Ventures into Childland: Victorians, Fairy Tales, and Femininity (review)

Although I usually yield to no one in my admiration of Victorian ingenuity, I wish that nineteenth-century publishers had never invented the jacket blurb, that fulsome form calculated to impress a volume's perfections upon readers who, presumably, might not otherwise notice them. Today's academic presses handle blurbs in a particularly unfortunate way where senior scholars are concerned, since praise in such cases does not emanate from manuscript referees (who might be comparatively unbiased) but from the author's bosom friends. U. C. Knoepflmacher's Ventures into Childland: Victorians, Fairy Tales, and Femininity is lumbered with an example of puffery calculated to arouse resistance in the most docile: James Kincaid (who in turn receives "a special paragraph for a special friend" in the acknowledgments [xviii] and a larger number of citations than any other critic) identifies the book as "the most important book in Victorian studies in some time" and Knoepflmacher himself as "a cross between Coleridge and Sendak," an author who "seems...to know everything" and who "writes the kind of glimmering cultural studies and gender analysis most of us only dream about."

Not surprisingly, Ventures into Childland does not live up to this hyperbole, although it is difficult to imagine the book that would. For one thing, its unusually limited use of recent scholarship other than books, articles, and journal issues edited, written, or contributed to by Knoepflmacher himself (and a few erstwhile collaborators or close associates such as Kincaid) inhibits its ability to speak to its field, although admittedly Knoepflmacher's oeuvre is sufficiently hefty to flesh out any bibliography. For another, to claim it as "cultural studies" is overstated. The achievement of this work, unfashionable but nonetheless honorable, is to provide detailed description, biographical analysis, and tracings of influences and intertextual references; Knoepflmacher's interest here is psychological and individualized much more than it is social or cultural, despite his claim—never adequately supported—that the texts he examines illuminate the dynamics of less distinguished Victorian families as well as the authors' own relationships. He does not concern himself with contexts beyond the biographical and cites no sources, primary or secondary, that address the issue of Victorian domesticity in the abstract, with the exception of a single Girl's Own Paper article dating from 1886, more than a decade after the chronological end of his study. Still more astonishing, of the immense body of work on nineteenth-century womanhood or the smaller but nonetheless substantial list of critical works that marry discussions of femininity to readings of Victorian children's literature (as opposed to studies of the particular writers included in Ventures into Childland), Knoepflmacher refers only to Nina Auerbach's Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth (1982), and that in a single footnote.

But while these traits lead me to take with a grain of salt Knoepflmacher's assertion—which itself reads like a jacket blurb—that he "may well have produced the most comprehensive history (literary and cultural) yet written about the so-called golden age of children's literature" (xiii), any reader will concede that he has produced a knowledgeable study of a limited number of figures working within a single genre over two decades, the early 1850s to the early 1870s. The seven Victorian fantasists profiled here, John Ruskin, W. M. Thackeray, George MacDonald, Lewis Carroll, Jean Ingelow, Christina Rossetti, and Juliana Ewing, comprise a useful mixture that blends the overstudied with the underexamined, writers who wrote voluminously for children with writers who addressed children only rarely, male authors with female authors, prose with poetry. And if Knoepflmacher's bibliography of secondary sources exhibits some surprising omissions, his bibliography of primary sources is exemplary, including not only major works (The King of the Golden River, The Rose and the Ring, "The Light Princess" and At the Back of the North Wind, the Alice books, Mopsa the Fairy, Sing-Song and Speaking Likenesses, and "Amelia and the Dwarfs") but also minor writings including juvenilia...