From the Editor

In Ways of Seeing, John Berger writes, "We never look just at one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves" (9). The eight essays gathered here all expand our field of vision, helping us to see how children's literature reflects and participates in culture. The intersections between texts and contexts in the essays that follow encourage us to understand the ways our views of the world and ourselves are shaped by perceptions of class and merit, by beliefs about our relation to the natural world, by hidden agendas and fear, and by the desire to tell stories that create coherence in the midst of a changing and unpredictable world.

The volume opens with Jackie Horne's essay, "The Power of Public Opinion: Constructing Class in Agnes Strickland's The Rival Crusoes." Horne asks that we rethink the notion that children's texts of the early nineteenth century are necessarily reflective of "middle-class" ideology. Instead, she suggests that a closer examination of class, and its limitations, allows us to see the ideological work these texts do and to trace the evolution of children's literature from the pre-Victorian to the Victorian. Her close reading of The Rival Crusoes (1826) demonstrates the complexity of class relationships in the early nineteenth century and the ways that values commonly labeled "middle class" were, in fact, present in the gentry and laboring classes as well.

The next two essays both call on Milton's Paradise Lost and the significance of a tempting serpent. In her essay, "Eggs and Serpents: Natural History Reference in Lewis Carroll's Scene of Alice and the Pigeon," Rose Lovell-Smith uses a natural history context to make connections between the human and animal world. By connecting Alice with images of serpents, the Pigeon scene challenged Victorian assumptions about girlhood innocence and purity. While Alice may protest that she is not a serpent, she is clearly an eater of eggs, and thus, to a mother Pigeon, has this most crucial serpent quality. Lovell-Smith sees the depiction of Alice as a serpent as drawing the human and natural worlds closer together, blurring the lines between tempter and tempted; Robert Hemmings, in his essay, "A Taste of Nostalgia: Children's Books from the Golden Age—Carroll, Grahame, and Milne," focuses on the act of eating that follows Eve's temptation by the serpent as a moment of sensory pleasure which provides a clue to the longing that underlies nostalgia. Hemmings's examination of nostalgia, beginning with its medical roots and tying it to imperialism, helps us to see the ways that nostalgia both reveals anxieties and covers them up. Eve's desire to eat the fruit undercuts the supposed perfection of Eden—why, if she is a perfect woman in a perfect world, would she have any desire to change herself or her environment? Milton's re-telling of the story of Adam and Eve's fall highlights this contradiction and suggests that the fall begins long before that moment when Eve takes a bite and asserts her imperfection. In his reading of Alice in Wonderland, The Wind in the Willows, and Winnie-the-Pooh, Hemmings finds that the tastes, smells, and rituals of food preparation and presentation reveal the weak points, the moments of trauma in an idealized past.

Like Hemmings, Troy Boone investigates the values that lie beneath the assumption of "nostalgic pastoralism" in his essay, "'Germs of Endearment': The Machinations of Edwardian Children's Fictions." The "germ" he identifies in the apparently bucolic world of Edwardian children's fiction is a relentless focus on class that links the working classes with machinery and the middle classes with the role of supervising these human machines. His reading of The Wind in the Willows and The Railway Children concludes that both texts "work to reinforce the visionary power that the middle-class subject has over the mechanized working-class body."

The use of context to provide new perspectives continues with Thomas Atwood and Wade Lee's examination of more recent young adult fiction. In "The Price of Deviance: Schoolhouse Gothic in Prep School Literature...