The Child and Young Person: in Life and in Literature

Abstract

Towards the end of the eighteenth century, a new major persona began to appear in English literature. The child, hitherto of relatively little interest to the artistic vision, began increasingly to assume the status of a symbol of something very important in current thought. Peter Coveney relates the birth of the Literary Child to ‘the revolution in sensibility which we call the “romantic revival”‘,¹ and places it within the generation of Blake and Wordsworth, and the development of ideas of ‘original innocence’ which stemmed ‘most forcefully from Rousseau’.² Coveney writes: