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 three major anxieties in the period of gender, class, and colonial anxieties by instilling different values in children and changing how children were viewed in order to successfully instruct and reinforce those values.

In the subsection of Gender and Victorian Childhood, we’ll look at the different ways stories for children reinforce normative gender roles as we’ve come to understand them. From Kenneth Grahame’s “The Golden Age” to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island to Welch’s “A Story for Children”, we can see the different constructions and negotiations of gender in this period. In this genre of Children’s literature that was just beginning to evolve, we can see how boys were meant to take charge, rule, and work as compared to girls who were supposed to care and be happy in the home.

I would note here that it would be interesting to return to both of Oscar Wilde’s works here and here, included in an earlier section on Morality, to discover the ways in which gender is being addressed in both pieces. In light of Oscar Wilde being viewed as a gay man, his positionality complicated and enriches his work under a gendered lens.