From the Editor

In this volume two essays on illustrators—the Bewick brothers and Chris Van Allsburg—frame a group of related essays, all but one of which deal with American children's books. Because Hilary Thompson in her essay on the Bewicks discusses the significance of a frame—or its absence—in their woodcuts, it seemed appropriate to use the two essays on illustration as a framing device. Although they are separated, they speak to each other in interesting ways. Thompson argues for both Bewicks' influence on modern conceptions of childhood and the picture book, Joseph Stanton for Van Allsburg's appropriation of surrealistic and "strangely-enough" conventions. But if John Bewick pioneered the integration of text and image that we take for granted in the modern picture book, the unframed vignettes of Thomas Bewick appear to have anticipated Van Allsburg's mysterious illustrations in their ability to encourage the free play of the child reader's imagination.

The redundantly framed woodcuts of John Bewick present a constricted world comparable to that of the dollhouse, as described by Frances Armstrong. Yet as Armstrong goes on to show, the dollhouse can indeed provide a "ludic space," where girls, and even boys, can exercise their imaginations, if not their bodies, as freely as the children portrayed in the vignettes of Thomas Bewick. And some dollhouse scenes, whether deliberately or inadvertently staged, rival Van Allsburg's in their incongruous, subversive, and surreal elements. Armstrong's illuminating, and often humorous, discussion of the way dollhouses inculcate domestic ideology or subvert it, constrain girls or liberate and empower them, introduces many issues in the essays that follow, as well as in Lois Kuznets's When Toys Come Alive, reviewed in this volume.

Carolyn Sigler's essay on the American writer Anna Matlack Richards's 1895 version of Lewis Carroll's Alice provides a bridge from the British focus of Thompson and Armstrong to the American essays. Just as Armstrong concludes her essay with the description of an Edwardian work that deserves to be much better known, so Sigler makes a strong case for the significance of Richards's A New Alice. Like many of the discussions and works discussed in this volume, A New Alice, even more than its prototype, offers a trenchant critique of educational theory and practice, including the then-new kindergarten movement. And by providing her Alice, based on her own daughter, with a maternal guide to Wonderland, Richards grants her a freedom that, ironically, Carroll's Alice, who is often forced into the role of mother, never achieves. Just as the dollhouse as stage can confer authorship and authority on the girls who play with it, so the boundaries of the domestic sphere prove elastic and actually become a source of power for Richards's Alice Lee.

Armstrong ends with a discussion of a turn-of-the-century story that could serve as a model for gender relations. In "Professor Green," Diana and her male cousin make of their dollhouse a miniature Utopia. Whether Louisa May Alcott's Little Women provides such a Utopia has been a matter of much recent critical debate. (See, for example, the book reviews in this volume; and recall that Meg refers to her home as a baby-house, the Victorian term for dollhouse.) Musicologist Colleen Reardon, by examining the neglected motif of music in the novel, concludes that both women and men, primarily the musician Laurie, must sacrifice their individuality in order to conform to prescribed gender roles. She does, however, view Jo's marriage more favorably than many commentators, for Professor Bhaer's musicality, and his acceptance of Jo's lack of it, indicate his comparative freedom as an immigrant from such cultural constraints.

With Holly Keller's "Juvenile Antislavery Narrative and Notions of Childhood," we turn from matters of gender to matters of race and to a more drastic form of confinement than the Acts of Enclosure protested by Thomas Bewick or the dollhouse on which Ibsen's Nora slams the door. In this essay Keller introduces us to a neglected body of writing for children and challenges several assumptions about it. Her essay, like...