Children playing at the park, laughing, shouting, and running around; birthday parties with balloons, and songs, and games; field trips to the bog, the museum, the farm. There are many things I can think of that speak to my childhood. Fond memories where I didn’t have to worry about getting groceries or paying the bills. This dichotomy between childhood and adult responsibility is a universal one in the western world now, but like much of society, it was a construction that continues to evolve even today. However, for the nature of this anthology, I’m interested in focusing on the shifts that occurred in the Victorian period.

The base point here is childhood. What was it like? How did it change? Why did it change? Although we’ll get to the ‘why’ a little later, it’s important to know what it is first. In this section, the selected works are organized into three subsections: Little Adult Full of Sin, Playful & Inquisitive Innocence, and the Animalistic Child.

For the first subsection, Little Adult Full of Sin we see two images. One that was included in the work Peter Pan as the frontispiece , and the other is a painting by C. B. Vignoles. These two works visually represent the child as an adult and as in need of moral instruction. It gives us a perspective that children were not always seen as there are today, and specifically, were more inherently immoral.

The next subsection, Playful & Inquisitive Innocence contains several sources that negotiate this shift, in children’s stories, fiction, images, and advice columns in papers. Flatland by Edwin Abbott distinctly shows a shift from erasing inquisitiveness in children to valuing it. Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll brings a child at play to the forefront. While the advice column plays not only with gender roles, but also that children need play and not discipline. Finally. The Golden Age by Kenneth Grahame’s frontispiece indicates a shift in visual representations of the last subsection to one of movement and therefore play. This explicit shift occurs fairly rapid, as it goes from one end of the spectrum to another.

Finally, the last subsection, the Animalistic Child, contains two works Erewhon by Samuel Butler and The Coming Race by Edward Bulwer Lytton. Each piece negotiates anxieties of the uncontrollable and instinctual nature of children and reconstructs the child as something other. Together these pieces bring to the forefront the anxiety around childhood and particularly the very fear around how to manage and educate children for a better future. What this shows us is that children and childhood are places of growth and change--and that change greatly concerns the Victorians.