The Mind of the Child: Child Development in Literature, Science, and Medicine, 1840-1900 (review)

Sally Shuttleworth's The Mind of the Child examines the development of Anglophone discourse about the child psyche in the mid to late nineteenth century, particularly in Britain. Shuttleworth reaffirms the importance of the nineteenth century in the cultural history of childhood, locating emerging Victorian conceptions of the child mind as a development from Romantic literary figurations and a forerunner of twentieth- and twenty-first-century social obsessions. Reaching back to the literature of child development that burgeoned in the 1840s, Shuttleworth brings to light pre-Freudian accounts of the mental capacities and disorders of children, attending to the interplay between literary, medical, and educational texts. Critical readings of the novels of Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, George Meredith, Henry James, and Thomas Hardy appear alongside meticulous original research in nineteenth-century medical journals and treatises on child rearing. Shuttleworth argues broadly for two types of interaction between literary and scientific texts: first, in the mid-nineteenth century, for the tendency of literary child protagonists to inspire psychiatric discourse, and then, in the later part of the century, for a period of increased scientific scrutiny of children giving rise to a proliferation of autobiographical and fictional treatments of childhood.

The work is divided into four multi-chapter sections, supplemented by a brief introduction and conclusion. The first two sections treat the period from 1840 to 1860, during which the first discussions of child insanity took place and many of the great English novels of child development were published. In the first section, "Early Child Psychiatry and the Literary Imagination," Shuttleworth describes the increasingly medicalized discourse surrounding "night terrors" and other intense childhood fears, the spectrum of childhood untruths from lying to imagining, and various manifestations of "passion" or intense uncontrollable emotion. The five chapters in this section are honeycombed with literary references, notably to Jane Eyre, which functions for both Shuttleworth and the nineteenth-century scholars of child psychiatry whom she references as a foundational text. Throughout, Shuttleworth finds evidence that it is not until the 1840s that doctors, psychiatrists, authors, and cultural commentators admit the possibility that a child could be insane. Shuttleworth notes connections between the medicalization of child behavior and increasingly permissive attitudes; once behavior such as lying, passionate defiance, or suffering from night terrors can be understood pathologically, parents and educators are more inclined to be indulgent. The second section, "Systematic Education," continues the examination of the child mind by considering Victorian ideas about "the appropriate pace for mental development" and the possibility that parents and educators might push their children too hard or expect their intellectual faculties to develop too quickly (p. 107). Here Shuttleworth focuses on two novels, Dickens's Dombey and Son and George Meredith's The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, noting that Dombey in particular was a response to and became a case study for contemporary debates about "overpressure on the young" (pp. 11, 107).

In the third and fourth sections of the book, Shuttleworth turns to the later part of the nineteenth century. Part three, "Post-Darwinian Childhood: Sexuality and Animality," addresses the aftereffects of Darwinian evolutionary theory on psychological and psychiatric constructions of childhood. Shuttleworth argues that evolutionary psychology gave rise to a focus on the relationship between children and animals, a perception of the child as a savage link between beast and adult, and even parallels between children and monkeys. Evolutionary discourse also, in Shuttleworth's reading, initiates a greater awareness in medical circles of child sexuality. Although scholars have generally accepted, following Freud's claims in "On Infantile Sexuality," that no attention was paid to child sexuality until the work of Freud and G. Stanley Hall in the early twentieth century, Shuttleworth reveals that nineteenth-century psychiatrists such as James Crichton Browne, T. S. Clouston, and Henry Maudsley "seemed to positively revel in depictions of child sexuality" (p. 190). As in earlier sections of...