Children’s Literature and Capitalism: Fictions of Social Mobility in Britain, 1850–1914 by Christopher Parkes (review)

This book is an interesting contribution to the valuable series Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature produced by Palgrave Macmillan and edited by Kerry Mallan and Clare Bradford. Christopher Parkes’s premise is that the child emerged from the Industrial Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century both as a victim of capitalist society and as a threat to it. This he claims is because the image of the child as exploited cheap factory labor and existing in deep poverty and misery led to the perception of capitalism as harsh and unsympathetic. As a result of this the child victim was a threat to it, making it vulnerable to forces which might attempt to destroy or replace it. He attempts in this book to assess the ways in which Victorian and Edwardian authors developed narratives that redefined the relationship of the child to the marketplace and allowed it a more acceptable place in capitalist society, rendering the threat harmless. He argues that this was done by equating the spirit of capitalism with the spirit of childhood, and examines various authors, looking at the way in which both phenomena are defined by their common attributes of curiosity, invention and ingenuity. Parkes looks at the role of nineteenth and early twentieth century children’s literature, as well as of texts that represent childhood and children, in reconfiguring the child so that it cannot be a victim of capitalist society. He reassesses the dominance of British romanticism’s idea of childhood as separate and apart from capitalist society. As he puts it: “It has caused us to focus almost exclusively on what capitalist society has done to the child rather than what the child has done to the capitalist society” (7).

He begins his analysis with a historical overview of the subject of the employment of young people, both male and female, in the nineteenth century, looking at the changes in employment practice which eventually allowed those with aptitude to pursue their ambition and to use their talents in order to achieve some social mobility. Further, the exigencies of the capitalist system required alterations to the profession’s management and recruitment, leading to changes in the education and qualifications required for certain roles. According to Parkes, one result of this was a move away from upper-class and major public school educated Civil Service officials to middle-class minor public school educated ones. This was obviously due to the overriding need of the expanding industrial capitalist system for a more educated workforce in general and for a practical and technically efficient middle-class hierarchy of overseers.

Parkes continues by looking at two works by Charles Dickens, David Copperfield and Great Expectations. He draws the reader’s attention to one of the themes in David Copperfield, the assumption that family business is the moral center of the economy, a theme that reflected the ideology of the time. Parkes asserts that Dickens shows in both novels that working-class children are not able to develop or even discover their natural talents as they are too involved in laboring for the family business. He points to Dickens’s place in the arena of British history, describing it as a time when there was a transition from family to corporate capitalism, thus necessitating the family’s use of the child’s talents in order to survive.

Through the analysis of David Copperfield’s road in life and the close examination of Uriah Heep’s role in the novel, Parkes is able to show that Dickens believes that social mobility is only possible for children born into solvent family businesses. He notes Heep’s experience in a charity school designed to turn working-class pupils into cheap and humble exploited labor. Heep recognizes the mixed message taught in the school, which also disseminated the idea of social mobility.

When Parkes discusses Great Expectations he reiterates the danger to capitalist society...