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  • Children’s Literature and Capitalism: Fictions of Social Mobility in Britain, 1850–1914 by Christopher Parkes
  • Troy Boone (bio)
Children’s Literature and Capitalism: Fictions of Social Mobility in Britain, 1850–1914. By Christopher Parkes . Houndmills, Basingstoke : Palgrave Macmillan , 2012 .

Christopher Parkes reexamines Victorian and Edwardian golden age children’s fictions in order to offer the subtle argument that their “authors developed narratives that were fundamentally concerned with redefining the relationship of the child to the marketplace in order to accommodate the child within capitalist society” (1). This topic—the relationship between conceptions of childhood and the workings of capitalism—is a big one, and Parkes approaches it rhetorically. He thus aims to show how, by developing “a rhetorical strategy that equated the spirit of capitalism with the spirit of childhood” and “by locating capitalist ingenuity at the level of the child,” golden age children’s works seek to transform “the child from the victim of capitalism”—for instance, the young person ground down by long hours in a mill—into “its ideal participant,” a being who shares with capitalism “an innate curiosity and invention, the kind that leads to capitalist innovation” (1).

This thesis is sophisticated, and Parkes’s textual analyses provide a good deal of evidence to support it. The first chapter presents a history of youth employment in Victorian Britain to demonstrate that the literature of the period (adventure stories and biographies of inventors in particular) recasts “the capitalist economy [as] an entirely democratic space inside which the tools of childhood itself—rather than wealth and social position—allow any child to, in an instant, transform a dead-end job into an exciting career” (40). Parkes scrutinizes the ideological work of this rhetorical strategy and the ways in which educational legislation, such as the Revised Code of 1862 and the Forster Act of 1870, might seem to enjamb with popular narratives of upward social mobility, but in fact established standards that constructed the working-class child “as an inferior version of the middle-class child” (36).

The succeeding chapters offer a series of textual case studies: the [End Page 440] depiction of the child as a worker in the family business in two texts that are outside the children’s literature canon but that are centrally about childhood, Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield and Great Expectations; how the adventure tradition, as represented by Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island and Kidnapped, participates in the making of the modern professional, in this case the civil servant and lawyer; the way in which Edith Nesbit’s The Story of the Treasure Seekers and The Railway Children represent imaginative play as enabling the middle-class child to engage with “mercenary enterprise and yet still remain uncorrupted” (101); how educational “tracking” and “streaming” are involved in the “feminized classroom” of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princess and The Secret Garden; and finally, the rhetorical treatment of feminization and victimization in Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables novels, which “argue that not even the victimized child can be considered a victim of the capitalist economy when victimization itself can be made to pay in the labour market” (163).

Parkes’s chapters offer many insightful readings of individual texts and their representation of class identity, profession, and the imaginative work of childhood. For instance, his treatment of family, home, and work in David Copperfield is exceptionally astute, examining David’s response to the Peggottys’ home, a disused fishing boat that “combines so completely into one space the family’s home and the family’s work” (45), and the way in which this space of sentiment and work is related to the commercial realm of Murdstone’s warehouse and the professional realm of the Wickfield law practice. Children’s Literature and Capitalism has as its implicit claim that the capitalist economy is a determining fact of Victorian society—that, as Marx puts it, “capitalist production . . . expands on an ever greater scale until it has become the generally prevailing social condition” (Marx 117), to the extent that everyone has a relationship to the labor market in which commodities are exchanged. Parkes details those relationships, and how they are determined by...

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