As more recent scholarship has called for a closer historical examination of class, gender, and race, I turn now to look at how class structures developed through children’s literature and negotiated inter-class anxieties by interpretive examples.

In this section, we can see that as trains and communications built up, as we became a “society of strangers,” Victorian society anxiously seeked to reify class construction in new ways. George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin and The Princess and Curdie show how the idea of cross-class relations were abhorred and strictly rejected.

As such, this children’s stories instructed and informed the children who read it. They learned that to interact across class boundaries could have catastrophis results. These texts reveal quite plainly the anxiety and fears that this increasingly cross-class mingling instilled in the Victorian period.