Precocious Children and Childish Adults: Age Inversion in Victorian Literature by Claudia Nelson (review)

Claudia Nelson's most recent book analyzes a noteworthy aspect of the nineteenth-century literary landscape: "age inversion." In structure and connotation like "sexual inversion," an obsolete late-Victorian term for homosexuality, Nelson's coinage names the queer individuals Victorians described as "old-fashioned," as "child-wife" or "child-man." Though Charles Dickens's characters most readily come to mind—Paul Dombey, Dora Spenlow Copperfield, or Harold Skimpole—Nelson shows how these categories appeared, changed, and recurred in quantities of novels and short stories between 1840 and 1910. Moving seamlessly between popular fiction such as Florence Montgomery's Misunderstood (1869) and Marie Corelli's The Mighty Atom (1896), and highbrow literature like Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure (1894-95) and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899), Nelson limns the contours of this phenomenon, persuasively showing that age inversion, like its sexual counterpart, may be used "to interrogate pressing questions having to do with work and family life, responsibility and desire, faith and doubt, masculinity and femininity, the primitive and the civilized, and more. The doubt and social questioning necessarily involved in any inversion of a norm, not least the age norm, provide fertile ground for insight into Victorian uncertainties" (11).

Precocious Children and Childish Adults is structured chiasmatically to mimic its subject. Nelson's introduction distinguishes between types of age inversion: though the term child-man or -woman could be used to describe either a chronological adult or child, Nelson offers the clarifying adjectives "arrested" to describe adults-as-children and "precocious" to describe children-as-adults. The meaning of these characters varies according to their class and gender. Moreover, each subtype is not present throughout the period; rather, one may surge to prominence and another recede as cultural anxieties and preoccupations shift. Nelson ambitiously charts the rise and fall of each subtype across multiple genres and readerships—in literature for children and literature for adults, in popular periodical fiction and serious novels—tracking the circulation of power between competing and distinctive groups.

Nelson begins with that commonplace of Victorian sentimental death scenes, the "old-fashioned" child. These children, Nelson argues, are estranged and uncanny products of incongruities and contradictions in the social system. They highlight flaws in both parents and society (38). Whether they reveal the fissure between business and domestic virtues, as Paul Dombey does, or underscore the costs and benefits of patriarchal and imperialist values, as do characters in Juliana Horatia Ewing's Mary's Meadow or Jeanie Hering's Elf, these strange children's uncanny effects achieve the moral function of estranging the assumptions of those around them. Their queerness, in short, is essential to their positive effect on others in that they draw attention to the peculiarities of their environments, particularly those of the upper classes. They exemplify problems that challenge the adults in their lives: conflicts between work and family, possessions and people, males and females, reason and faith, social identity and individual subjectivity. In the old-fashioned child, extremes meet to create new possibilities for bridging those contentious binaries—or at least creating awareness in the reader of one's own "old-fashionedness."

The succeeding chapters move systematically, and in a pattern that mimics the inversion theme, from "arrested child-men" in chapter two to "arrested child-women," "precocious child-women," and "precocious child-men" in chapters three through five. Nelson shows how each category of age inversion exhibits common traits that indicate the sort of issues this figure rhetorically embodies. Arrested child-men, such as David Copperfield's Mr. Dick, may be positive if they express childlike traits of playfulness, enthusiasm, innocence; but they are entirely negative if they selfishly fail to curb their appetites or take responsibility for those in their charge (for example, Harold Skimpole in Bleak House). They may even be downright evil if they flout civilization's restraints to return to the savagery lurking not only in the past or in distant lands, but in the...