Children always hold a special focus in any text I read. Being a primarily youth centered literary scholar, I’m constantly questioning what the literature written for young adults does for them. What effect might it have on them? What does it tell them about the world? Further, what can the way other mediums, particularly online fan interactions and productions, might inform us about  what they're engaging with and why they're engaging with it. Studying how young adults deal with literature can gives us a sense of what they’re thinking about issues, life, and what viewpoints resonate with them can gives us a glimpse into their understandings of the world. For me, literature is only as powerful as it is able to interact and inform readers about people and society. So, this journey to understand children and society has led me to the Victorian period. To understand now, it can be illuminating and instructive to understand how we got here. So, not only does this anthology help me in my analysis and evaluation of childhood now, I hope it addresses and informs others in their work on children in the Victorian period, now, and beyond.

This is certainly a shift from the usual scholarship I perform, but what draws me specifically here isn't how youth interacts with literature around their concerns but I’m interested in how adults utilize the narrative of childhood to allay their anxieties and concerns about the period and to imagine a different future. Leah Marcus in her notable book Childhood and Cultural Despair : A Theme and Variations in Seventeenth-Century Literature says “By measuring the portrayal of child subjects in literature against a wider range of attitudes and actual behavior toward children, we can learn a great deal about what is going on in that literature, and in other areas of a given culture as well” (242). For Marcus, looking at childhood in literature to understand what it’s doing and why can inform our understanding of the literature itself and learn more about the period in which it is written. While she focuses primarily on seventeenth century works, who work demands that scholars take up her exploration of childhood in other periods and places. For my work here, I see this anthology performing that work for the Victorian period.

Notably, the construction of childhood evolves over the Victorian period. Conceptions of how children were little adults or full of sin made way for more modern conceptions of childhood as a sight of play and innocence. For many, children are the hope of the future. To protect them means to protect the future. So, by taking this old adage at his word, I think we can come to a better understanding of the future that adults are imagining. More than this though, by the very nature of reimagining one's future, one has to address what they agree with and don’t agree with about the present time. And who but they adults get to decide what it means to be a child?

I’ve gathered pieces here that I think can lead us to consider what childhood was like, how it was changing and what exactly we can decipher about the morality and anxieties of the Victorian society. Below, I’ve selected two pieces to get us thinking about how childhood is being imagined, constructed, moralized, and reimagined to address issues of the time period. In that vein, I turn toward fictional works not for what they can tell us in and of themselves, but also for the way in which we understand, and indeed the Victorians understood, the instructive and educational nature of the stories for children. These two pieces set the foundation for what this anthology attempts to do.  

A.P.C. "Children's Story-Books" pushes readers to think very carefully to think about what parents give children to read due to the moral and instructive natures of literature in formative years. What this article gives us is an indication that Victorians think carefully about what effect children’s literature has on their children and more importantly, acknowledges their awareness that children’s books can and do affect a child’s upbringing and latter integration in society. "Advice on the Management of Children in Early Infancy" is an article advising how to instruct children and pushing towards moral foundations to address their society. Published next to a piece analyzing and praising a children’s book, it addresses how the book was less about factual instruction and more about encouraging children at play, having fun, and learning to be better citizens.

In each section of this anthology, there are a wide variety of materials gathered. Magazine pieces, books, paintings, illustrations, short stories, and more are used to explore this topic. For many of the larger works, I have tried to point towards specific excerpts that best perform the work of this anthology even as I have included the whole work as a way to emphasis the importance of understanding and appreciating works as they were meant to be; Indeed, to enjoy works as the Victorians would have dealt with them. This organization, along with the sections I outline below, prove to me to show the progression from childhood’s construction, to moral instruction which reveals levels of tensions, fears and anxieties addressed and revealed through the evolution of childhood in this period.

Our first section is on childhood, we will look at different narrative texts to piece together different conceptions and definitions of what it means to be a child. As many scholars have noted, the Victorian era establishes a shift between a classical child that acts like a small adult and is born sinful to that of a playful and innocent child, full of inquisitiveness. This section will also negotiate an alternate space where children are conceived as unruly animals, incapable of interaction until they reach maturity to contemplate what more that can tell us about how Victorians are dealing with childhood?

For the following section, we will try to gain a glimpse into the morals and norms of society. Looking at philosophical and instructional materials as well as narrative pieces and more, this section will negotiate a space to explore how society stood on a multitude of ethical concerns and how changes or their essence informs childhood. By gaining that understanding, we can then more closely look towards what this can tell us about anxieties society has towards the future.

Next, we will turn to a section on Gender, to more clearly outline some of the major anxieties society seems to be facing and readdressing in this period in order to hold on to an acceptable future. I have included fictional works, modern audiobooks, images, and more to help frame these topics within a multitude of genres and forms to gain a full picture and hopefully, a varied one that represents the multiplicity of the period. Gender specifically addresses concerns about how a man or woman should behave and what role they should have in the period. We can see through these stories an extreme commitment to gender roles, and as the period was increasingly becoming more about interacting with those whom you did not know, it became important to more firmly cement the roles of each gender in terms of women in the domestic field and males in the political field and fulfilling a role of toughness.

For a section on class we look explicitly at George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin and The Princess and Curdie to see the ways in which the story evolves to complicate interclass relations. While the first indicates that each class has it’s place and can be happy in it as long as they stay in their class, the later shows us that society is destroyed when cross-class relations are indulged. This shift from a happy ending to a destroyed society represents an increased tension between interclass contact to the point where it needs to be avoided completely.

The section on the Colonial child works through several pieces of literature of the time, like The Secret Garden and The Jungle Book to think through how colonial atmosphere’s were dealt with in conjuction with children and depictions of childhood. We will see definite pushes to anglicize children who are in colonial environments as well as an association of children in colonial spaces as animalistic and immoral.

Through all of this, I have included a timeline to reference throughout to firmly ground these pieces as occurring over time. If we fully recognize how childhood conceptions shift over time, we can gain a firmer understanding of how childhood reacts to major discussions over time.

Scholars like Marcus, Jennifer Sattaur, Sally Shuttleworth, and so many more point us to the ways in which literature and more can help inform our conceptions of childhood in the Victorian period. This timeline, along with other features like paths, images, and more are the benefits of this online platform that I hope you can take advantage of us as you explore just what was going on with Victorian Childhood.