Victorian Childhoods (review)

Sally Mitchell and Praeger Publishers are engaged in an endeavor of great utility to Victorianists. Mitchell edits Praeger's Victorian Life and Time series, of which Victorian Childhoods is a part; as she writes in the introduction, the goal of the series is to address the twenty-first century's inherited myths about Victorianism, to "explain and enrich the simple pictures that show only a partial truth" (ix). The series's method is to provide a context for understanding the period in a variety of fields—literature, history, sociology—by supplying "accurate information about the period's social history and material culture." To do so, it employs established university scholars, "chosen not only for their academic qualifications but also for their ability to write clearly and explain complex ideas to people without extensive background in the subject" (x). These are books meant for readers just beginning to interpret the Victorian age: general readers, undergraduates, beginning graduate students looking for an overview. They provide the kind of information that can supplement the highly edited facts which are all we professors can usually supply in lecture. They offer readers a place to start if they want to understand Victorianism and, even better, the means to continue on into greater depth and complexity. In all these ways, they are invaluable.

There are eight books to date in the series. Victorian Childhoods—along with Mary Wilson Carpenter's book on Victorian medicine, also published in 2009—demonstrates that the series keeps pace with academic need, producing volumes that address burgeoning fields and topics: childhood studies and literature and medicine are certainly two growing areas within literary criticism today. Given her long experience in Victorian studies—she published her first essay in this journal in 1977—Mitchell is a very fitting choice for series editor. An expert in material and social history, Mitchell understood the importance of such context to literary criticism a full generation before it became ascendant in literary studies as it is today. She has chosen all the authors in the series well, but her own work on Victorian girlhood especially qualifies her to know historians of Victorian childhood.

Hence, Ginger Frost, a respected historian whose work in review has been noted for its attention to difference (of class, gender, region, age) and for its knowledge and use of literary discourse. Frost's extensive past work on courtship and marriage gives authority to her claim that "good or bad, families were the most important factor in a child's success in life" (11). She goes on in Victorian Childhoods to explore other crucial factors for those children besides the family, involving school, work, play, religion, and nation. Once she has clearly and sensibly drawn these basic parameters of children's experience, she devotes her final chapters to extending and complicating that map. Her best chapter explores children outside the family—those in work houses, orphanages, and prisons—providing necessary information in detail but complicating expected structures at the same time. She ends with a discussion of late-century protectionist movements that grew out of Victorian assumptions about childhood but also began to redefine childhood so that it came to look more like our modern ideas about it: the intensity over the course of the century with which children became objects of consideration and concern, whose welfare became paramount, shifted the balance of understandings of children shared over time. Though the beginning and the end of the nineteenth century held many views in common, by the twentieth century, because of shifts in emphasis and value, the definition of the child had changed.

Frost's ability as a historian evenhandedly to balance similarities and differences over time stands out in this volume. Her prose advances understanding through assertion and qualification. As Mitchell suggests, Frost's goal has been to take received myths about Victorian children and revise and expand them. Every chapter records the different childhoods that boys and girls experienced, whether English, Welsh, or Scottish, begging or laboring in factories or on the...