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

Could a child suffer from insanity? This was a troubling question in Victorian Britain, as it is now, because it frayed the edges of the belief in childhood innocence. If, in the mid-nineteenth century, children were being defined in both religious and secular contexts as too young to tell the difference between right and wrong, it was this conception of innocence that overlapped with the British court’s definition of insanity. Under the M’Naughten rule of 1843, a defendant could plead insanity if he or she could be proven unable to discern right from wrong at the time of the crime. Nineteenth-century psychiatrists such as George Savage, Crichton Browne, and Forbes Winslow also took up this uneasy overlap between innocence and insanity, writing ominously about the way “moral insanity” in childhood could lead to future criminal behavior.

This is just the sort of vexed social issue Sally Shuttleworth finds underpinning Victorian conceptualizations of “the mind of the child.” As early as 1840, Shuttleworth claims, the mind of the child was “for the first time an explicit object of study across the cultural and disciplinary spectrum, from novels and autobiographies to psychiatric case studies” (2). The Mind of the Child: Child Development in Literature, Science, and Medicine, 1840–1900 revises previous histories of child psychiatry and psychology where “the dominance of Freudian theory has tended to create a revolutionary, or originary, moment around 1900,” Shuttleworth writes (3). She brings together an impressive body of nineteenth-century materials, touching on a range of topics including night terrors and imagination, rational education, child sexuality, evolution and animality, and child suicide.

Shuttleworth’s broad scope is perhaps justified by her intangible theme, the mind of the child, a concept born in a nineteenth-century cultural and scientific context and only recently located in fields like child psychology and neuroscience. Yet this sheer breadth of coverage limits the depth of analysis, sometimes allowing for only cursory summaries of both well-known and obscure sources alike. In addition, some readers may be disappointed by her emphasis on historical coverage over the development of a dynamic, interpretive argument about the past. These limitations, however, invite future scholars to further interpretive and historical work. Shuttleworth’s impressive and time-consuming archival research is immediately relevant to children’s literature criticism and childhood studies and will inevitably enrich scholarship.

Shuttleworth’s broad conceptualization of “the mind of the child” does allow for a fresh interdisciplinary perspective as she brings together a spectrum of nineteenth-century sources, like those found in her chapter on “Lies and Imagination.” If literary writers, beginning with the Romantics, created idealized depictions of childhood imagination, nineteenth-century medical, scientific, and moral discourse often recast these depictions in starkly negative terms, as deceptions or lying. The psychiatrist Crichton Browne, for example, wrote unequivocally that “much mental derangement in mature life, we believe, is attributable to these reveries indulged in during childhood” (qtd. in Shuttleworth 61). Isaac Watts’ widely circulating poem “Against Lying,” on the other hand, threatened eternal damnation for any form of deception, and it is this very poem that is ironically evoked in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) when Jane is accused of deceit: “‘Deceit is, indeed, a sad fault in a child,’ said Mr Brocklehurst; ‘it is akin to falsehood, and all liars will have their portion in the lake burning with fire and brimstone’” (qtd. in Shuttleworth 61). Shuttleworth links psychiatric discourse like Browne’s with that of moralists like Watts to demonstrate how “medical, religious, and educational commentators combined to warn of the dangers of a lie, with the difference that medicine replaced the threat of hell with that of future insanity” (61). What we see when we bring literary, scientific, and medical writings together is not evidence of scientific progress or new discoveries about children, but rather rhetorical reformulations of existing fears and assumptions about childhood.

Shuttleworth understands “the mind of the child” not...