Abstract
The Introduction argues that the precocious child is a neglected but productive focus for the study of Victorian literature, childhood, autobiography, and science. It points to the ubiquity of the precocious child in writing of the long nineteenth century, from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Émile, ou de l’Education (1762) to Thomas Hardy’s Jude The Obscure (1895), and the increasing critical interest in this figure in nineteenth-century studies. Marah Gubar’s Artful Dodgers (2006) and Claudia Nelson’s Precocious Children and Childish Adults (2013) are keynotes in the study of precocity, but Gubar focuses exclusively on children’s literature, and Nelson almost exclusively on canonical fiction. I argue that the precocious child has a particular significance in the context of the evolutionary discourse which permeated Victorian culture, overlooked in the literary focus of Gubar’s and Nelson’s seminal works. I suggest that the theory of recapitulation invited Victorians to extrapolate from the growing child to the evolving species. Thus, the child is a means to depict, explore, or elide the tension between progressive and non-progressive models of evolution. The precocious child undermines the equation of growth with progress and thereby facilitates other ways of imagining both individual and species development in Victorian culture.
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Notes
- 1.
Alexander Bain, ‘John Stuart Mill’, Mind, 4/14 (April 1879), 211–229, (225 and 227).
- 2.
Marah Gubar, Artful Dodgers: Reconceiving the Golden Age of Children’s Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 4.
- 3.
Robin Bernstein, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights (New York: New York University Press, 2011), p. 4; Karen Sánchez-Eppler, Dependent States: The Child’s Part in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. xxi.
- 4.
See, for example, Peter Coveney, The Image of Childhood: The Individual and Society: A Study of the Theme in English Literature (1957; 2nd edn, Middlesex: Penguin, 1967); Gillian Avery, Nineteenth Century Children: Heroes and Heroines in English Children’s Stories 1780–1900 (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1965); James R. Kincaid, Child-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992); Jacqueline Rose, The Case of Peter Pan: Or, The Impossibility of Children’s Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993); and Kevin Ohi, Innocence and Rapture: The Erotic Child in Pater, Wilde, James, and Nabokov (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
- 5.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile, or On Education, trans. Barbara Foxley (London: Dent, 1969), 7.
- 6.
Rousseau, 56.
- 7.
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, ed. Donald L. Lawler (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988), 17.
- 8.
These variations of the ‘child’ are the subject of Beth Rodgers’s Adolescent Girlhood and Literary Culture at the Fin de Siecle: Daughters of Today (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); Lucy Andrew’s The Boy Detective in Early British Children’s Literature: Patrolling the Borders between Boyhood and Manhood (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); Elisabeth Rose Gruner’s Constructing the Adolescent Reader in Contemporary Young Adult Fiction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019); and Monica Flegel and Christopher Parkes’s Cruel Children in Popular Texts and Cultures (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), all published within the past decade.
- 9.
Claudia Nelson, Precocious Children and Childish Adults: Age Inversion in Victorian Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 6.
- 10.
Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor (London: Charles Griffin and Company, 1865), 157.
- 11.
Nelson, 6.
- 12.
Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1951), 228.
- 13.
Sally Shuttleworth, The Mind of the Child: Child Development in Literature, Science, and Medicine, 1840–1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 108.
- 14.
Shuttleworth, Mind, 310.
- 15.
Shuttleworth, Mind, 340.
- 16.
Shuttleworth, Mind, 335.
- 17.
William Wordsworth, ‘Ode (“There was a time”)’, in William Wordsworth: The Major Works, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 297–302 (299).
- 18.
See Shuttleworth, Mind, 335–352.
- 19.
Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962; 6th edn, 2012).
- 20.
Gertrude Himmelfarb, Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996).
- 21.
Peter Bowler, The Non-Darwinian Revolution: Reinterpreting a Historical Myth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988).
- 22.
Michael Ruse, The Darwinian Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 40; Bennett Zon, ‘The “non-Darwinian” Revolution and the Great Chain of Musical Being’, in Evolution and Victorian Culture, ed. Bernard Lightman and Bennett Zon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 196–226 (197 and 201). See also Piers J. Hale, ‘Rejecting the Myth of the Non-Darwinian Revolution’, Victorian Review, 41/2 (2015), 13–18, on the capacious significance of the term ‘Darwinian’ in the Victorian period.
- 23.
Emilie Jonsson’s The Early Evolutionary Imagination: Literature and Human Nature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) also examines literary responses to Darwinian evolution.
- 24.
Jessica Straley, Evolution and Imagination in Victorian Children’s Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 1–18.
- 25.
See John R. Morss, The Biologising of Childhood: Developmental Psychology and the Darwinian Myth (Hove and London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1990), esp. p. 4 on recapitulation.
- 26.
Chambers, cited in James Secord, Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 97.
- 27.
Secord, p. 97.
- 28.
‘Children’s literature’ is perhaps best defined as literature we imagine is more typically read by children than by adults; as this suggests, it is often applied to texts which were not originally written ‘for’ children and in fact tells us very little about who a book was written for or who reads it (and nothing at all about why ‘who reads it’ might matter). I use the phrase ‘children’s literature’ to refer to texts which have almost uniformly been classed as ‘children’s literature’ by critics and which are seen as primarily children’s literature, rather than as primarily (or, often, even additionally) belonging to any other genre (such as canonical literature, or Victorian literature, or fantasy literature). This is also why I differentiate works I call children’s literature (such as A Little Princess) from works I call ‘canonical literature’ (such as The Mill on the Floss): being classed as ‘children’s literature’ almost precludes classification as ‘canonical literature’ (the subgenre, ‘canonical children’s literature’, only supports this claim). I do not extrapolate from a text’s assigned genre to any assumptions about the average age of its readership.
- 29.
Jacob Jewusiak, Aging, Duration and the English Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), p. 31.
- 30.
Carolyn Steedman, Strange Dislocations: Childhood and the Idea of Human Interiority,1790–1930 (London: Virago, 1995), p. 52.
- 31.
Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (1983; 3rd edn, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 102.
- 32.
Alexis Harley, Autobiologies: Charles Darwin and the Natural History of the Self (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2015), 2.
- 33.
See Shuttleworth, ‘Inventing a Discipline; Autobiography and the Science of Child Study in the 1890s’, Comparative Critical Studies, 2/2 (2005), 143–163. Sully’s use of children’s authors is another instance of Gowan Dawson’s observation that the ‘interconnection’ of literature and science were ‘exploited and manipulated for a variety of strategic reasons’ in the Victorian period; children’s authors were presumed to have special insight into childhood, which Sully could accrue vicariously (Gowan Dawson, Darwin, Literature, and Victorian Respectability (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 7.
- 34.
See Roisín Laing, ‘Victorian Culture and the Origins of Child Psychology’, in Victorian Culture and the Origin of Disciplines, ed. Bernard Lightman and Bennett Zon (New York: Routledge, 2019), 188–210.
- 35.
Jenny Bourne Taylor, ‘Between Atavism and Altruism: The Child on the Threshold in Victorian Psychology and Edwardian Children’s Fiction’, in Children in Culture: Approaches to Culture, ed. Karín Lesnick-Oberstein (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), 89–121 (93).
- 36.
Straley likewise focuses exclusively on Victorian children’s literature. Recently, Anne Stiles, Children’s Literature and the Rise of ‘Mind Cure’: Positive Thinking and Pseudo-Science at the Fin-de-Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), and Elizabeth C. Miller, Extraction Ecologies and the Literature of the Long Exhaustion (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2021), compare ‘children’s literature’, scientific texts, and canonical literature ‘for adults’.
- 37.
George King, ‘Education in Parochial Schools: Its Influence on Insanity and Mental Aberration’, Association Medical Journal, 3/141 (1855), 855–857 (856). Natalie Hunter’s ‘The Curse of the Child Star’, Daily Mail, 8 July 2022, www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-10991489/Actors-got-addicted-drugs-child-stars-Hayden-Panettiere-reveals-substance-abuse.htmlee, [last accessed 18 October 2022] is a recent example of comparable contemporary writing.
- 38.
Kincaid, 78.
- 39.
George Levine, Darwin Among the Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 13.
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Laing, R. (2024). Introduction. In: The Precocious Child in Victorian Literature and Culture. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41382-7_1
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