Child's Play: Collaboration and Resistance

Marah Gubar adopts the term "artful dodger," from the cunning and worldly boy-pickpocket in Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist, to describe Victorian juvenile characters and readers who complicated what Judith Plotz calls a cultural "fixation" on the idea of childhood as a sequestered and idyllically innocent state of being (Plotz xiv). The child, as a construction of culture, was not the simple innocent defined by the Romantics, and Victorian writers associated with the golden age of children's literature and with the cult of the child knew it. So critics, she argues, must "accord to the Victorians the same kind of respect the Romantics have recently received by recognizing that their representations of children are just as diverse and dynamic as [those of] their predecessors'" (Gubar viii).

Gubar's book, an expansion of her 2002 doctoral dissertation, illustrates through close readings of literature, art, and drama that "rather than producing an escapist literature that idealized the child as a wholly natural being, children's writers from this era frequently represented young people as complex, highly socialized individuals who (like adults) had to struggle with thorny issues of pressing contemporary relevance"—issues that included gender, class, and empire (181). Rather than urging young people to embody a static archetype of unconscious innocence, writers like Stevens, Carroll, and Nesbit explored the much-contested issue of the child's agency. And, as Gubar argues, they often took a "strikingly nuanced position, acknowledging the pervasive and potentially coercive power of adult influence" and exploring the possibility that "young people have the capacity to exploit and capitalize on the resources of adult culture" (4–5)—hence, the "artful dodger."

Beginning her study with a background chapter on the complicated relationship between adult authors and child readers, Gubar then explores the possibility of children serving not only as muses for the adults around them but also as actors, editors, and savvy collaborators. The assumption that golden age authors represented children as "free from the shaping force of social, familial, and scholastic institutions" can be traced, according to Gubar, back to the "long-standing tradition of ignoring or denigrating the contributions of influential female authors of this era" (5). For this reason, she turns to previously ignored texts by women writers and the ways in which they used child narrators as "vehicle[s] to explore how young people enmeshed in ideology might nevertheless deviate from rather than ventriloquize various social, cultural, and literary protocols" (7).

As Gubar explains in the first chapter, "'Our Field': The Rise of the Child Narrator," writers such as Juliana Ewing and Dinah Mulock Craik signaled a movement from images of passive, pathetic children to those of empowered juvenile subjects and created child narrators "not to ensure the child reader's absolute identification with her young protagonist, but to highlight the issue of influence"; such a collaborative effort "reminds child readers that people who have formerly functioned only as the subjects of stories can evolve into creative agents in their own right" (60–61; emphasis in original). Doing so, as Gubar explains, "encourages children to become more canny critical readers of the stories handed to them by adults" and "send[s] a cautionary message to children's literature critics, reminding us that we cannot assume that all stories featuring child narrators aim to seduce their audience into a state of unreflective identification" (68). Indeed, as she argues in relation to Stevenson's Treasure Island in chapter two, "Collaborating with the Enemy: Treasure Island as Anti-Adventure Story," even a child protagonist's failure to collaborate successfully with adults can be used to warn children about "the treachery of adult storytellers" and to encourage "child readers to act as artful dodgers—to see through the seductive propaganda of books that urge them to take part in the project of imperial expansion" (71; emphasis in original).

Chapter three, "Reciprocal Aggression: Un-Romantic Agency in the Art of Lewis Carroll," further develops the argument that "Golden Age children's authors were extremely self-reflective about...