Perceptions of Childhood in the Victorian Fin-de-Siècle by Jennifer Sattaur, and: History and the Construction of the Child in Early British Children’s Literature by Jackie C. Horne (review)

Childhood, that slippery hegemonic customer, is often contradictorily defined and is certainly impossible to pin down. From the cherubic wings of innocence to the sinful horns of corruption, childhood is dependent upon ideological perception and its discursive positioning.

In her book Perceptions of Childhood in the Victorian Fin-de-Siècle, Jennifer Sattaur outlines some of these associative traits by emphasising that they are perceptions based upon grand narratives. As if such kaleidoscopic multiplicity were not enough to destabilise fixed definitions, Sattaur focuses on the fluid anxieties, turbulences, advances, and changes felt during the Victorian fin de siècle. Touching on a variety of themes, including degeneracy, Darwinism, colonialism, aestheticism, and spirituality, this book uncovers a myriad of childhoods as perceived through various literary narratives: the child as monstrous, idealised, suffering, uncanny, savage, and criminal. Rather than remaining within the realms of fin-de-siècle children’s literature, Sattaur extends her discussion into representations of childhood within adult fiction, such as Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) and Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898).

Other texts include Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888), George MacDonald’s Lilith (1895), Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book (1894) and The Second Jungle Book (1895), and Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Tales for Children (1907). This blurring of literary approaches seems apt, given her argument “that as the end of the nineteenth century approached, the patterns which indicated a negative or fearful response to childhood merged with those indicating a positive response to childhood, so that it becomes difficult in works from the 1890s to distinguish between the two” (149). The discussion of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde focuses on Hyde as the monstrous child unleashed within Jekyll who, free from Victorian social constraints, plays out his primitive desires. Regarding the child as an incomplete adult heightens cultural anxieties surrounding Darwinian issues of degeneration and fears for the future of the British Empire. Colonial arguments are developed in chapter 4’s assessment of The Jungle Books, where the savage child is regarded as developmentally necessary to adult mastery over the Other. Utilising the survival techniques required by empire, “Such a child is the generic colonizer who, like Mowgli, enters a foreign and dangerous space as a vulnerable weakling, only to emerge as a figure of authority, God-like and master of the future” (84). An interesting point, but it could have considered more fully the increasing uncertainty felt toward colonialism during this period, rather than simply acknowledging “the strength necessary for the child to grow into the hero of the future” (104). The chapter on The Turn of the Screw considers the depiction of childhood as uncanny, emphasising that the child is both present and absent in its ghostly transitional quality of being “something always on the verge of becoming something else” (106). This ethereal aspect, in turn, is linked to the predicament of the Victorian governess caught between ruling class and servant and never able to fully embody either position.

Some of the arguments were a little tentative. The discussion of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde felt rather vague and lacked a persuasive engagement with some of the critics mentioned in the introduction, such as Jacqueline Rose or Kimberley Reynolds. Stevenson wrote children’s literature, including Treasure Island (1883) and A Child’s Garden of Verses (1885), and commented upon the art of such writing in his essay “Child’s Play” (1878). Yet no awareness of this is indicated. Similarly, Stevenson and James had very different approaches to fiction as is clear from the essay exchange between them...