Ventures into Childland: Victorians, Fairy Tales, and Femininity (review)

U. C. Knoepflmacher. Ventures into Childland: Victorians, Fairy Tales, and Femininity. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998.

Forgive me for beginning with a quotation: "The trouble with Knoepflmacher's approach is that everything becomes like everything else" (Jenkyns 40). I take this from what must have been one of the first reviews of Ventures into Childland, Richard Jenkyns's "Phallus in Wonderland." Jenkyns is not a generous reader. Both the title and the sentence I quote are deficient as clues to Knoepflmacher's study of seven Victorian writers for children: Ruskin, Thackery, Carroll, MacDonald, Ingelow, Rossetti, and Ewing. The raising of the phallus is premature since this study largely focuses on the subversion of phallogocentrism. And everything in Knoepflmacher's approach does not so much become like everything else as it enters into dialogue with everything else. This is a book about influence, much in the manner of John Docherty's exhaustive study, The Literary Products of the Lewis Carroll-George MacDonald Friendship (1995). Knoepflmacher is interested in how works of literature speak to and from each other, how authors consciously set out to speak privately in public. Speaking privately in public, strangely, does not of necessity result in speaking only to insiders, those privy to the lives and concerns of those engaged in the conversation. No, the privately public speech here expects to be overheard by readers young and old because it discusses matters of growth and the social life of the individual. Or to put this more precisely than I have, I note simply that these seven writers deal with matters of patriarchy.

Although Knoepflmacher does not invoke the work of Jack Zipes, he does work similar territory as his focus on fairy tales and femininity indicates. And like Zipes, Knoepflmacher not only wishes to examine challenges to Victorian patriarchal norms, but he also sets out to write an apology for what we insist on calling "children's literature," that is, works that clearly direct themselves at a readership of both those under and those over twenty years of age. Another way of stating this is that Knoepflmacher understands that books written for the young have routinely been dismissed as slight, even when enjoyable. In his "Preface of Sorts," he dedicates this study of Victorian writers who ventured into the realms of childland to "the dream-children our post-Victorian century created in a nightmare we cannot afford to forget" (xvii). To invoke the memory of the Holocaust is to remind us of many things, not least the serious business of writing about and thinking about and delving into those realms of childhood we so often wish simply to admire with thoughtless nostalgia.

Thinking about childhood rather than celebrating it returns us to perhaps the most familiar of Romantic platitudes: the agon between innocence and experience. Knoepflmacher begins his study of Victorian children's books with a brief look at William Blake and his two famous "contraries," and we, too, might begin to review Ventures into Childland with Blake's appearance in this book. First, a small but symptomatic point. Knoepflmacher quotes Blake from the 1967 edition of David Perkins's anthology of Romantic literature, English Romantic Writers. Why he should choose this as his source for Blake's poetry when far more accurate editions of Blake's work are readily available (e.g., Erdman's The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake), or why he should not use the more recent edition of Perkins is unclear. I say this is symptomatic because the range of reference and choice of references in Ventures into Childland is both relatively small and largely ten or more years old. This is perhaps best exemplified in the chapters on Lewis Carroll, in which Knoepflmacher cites little very recent scholarship and criticism.

Second, Blake's innocence and experience, as we need to emphasize and reemphasize, are contraries; that is, they exist in an ongoing dialectic. One does...