From the Editors

The essays contained in this volume were prepared for publication against the backdrop of one of the most turbulent years in recent history. In countries around the globe, the past twelve months gave rise to an economic crisis of a scope and scale not seen in generations. Major investment firms like Lehman Brothers failed, stock markets from New York to London to Tokyo plummeted, and the gross domestic product of entire nations dropped off precipitously. In August, the world turned its attention to China for the Olympic Games. The event was as historic as it was controversial, as China's poor record regarding human rights, its intolerance for any type of political dissent, and its harsh rule of Tibet received sharp criticism. Meanwhile, US swimmer Michael Phelps captivated audiences around the world as he won a record-setting eight gold medals. Finally, in the United States, the past year was marked by one of the most impassioned as well as historic presidential elections in recent memory, culminating with the election of the nation's first black president, Barack Obama.

These essays reflect this period of profound change. The nine critical articles and the final Varia piece represent one of our most diverse volumes in recent years. Taken collectively, these essays cover a broad swath of chronological time, deploy a wide array of theoretical viewpoints, and—akin to the events taking place around the world in 2008—map a literary, critical, and narrative world undergoing transformation.

The volume opens, quite appropriately, with Megan A. Norcia's article "Puzzling Empire: Early Puzzles and Dissected Maps as Imperial Heuristics." The essay takes the unique approach of examining puzzles from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as texts to reveal the way in which "these playthings can also be understood as a means of transmitting social and political geography and imperial mores to the very youngest British citizens." Indeed, as Norcia asserts, early puzzles, often called "dissected maps," "placed users in a powerful position in relation to the world" and thereby "served as imperial heuristics, teaching tools through which the meaning of imperial power could be made manifest."

This interest in spotlighting transformation likewise permeates Elizabeth Reimer's "'Her favorite Playmate': Pleasure and Inter-dependence in Dorothy Wordsworth's 'Mary Jones and her Pet-lamb.'" The only completed piece of fictional prose penned by the sister of the famed Romantic poet, the work has been long neglected by critics. But, as Reimer argues, a consideration of "Mary Jones and her Pet-lamb" on its own merits sheds new light on Wordsworth's identity as both an aunt and a writer, offers a new way of viewing the Grasmere Journals in which the story appeared, and invites us to reconsider the canon of children's literature during the late eighteenth and first years of the nineteenth century.

Reimer's recurring caution that things are not always as they seem forms an apt bridge to Monica Flegel's essay, "'Masquerading Work': Class Transvestism in Victorian Texts for and about Children." Her article examines four narratives from nineteenth-century Britain "that use performance to dramatize the seeming social malleability of children through moments of 'class masquerade'—that is, of poor children dressed up as children of the upper classes." Ultimately, the works "all employ class masquerade as a means of intervening in specific child-endangerment issues in nineteenth-century England. The presence of this trope in such divergent texts speaks to the persistence of concerns regarding the lower-class child's fixity in England's social hierarchy, as well as to the complexity of responses those concerns raised."

This notion about the transmission of sociocultural knowledge among reading demographics as well as between generations also permeates Michelle H. Phillips's "Along the 'Paragraphic Wires': Child–Adult Mediation in St. Nicholas Magazine." Her essay examines this seminal periodical through a fresh critical lens: the way in which the serial served not simply as a venue for child readers but also for those who were making the transition into adulthood. Examining passages from columns like "Jack-in-the-Pulpit" and "The Letter-Box," Phillips probes the way in which...