The Child and History

Abstract

In the previous chapter I suggested that certain queer readings of the nineteenth-century child, although offering path-breaking analyses of its apparent ‘naturalness’, also have a stake in maintaining access to apparently non-textual identities and conditions, and are often unable to read their own demands. This final chapter will turn to historicising accounts of the child in nineteenth-century literature, to be read in works such as Laura Berry’s The Child, The State and the Victorian Novel (as discussed in an earlier chapter), Hugh Cunningham’s Children and Childhood in Western Society Since 1500, George Rousseau’s edited Children and Sexuality: From the Greeks to The Great War and Galia Benziman’s Narratives of Child Neglect in Romantic and Victorian Culture.¹ In each I read a further, significant, late-twentieth century critique of universalising notions of childhood, although, perhaps, one less concerned with rigorously and self-consciously maintaining a ‘perverse […] refusal of every substantialization of identity’ than those addressed in Chapter 5. It is my suggestion, however, that they share with the queer accounts an investment in a non-discursive ‘real’ that works to limit the disruption that might be caused by the child’s return.