Childhood evolves to match the period in which we live. We raise children to live in a better future--and what’s better depends on the person. We therefore carefully choose how to raise our children to live in that future. Nevertheless, across the board we can see different ways childhood changed in the Victorian period. More than a shift from sinful adult to playful innocence, childhood evolved to address concerns about a person’s place in society. What I would indicate is that the Victorians Victorians addressed colonial anxieties by instilling different values in children through literature and changing how children were viewed in order to successfully instruct and reinforce those values.

In this last section, The Colonial Child and Victorian Childhood takes issues of class one step further in looking towards how devotedly the literature of the time not only worked against cross class relationships but also across borders. Constantly in a state of fear that children would lose their “Englishness” or become ‘other,’ these stories negotiate the border between Englishness and the other in childhood in order to protect the future state and what it means to be English. We’ll turn to The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett and “The Jungle Book” by Rudyard Kipling. We’ll also look at “A Portrait of an English Family in Macao.” One might turn to scholars like Jennifer Sattaur who in her work Perceptions of Childhood in the Victorian Fin-de-Siecle characterizes Mowgli as savage. Indeed, she says “attention is focused on the animalistic traits of the human child when it is deprived of a civilising education in its early years” (83). What we see is a critical investment to understand the “animalistic” nature of colonially raised children, associated with a lack of English instruction. Here, the works gathered seek to play out that relationship and to see how the period negotiated it.

All of these together show but a small sliver into some of the ways childhood shifts as well as the way instruction and conception of children changes to accommodate anxieties the English have over the future of their nation and society. Nevertheless, these children’s stories and images serve up an example to be followed--one that negotiates what it means to be English through definitions of childhood.