Manuals from the Late Victorians to Dr Ruth

BOOK REVIEW: Edited by Isobel Armstrong and Virginia Blain.WOMEN'S POETRY, LATE ROMANTIC TO LATE VICTORIAN: GENDER AND GENRE, 1830-1900. and Edited by William B. Thesing.VICTORIAN WOMEN POETS (DICTIONARY OF LITERARY BIOGRAPHY: VOLUME 199).

BOOK REVIEW: Edited by Isobel Armstrong and Virginia Blain.<b>WOMEN'S POETRY, LATE ROMANTIC TO LATE VICTORIAN: GENDER AND GENRE, 1830-1900</b>. and Edited by William B. Thesing.<b>VICTORIAN WOMEN POETS (DICTIONARY OF LITERARY BIOGRAPHY: VOLUME 199)</b>.

VICTORIAN ART HISTORY: RAP 2 UNWRAPPED

AT THE END OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, Victorian painting experienced at least one mass media event, so far as circulation is concerned — the appearance of Frederic Leighton’s The Bath of Psyche (1890) on the wall of the drug kingpin in Paul Thomas Anderson’s notorious film Boogie Nights of 1997. As a ferocious deal is going awry, over the desperate dealers looms one of the masterpieces of the Victorian High Renaissance, a commentary through the cool classicism of the late Victorians about the corresponding fin-de-siècle of the lately finished century. It is a stunning moment — perhaps recognized only by historians of British art — but there it is nonetheless. One is to presume that the dealer has acquired the original from the Tate Gallery, since he would never own a copy, let alone a poster! Busboy superstud Mark Wahlberg has brief, violent contact with a masterpiece.

&amp;quot;Telling Brutal Things&amp;quot;: Colonialism, Bloomsbury and the Crisis of Narration in Leonard Woolf's &amp;quot;A Tale Told by Moonlight&amp;quot;

Upon returning from Ceylon in 1911, where he had served for nearly eight years as a colonial bureaucrat, Leonard Woolf resigned his post in the colonial service and married Virginia Stephen, eventually settling down with her in their home, Monk's House in Sussex in 1916. Along with Virginia and Vanessa and their Cambridge friends, Leonard Woolf established the new Bloomsbury Group as the center of a liberal aesthetic and intellectual culture fashioned after the tradition inherited from the late Victorians. During this pe riod Leonard Woolf wrote his novel The Wise Virgins (1914), and a novel and three short stories based on his experienced in Ceylon, The Village in the Jungle (1913) and Stories of the East (1921). Woolf's five-part autobiography was to appear much later in the 1960s. Despite the growing body of scholarship on Bloomsbury, Leonard Woolf's fiction has been of peripheral interest to literary scholars. The Wise Virgins remains his most widely discussed literary work, mainly because of its portrayal of the troubled relationship between Virginia Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell.1 Praised by Quentin Bell as a novel of su perbly dispassionate observation, but also reviled as a work with too many blacks in it2—this was the reason Lytton Strachey offered for not liking it— The Village in the Jungle was largely ignored by scholars. It was only during the 1960s, nearly fifty years after its first appearance in 1913, that scholars from South Asia recognized the novel as a significant social document about colo nial Ceylon. As for Stories of the East, it failed to generate any interest during Woolf's lifetime, and Woolf's contemporary Bloomsbury friends and peers, who had on other occasions been eager to express their personal views on his work, remained silent about this work. Modern critics seem largely to be un aware of its existence, and despite its republication in 1963 in Diaries in Ceylon

The Boyd Orr Survey of the Nutrition of Children in Great Britain 1937–9

If the first great social question of interwar Britain was unemployment then the second, closely related, was poverty: how to define it, and where to draw the 'poverty line'. This was an intensely political issue. Moving the line five shillings up increased the numbers of people considered poor, heaped criticism on government and brought pressure for reform. Moving it five shillings the other way evidenced progress from the dark days of the late Victorians and made state benefits look bearable, if not generous. So the debate over the minimum income needed to maintain a family at a tolerable level of existence was fiercely fought. The emerging science of nutrition, which came of age during this same period, played an ever-larger part in the poverty debate, especially in the 1930s. Arguments within nutritional science over what represented a diet necessary to sustain a person in health fed back into the poverty line question. When the New Survey of London Life and Labour in 1929 revisited the great poverty survey of Charles Booth, who had published his first findings some forty years before, it concluded that the proportion of Londoners in poverty had fallen from 30.7% in Booth's day to just 6.6%. But that reassuring picture was quickly disturbed. In November 1933 the British Medical Association (BMA) published its own estimates of the nutritional needs of individuals and the minimum weekly expenditure needed to satisfy them. When this new component of the poverty line was worked back into the New Survey's findings, researchers concluded that 9.3% had an income insufficient for health, enlarging the numbers of Londoners in poverty by forty per cent.' So nutrition thrust the medical profession into prominence in the poverty debate. In general, they were pessimists, decrying the inadequacy of income to purchase a proper diet, especially in childhood, when poor nutrition constrained the life chances of the adult to come. They recognized, too, that poverty was not the only obstacle to healthy nutrition, and discovered that even families with comfortable incomes had an unsatisfactory diet through ignorance and tradition. And they were critical of their own colleagues, especially in the public service, who complacently characterized over ninety-five per cent of schoolchildren as having 'normal' nutrition, when 'normal' meant one thing in Hoxton, say, and something very different in

Book ReviewsTeaching America about Sex: Marriage Guides and Sex Manuals from the Late Victorians to Dr. Ruth. By M. E. Melody and Linda M. Peterson. New York: New York University Press, 1999. Pp. xii+287. $28.95.

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook Reviews Teaching America about Sex: Marriage Guides and Sex Manuals from the Late Victorians to Dr. Ruth. By M. E. Melody and Linda M. Peterson. New York: New York University Press, 1999. Pp. xii+287. $28.95.Julia A. Ericksen Julia A. EricksenTemple University Search for more articles by this author Temple UniversityPDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by American Journal of Sociology Volume 105, Number 6May 2000 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/210497 Views: 3Total views on this site Permission to reprint a book review printed in this section may be obtained only from the author.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Teaching America about sex: marriage guides and sex manuals from the late Victorians to Dr. Ruth

In this witty and provocative study of sex and marriage manuals, M.E. Melody and Linda M. Peterson reveal that permissiveness, prohibition, and, tellingly, persuasion and enforcement-from sermons and hellfire to mutilation and electroshock-have informed popular sex education over the past hundred and twenty years. From the late Victorian obsession with masturbation and hygiene, to the if feels good, do it ethos of The Joy of Sex, America's disposition to sex has evolved from a general squeamishness to a veritable cult of mutual orgasm. But despite the recent emphasis on voluptuous pleasure, the basic power dynamic underlying the discourse on sex has been remarkably resistant to change. The authors reveal that, even as sexual behavior changed during periods of upheaval, the prescriptive literature on sex has remained traditional at its core, promoting sex within marriage for the purpose of reproduction. A cross-generational account of the major constructions of masculinity and femininity from 1880 to the present day, Teaching America About Sex serves up a lucid and entertaining reading of the twentieth century's vexed relationship with sex.

The Victorians and the Stuart Heritage: Interpretations of a Discordant Past.

Preface Acknowledgments Introduction: politics, religion and history: David Hume and the Victorian debate 1. Henry Hallam and early nineteenth-century Whiggism 2. Thomas Babington Macaulay and Victorian religious controversy 3. Puritanism and the ideology of dissent 4. Samuel Rawson Gardiner and the search for national consensus 5. Cromwell and the late Victorians Epilogue: beyond the Victorians Index.

Subversive discourse: the cultural production of late Victorian feminist novels

Introduction - Late Victorian Cultural Subjectivity: Identity Crises and Protest - 'The Idea is the Fact': Art's Interiority and Literary Production - The Politics of Publication: Women in the Literary Marketplace - Late Victorian Feminist Discursive Aesthetics - Defining the Political: The 'Realistic Appropriation' - Works Cited

Hold the heights: the foundations of mountaineering

Hold the Heights adds a reassessment of the late Victorians, examines the important influence of the Munich School and considers the Americas' separate development in detail. This is a world-wide appraisal of the sport, tracing the development of mountaineering up to the ascent of Everest and examining the foundations laid down for the phenomenal expansions of climbing techniques, equipment and attitudes in the second half of the 20th century.

The Making of an English Working Past: The Rediscovery of Gerrard Winstanley and Late Victorian English Radicalism

Previous articleNext article No AccessCAVALIERS AND ROUNDHEADS FIRST: Interdisciplinary Essays on Romantic and Victorian Recuperations of the English Civil WarThe Making of an English Working Past: The Rediscovery of Gerrard Winstanley and Late Victorian English RadicalismThomas PraschThomas Prasch Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 25, Number 3Summer 1994 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/TWC24042466 Views: 2Total views on this site © 1994 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father

Days of ObligationIntroduction: My Parent's Village Chapter One: India Chapter Two: Late Victorians Chapter Three: Mexico's Children Chapter Four: In Athens Once Chapter Five: The Missions Chapter Six: The Head of Joaquin Murrieta Chapter Seven: Sand Chapter Eight: Asians Chapter Nine: The Latin American Novel Chapter Ten: Nothing Lasts a Hundred Years

‘The Way We Live Now’: Late Victorian Studios and the Popular Press

‘The Way We Live Now’: Late Victorian Studios and the Popular Press

Poverty and Compassion: The Moral Imagination of the Late Victorians.

Poverty and Compassion: The Moral Imagination of the Late Victorians.

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

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...