Men in Wonderland: The Lost Girlhood of the Victorian Gentleman (review)

Men in Wonderland undertakes a delicate task: negotiation of the fine and wobbly line between presentation of the Victorian gentleman's interest in girls as emblematic of a pervasive cultural obsession with what is perfect, lost, irretrievable, and his interest in girls as representative of the obsessions of "dirty old men" (to put things crudely). The primary aim of Men in Wonderland is to convince us of two related things: that nineteenth-century culture imagines the perfect childhood as gendered female, and that Victorian middle- class men (well, certain middle-class men) fetishize particular little girls as symbolic of their lost childhoods. In her always sensitive readings of a variety of nineteenth-century texts, Catherine Robson binds a global argument about Victorian culture with local readings of the works of a few individual authors. Superbly managed as it may be, however, Robson's Foucauldian approach tends at once to diminish the power of the book's local insights and to provoke a reader to question some of its large claims.

Beginning with a supple account of childhood development in the poetry and prose of William Wordsworth and Thomas de Quincey, Robson gives us several significant images: curious and vital boys, marble-like dead girls, and the young self as consistently feminine. Robson is especially good in showing that Wordsworth's transgressive, active child is almost always male, that the masculine lifespan, "the passage from babe to child, to boy, to youth, to man, illustrates the incremental process of loss" (31). Girls in Wordsworth, Robson nicely observes, "defy the ordinary mechanics of temporal succession, existing in an ideal childhood worlds away from the prison-house gloom" (32). But where Robson's Wordsworth readings and discussion of philanthropic and governmental management of the transgressive child in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century are persuasive and useful, her over-elaborated dissection of the ideal girl in industrial England leans to the familiar and redundant.

Who else but Little Nell should dominate this discussion? Perhaps because Charles Dickens's strange little girl is such an iconic figure, much of what Robson offers on Nell—her association with the rural, idealized past, her improbable sweetness and virtue, her fondness for lying on gravestones—is familiar to all who have read Steven Marcus and Alexander Welsh. Aiming to locate the weirdness of The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-41) in a larger cultural obsession with the juvenile female body, Robson surrounds her reading with the shaky political edifice of Sarah Stickney Ellis's Daughters of England (1842), representations of the working-class girl in Victorian writing about industrialization, and an over-extended reading of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "The Cry of the Children" (1844). Robson is very astute in disclosing the contradiction in Victorian writing between sexualization of the female child's laboring body and simultaneous presentation of her as, in essence, like her "ideal sister" (for example, the middle-class girl seen in Victorian paintings such as W. P. Frith's Many Happy Returns of the Day [1856]). Robson is also splendid in her demonstration of how Nell's "alliance with old men, most notably her grandfather" is the "most disquieting aspect" of Dickens's novel (87). Yet this assembly of disparate texts under the Foucauldian rubric of industrial discourse tends to expose the danger lurking in the arrangement of formally different texts in a cultural studies montage. Robson's analysis opens up more questions than it answers. How, precisely, does the idealized Nell participate in what Robson calls the eventual destruction of "the myth of the gentleman's lost childhood" (11)? And is substantial discussion of only a few texts (Sarah Ellis, Richard Horne, Barrett Browning) sufficient to situate Nell within the context of large-scale cultural, economic, and social movements?

John Ruskin and Lewis Carroll are natural candidates for discussion of Victorian girl-loving. Robson poses some large...