The Mind of the Child: Child Development in Literature, Science, and Medicine, 1840–1900 by Sally Shuttleworth (review)

For the twenty-first-century reader, the scene in The Mill on the Floss in which 8-year-old Maggie Tulliver retreats to the attic to vent her childish frustrations by abusing her doll can be shocking. The episode is so unexpected because it feels so modern. Anxieties about little girls and their dolls seem a quintessentially modern obsession, inextricably linked to constantly shifting gender politics. But as The Mind of the Child, Sally Shuttleworth’s most recent study of the intersections between Victorian science culture and literature demonstrates, long before we were asking what it means when little girls destroy their Barbies,¹ Victorians were deeply invested in similar questions about the psychology underlying children’s behavior and development.

The Mind of the Child provides an interdisciplinary exploration of the largely overlooked history of pre-twentieth-century child psychology. As she states in her introduction, Shuttleworth seeks to overturn some common misperceptions: that before Freud there was little scientific interest in the inner workings of the child’s mind, and that during the Victorian era, the prevailing attitude toward children was that they should be seen and not heard. Her research reveals a much more complex picture of Victorian attitudes toward child development expressed throughout the era in medical and scientific publications, as well as in works of literature and the popular press. Each of the book’s four sections interweaves archival research with in-depth literary analysis. Shuttleworth’s incorporation of discussions of literary works into her study of the medical and social history of child psychology is essential to her project; she establishes convincingly that the novels and memoirs of the period did much to influence the scientific opinions of the time, and vice versa. The result is a highly accessible and engaging account of Victorian England that, like the best Victorian novels, holds up a mirror to our own, twenty-first-century cultural neuroses.

Although the four sections of the book are meant to chart a rough chronological progression from the 1840s to the first decade of the twentieth century, the integrating conceit is more thematic, each section focusing on a particular facet of the evolving discipline of child psychology. As a result, there are occasional abrupt and disorienting shifts between time periods. Given that the trends in child study that Shuttleworth examines seem to go through cycles, some jumping around in time is unavoidable, and sometimes effective, underscoring the significance of these trends to Victorian cultural consciousness. The first section deals with early explorations of children’s perception, especially related to children’s imagination and the sometimes tenuous division between fantasy and reality. Representations of childhood in Jane Eyre and The Mill on the Floss provide the thematic framework for this section, which also draws from memoirs of figures like Hartley Coleridge, Thomas De Quincey, and Harriet Martineau. Interspersed with these personal accounts of childhood are references to contemporary case studies, articles on child psychology and psychiatry drawn from medical journals, and child-rearing advice from religious pamphlets. The cultural construction of the child that emerges here is a varied one, but the important point is that the period represents a departure from previous conceptions of childhood as a state of innocence and communion with nature. Another important point that emerges is the instating of rhetorical practices linking children and insanity, but also to animals and “savages.” The subsequent sections of the book will show how deeply these rhetorical linkages become rooted in nineteenth-century constructions of childhood, often with troubling implications for developments in medicine and social science.

The second section focuses on educational practices—specifically, debates about the effect of “overcramming” on child mental health. Connections are made between increased educational pressure on children and the degenerating influence of industrial capitalism, between the overstimulated child intellect and the evils of masturbation, between education for girls and the stunting of...