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

The “artful dodger” who figures on the cover of Marah Gubar’s book in a trompe-l’oeil painting by Pere Borrell del Caso is slipping slyly out of the frame, like a small and ragged thief who slips out the door of a bourgeois Victorian home. What is he stealing? Perhaps he is absconding with the bourgeois ideal of childhood innocence, rooted in Rousseauvian and Romantic notions of primitive simplicity, purity, impotence, and otherness. Gubar’s title underscores not that ideal but the subversive strand of her argument about Golden Age children’s literature: the self-conscious literary sophistication and precociousness of children whom canonical Victorian writers represented, both in the literature they wrote for children and in their letters or memoirs about their favorite child-friends and child-actors. Gubar traces in detail nineteenth-century tensions between these two poles of thinking about childhood. She has collected a hefty body of periodical essays and reviews by anonymous critics as well as by central figures such as Leigh Hunt, Charles Dickens, and John Ruskin, texts that permit her to develop a thick description of Victorian attitudes. Almost equal space goes to late-twentieth-century debates about Victorian ideology. Thus Gubar responds to Humphrey Carpenter, who posited a Golden Age escapist cult of the child centered on innocence, a reading followed by scholars such as Jeffrey Weeks and Jackie Wullschläger, who perceive the Victorian child as a figure psychologically separated from adults. She also critiques the influential “colonialist paradigm” propounded by Jacqueline Rose in her study The Case of Peter Pan (1984), which claims that children’s authors must suppress their own voice in order to preserve a realistic illusion of a pristine, stable childhood. While Gubar primarily aims to revise our understanding of the theme of the child, she sets the topic within the context of a broader Victorian cultural history, marked not only by the development of theater with child actors, directed specifically at children, but also by protectionist legal changes in the age of marriage, permissible child labor, and education.

Gubar launches her close revisionist readings of familiar Victorian texts such as Treasure Island (1883) and Peter Pan (1904) with a quick overview of what Victorian thinkers called “Babyolatry” or “Child-Worship,” tracing the “cult of the child” as pure and “natural” back to Jean Jacques Rousseau, who banned books from the early education of Emile in 1762, and to Romantics such as William Wordsworth, S. T. Coleridge, and Charles and Mary Lamb. At the same time she acknowledges that recent critics such as Mitzi Myers and Alan Richardson have complicated that interpretation of the Romantic view of childhood, and indeed it is her aim to do the same for the Victorians. One of the questions that springs to mind in response to this initial broadly sketched history is what might have been the engines driving the idealist view: Lockean psychology? a Protestant didacticism? an age of exploration that required Romantic primitivism? anxieties about class division and unstable language? or the gradual rise of a consumerist market for age-specific (and gender-specific) books? When Gubar maps the complexities and contradictions in Victorian attitudes, how might she distinguish Victorians’ resistance to the theme of the innocent other from Romantic complexities and resistance?

What is the cultural work that the Victorian “cult of the child” performs? At first glance those journalists and literary critics who wish to protect the putative innocence of child readers by censoring depictions of “adult” themes and of “precocious” child protagonists may seem to speak for a new educational bureaucracy and a petitbourgeois mentality that empowers itself by sequestering a realm inhabited by children without agency. In contrast, the major figures of the age blur the line between literature for children and for adults, as they blur the lines between children’s and adults’ knowledge and desires. This looks like a split between “high” and “low...