The Precocious Child in Victorian Culture: Precocity in Fantasy and in Reality

Laing, Roisín

doi:10.1007/978-3-031-41382-7_5

Roisín Laing³

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture ((PNWC))

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Abstract

This chapter reads Peter Pan as a study of the conflict at the heart of Victorian evolutionary discourse. In Peter Pan, we can see one iteration of a ‘Darwinian’ model of child development, in which its tragic losses are foregrounded. Through the bleakness embodied in Peter Pan, Barrie accounts for his era’s tenacity to the idea that growth is progress. Peter’s model of growth is therefore refuted by the Darling children in favour of a fantasy of progressive development. Peter Pan facilitates our participation in this fantasy, even as its protagonist performs its falsity. I then suggest that, in two works by child authors, adult and child are not clearly differentiated. Both in their precocity and in what they wrote, Daisy Ashford and Marjory Fleming challenge a progressive model of development and the idea of a ‘confirming conclusion’ in adulthood which this model facilitates. What has since been written about Ashford and Fleming reveals that critics cling to the idea that growth is progress and that precocious children fundamentally undermine this idea. Thus, this chapter reads Peter Pan, along with child-authored work and responses to it, as distillations of the representation and significance of the precocious child in Victorian culture.

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Notes

1.
R. D. S. Jack, ‘Peter Pan as Darwinian Creation Myth’, Literature and Theology, 8/2 (1994), 157–173 (157). Jack bases this claim on two leader articles Barrie wrote during his time as a journalist for The Nottingham Journal.
2.
A contemporary reviewer considered The Young Visiters ‘one of the funniest books of the day’ (Anon., ‘The Young Visiters, or Mr Salteena’s Plan’, The Bookman, 56/334 (Jul 1919), (147)). Clinton Fadiman considers it ‘one of the dozen funniest books in English’ (Fadiman, ‘The Case for Children’s Literature’, Children’s Literature, 5 (1976), 9–21 (17)), while Irvin S. Cobb suggests that it is ‘almost the funniest book that was ever written’ (Cobb, ‘Preface’, in Her Book, by Daisy Ashford (New York: George H. Doran Company, 1920), v–xix (viii).
Daisy Ashford, ‘Preface’, in Love and Marriage, by Daisy Ashford and Angela Ashford (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1966), 6.
3.
J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan in Peter Pan and Other Plays, ed. Peter Hollindale (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 88. Except in analysis of relevant differences, all versions of Peter’s story are treated interchangeably and referred to as Peter Pan. I will indicate references to specific versions with the following abbreviations: Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens: KG; Peter and Wendy: PW; Peter Pan (1928): PP. Page numbers for KG and PW refer to Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens and Peter and Wendy, ed. Peter Hollindale (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).
4.
Claudia Nelson, Precocious Children and Childish Adults: Age Inversion in Victorian Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 163.
5.
Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, ed. Gillian Beer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 345.
6.
Frances Hodgson Burnett, The One I Knew the Best of All: A Memory of the Mind of a Child (New York: Charles Scribner’s, 1893), 325.
7.
Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (1983; 3^rd edn, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 8; Frank Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative (Cambride, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1979), 16.
8.
Darwin, Origin, 99.
9.
Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, ed. James Moore and Adrian Desmond (London: Penguin, 2004), 209–210.
10.
Darwin, Descent, 210.
11.
Darwin, Descent, 210.
12.
Monique Chassagnol, ‘Masks and Masculinity in James Barrie’s Peter Pan’, in Ways of Being Male: Representing Masculinities in Children’s Literature and Film, ed. John Stephens (New York: Routledge, 2002), 200–215 (213).
13.
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 136.
14.
Darwin, Origin, 84.
15.
Sheila Kaye-Smith, ‘J. M. Barrie, The Tragedian’, The Bookman Christmas Number, 59/351 (1920), 107–108 (108), qtd. in Jack, ‘Creation Myth’, 172.
16.
Barrie, The Little White Bird (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1902), 142; KG, 12; PP, 99 and 151; PW, 69.
17.
Amanda Phillips Chapman, ‘The Riddle of Peter Pan’s Existence: An Unselfconscious Stage Child’, The Lion and the Unicorn, 36/2 (2012), 136–153 (137).
18.
In the play’s ‘Dedication’, Barrie suggests that ‘to force open a crammed drawer’ is a ‘safe but sometimes chilly way of recalling the past’ (PP, 75–86 (84)). The connection between Peter’s shadow and his memory is therefore emphasised by Mrs Darling’s choice of place for safekeeping: Peter finds his shadow where others find memories. Of course, only Peter could lose both.
19.
John Pennington, ‘Peter Pan, Pullman, and Potter: Anxieties of Growing Up’, in J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan In and Out of Time: A Children’s Classic at 100, ed. Donna R. White and C. Anita Tarr (Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 2006), 237–262 (250).
20.
Rose identifies a note by Barrie in a first edition of Peter Pan, which substantiates this reading; Barrie writes that Peter ‘is only a sort of dead baby’ (Jacqueline Rose, The Case of Peter Pan: Or, The Impossibility of Children’s Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 38). See also Chapman, especially 149, on the pain associated with Peter’s eternal youth, and, comparably, Lucas Crawford ‘“A child is being beaten”: Peter Pan, Peter Grimes, and a Queer Case of Modernism’, English Studies in Canada, 39/4 (2013), 33–54, especially 51, on the ‘violence’ of Peter’s ‘preservation’.
21.
See Sarah Gilead, ‘Magic Abjured: Closure in Children’s Fantasy Fiction’, PMLA, 106/2 (1991), 277–293, especially 287, on the role of memory in meaning in Peter Pan.
22.
Karen McGavrock, ‘The Riddle of His Being: An Exploration of Peter Pan’s Perpetually Altering State’, in White and Tarr, 195–215 (196).
23.
Beer, 8.
24.
Darwin, Origin, 97
25.
Beer, xix.
26.
Beer, xviii.
27.
Darwin, Origin, 338.
28.
Darwin, Descent, 43.
29.
John Hedley Brooke, ‘“Laws Impressed on Matter by the Creator”? The Origin and the Question of Religion’, in The Cambridge Companion to The Origin of Species, ed. Michael Ruse and Robert J. Richards, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 256–274 (269). In this essay, Brooke offers a detailed analysis of Darwin’s contribution to, and position within, nineteenth-century debates about religion. See Brooke, ‘Darwin and Victorian Christianity’, in The Cambridge Companion to Darwin ed. Jonathan Hodge and Gregory Radick (2003; 2^nd edn, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 197–218, for a discussion of contemporary and current religious responses to Darwin’s theory.
30.
Rasheed Tazudeen, ‘Immanent Metaphor, Branching Form(s), and the Unmaking of the Human in Alice and The Origin of Species’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 43/3 (2015), 533–558 (534), quoting from Donald Rackin, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass: Nonsense, Sense, and Meaning (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1991), 88–103 (93).
31.
R. D. S. Jack, The Road to Neverland: A Reassessment of J. M. Barrie’s Dramatic Art (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1991), 141.
32.
Jack, ‘Creation Myth’, 167.
33.
Peter Bowler, The Non-Darwinian Revolution: Reinterpreting a Historical Myth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 96 and 51.
34.
Jack, ‘Creation Myth’, 160.
35.
Even this first appearance is debated. Jack identifies Peter Pan in Barrie’s Sentimental Tommy (1895), in which its protagonist imagines, as the subject for his next work, a boy who never grows up (Jack, Neverland, 164).
36.
Leonee Ormond, J. M. Barrie (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1987), 103.
37.
Kirsten Stirling, Peter Pan’s Shadows in the Literary Imagination (New York: Routledge: 2012), 12. See in particular Roger Lancelyn Green, Fifty Years of Peter Pan (London: Peter Davies, 1954), for a detailed analysis of the differences between each of the many versions of Peter Pan Barrie wrote for stage and screen, and Jack, ‘The Manuscript of Peter Pan’, Children’s Literature, 18 (1990), 101–113, for a comparison of the manuscript (dated 1903–1904 and held at the Lilly Library, University of Indiana) with the production text (dated 1904–1905 and held at the Beinecke Library, Yale University).
38.
Barrie, The Plays of J. M. Barrie (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1928), qtd. in Jack, ‘Manuscript’, 101; Jack, ‘Manuscript’, 102. Jack notes that Roger Lancelyn Green does claim to have consulted the Lord Chamberlain’s manuscript, which, like all other plays censored by the Lord Chamberlain, would have ‘found [its] way’ to the British Library (Jack, ‘Manuscript’, 102). According to Jack, if this manuscript was held in the British Library for Green’s research, it is not to be found there today.
39.
See Rose, 155–171, and especially 155–159, for a useful overview of the creative output generated by and about the figure of Peter Pan until the 1980s. That output continues today and includes what has been marketed as the ‘only official sequel’, Geraldine McCaughrean’s Peter Pan in Scarlet (2006). Its claim to ‘official’ status is based on its authorization by Great Ormond Street Hospital, to which Barrie bequeathed the rights of the play in 1929. See ‘Peter Pan’, Great Ormond Street Hospital Charity, www.gosh.org, [last accessed 2 September 2016].
40.
Darwin, Origin, 360.
41.
Levin, p. 86.
42.
This absence which Peter Pan represents is also captured in the title, Anon., of the manuscript version at the Lilly Library.
43.
Levine, p. 86.
44.
Beer, xviii.
45.
Ormond, 107.
46.
Ormond, 107. See also Paul Fox, “The Time of His Life: Peter Pan and the Decadent Nineties’, in White and Tarr, 23–45, and especially the comparison between Peter and Hook (42), for an affirmative reading of eternal youth. Karen Coats likewise suggests that the reader is free to choose whether to admire or pity Peter Pan (Coats, ‘Child-Hating: Peter Pan in the Context of Victorian Hatred’, in White and Tarr, 3–22 (17).
47.
Ormond, 107.
48.
There is an obvious connection between Peter’s contradictory wishes at this point and those painful dreams he has about a boy who is never here. This connection is prescient of, and problematic for, Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, the first English translation of which was published in 1913. In this work, Freud claims that ‘the dreams of small children are simple wish-fulfilments’ (Freud, ‘The Dream is a Wish-Fulfilment’, in The Interpretation of Dreams, ed. Ritchie Robertson, trans. Joyce Crick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 98–105 (102). If Peter’s pursuit, in dreams, of a boy he never catches is a wish-fulfilment, Peter’s wish must be for eternal youth. However, these dreams are painful to Peter, because they foreclose the possibility of fulfilling his wish to return to his mother, and thus to attain selfhood. Peter’s dreams might be understood as wish-fulfilment, but as such they are anything but simple.
49.
Robert J. Richards, ‘Darwin’s Theory of Natural Selection and its Moral Purpose’, in Ruse and Richards, 47–66 (65).
50.
Darwin, Origin, 65.
51.
Darwin, Origin, 360.
52.
Richards, 66.
53.
Beer, xviii.
54.
Jack, ‘Manuscript’, 101.
55.
Anon., The Times, 28 December 1904, 4, qtd. in Jack, ‘Manuscript’, 101–102.
56.
See also Beer’s analysis of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Beer, 103.
57.
Coats, 4.
58.
Burnett, The One I Knew, 325.
59.
Darwin, Origin, 345.
60.
The title Peter and Wendy is suggestive of the centrality of the tension between the two opposing models—process and progress, Darwinian and non-Darwinian—offered in the texts.
61.
James Sully, ‘A Learned Infant’, The Cornhill Magazine, 8/43 (1887), 48–60 (48–49).
62.
Lachlan Macbean, The Story of Pet Marjorie (New York: G. P. Putnam’s, 1904), 10–11. Subsequqent citations will be given in parentheses.
63.
Alexandra Johnson, ‘The Drama of Imagination: Marjorie Fleming and her Diaries’, in Infant Tongues: The Voice of the Child in Literature, ed. Elizabeth Goodenough, Mark A. Heberle, and Naomi Solokoff (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994), 80–109 (105).
64.
Johnson, 105, emphasis added.
65.
Sully, ‘Learned’, 48.
66.
‘Biographical Note: Barbara Newhall Follett papers, 1919–1966’, Columbia University Libraries Archival Collections (Columbia University Libraries), www.columbia.edu, [last accessed 4 September 2016].
67.
David Sadler, ‘Innocent Hearts: The Child Authors of the 1920s’, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, 17/4 (1992), 24–30 (28).
68.
Sadler, 28.
69.
Sadler, 29.
70.
Henry James, ‘The Author of Beltraffio’, in Henry James: The Figure in the Carpet and Other Stories, ed. Frank Kermode (London: Penguin, 1986), 57–112 (111).
71.
Johnson, 105.
72.
Hugo Brunner, ‘Ashford, Margaret Mary Julia [Daisy] (1881–1972)’, rev. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), www.oxforddnb.com, [last accessed 4 September 2016]. Ashford’s daughter uses the same word to describe her, but specifies that she was ‘unworldly in the sense that money and possessions were unimportant to her…Nor did position worry her and she married entirely for love’ (Margaret Steel, ‘Introduction’, in The Hangman’s Daughter and Other Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), ix–xxii (xxi). However, Penelope Schott Starkey notes that it was because of the financial independence she won through the success of The Young Visiters that Ashford could marry for love: ‘[w]ith this unexpected money of her own, she and James Devlin bought a small farm and were married the following spring’ (Starkey, ‘The Young Visiters Revisited in Light of Virginia Woolf’, Research Studies, 42 (1974), 161–166 (166)). Ashford’s marriage may have been ‘for love’, but, since it could only come about because she had money, it seems unlikely that Ashford was entirely unaware of the ‘worldly’ obstacles to such marriages in general.
73.
Ashford, ‘Author’s Foreword’, in Her Book, xxi–xxiv (xxiii–xxiv).
74.
Christine Alexander, ‘Defining and Representing Literary Juvenilia’, in The Child Writer from Austen to Woolf, ed. Christine Alexander and Juliet McMaster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 70–97 (75).
75.
Ashford, ‘Foreword’, xxiii, emphasis added.
76.
Sully, ‘Learned’, 48.
77.
Gillian Adams, ‘Speaking for Lions’, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, 17/4 (1992), 2–3 (2). The third question, ‘how and to what extent such texts are influenced by adult culture’, is not as fully addressed, in any of the contributions to the issue, as either of the other questions (Adams, 2).
78.
Christine Alexander and Juliet McMaster, ‘Introduction’, in Alexander and McMaster, 1–7 (2).
79.
Alexander and McMaster, 2.
80.
Ashford began an autobiography in her old age, but destroyed the manuscript (Brunner, last accessed 4 September 2016).
81.
Ashford, ‘Foreword’, xxiii.
82.
Ashford, ‘Foreword’, xxiii.
83.
Jan Susina, ‘“Respiciendo prudens”: Lewis Carroll’s Juvenilia’, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, 17/4 (1992), 10–14 (13).
84.
Daniel Shealy, ‘Louisa May Alcott’s Juvenilia: Blueprints for the Future’, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, 17/4 (1992), 15–18 (17).
85.
Sully, ‘Learned’, 48.
86.
Alexander, 74.
87.
Steel, xxii.
88.
A. J. O. Cockshut, ‘Children’s Diaries’, in Children and their Books: A Celebration of the Work of Iona and Peter Opie, ed. Gillian Avery and Julia Briggs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 381–398 (382).
89.
Elizabeth Goodenough, Mark A. Heberle, and Naomi Sokoloff, ‘Introduction’, in Goodenough, Heberle, and Sokoloff, pp. 1–15 (4).
90.
Alexander, 87–88.
91.
Laura K. Ray, ‘Childhood and the English Novel: Two English Girls’, Genre, 8 (1975), 89–105 (96).
92.
Ray, 96.
93.
James, ‘Preface IX’, 293.
94.
See Roisín Laing, ‘What Maisie Knew: Nineteenth-Century Selfhood in the Mind of the Child’, Henry James Review, 39/1 (2018), 96–109.
95.
Cobb, viii. Cobb’s qualified praise for The Young Visiters is telling in this analysis; that it can only be ‘almost the funniest book ever written’ seems to be associated with the author’s supposed ‘innocence’ of its humour.
96.
Ray, 91.
97.
Ray, 94.
98.
Macbean’s surprise that ‘at her age’, Fleming ‘hesitates’ (44) to believe a story she reads in Mother Goose’s Fairy Tales is equally illustrative of his ideas and expectations about ‘the child’ and her relationship with language.
99.
G. Stanley Hall, ‘Children’s Lies’, American Journal of Psychology, 3/1 (1890), 59–70 (66); Sully, Studies, 55.
100.
Kevin Ohi, Innocence and Rapture: The Erotic Child in Pater, Wilde, James, and Nabokov (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 7.
101.
Cathryn Halverson, ‘Reading Little Girls’ Texts in the 1920s: Searching for the “Spirit of Childhood”’, Children’s Literature in Education, 30/4 (1999), 235–248 (246).
102.
Laing, 98.
103.
Halverson, 246.
104.
Halverson, 246.
105.
E. Nesbit, The Story of the Treasure Seekers (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 1995), 164.
106.
Daisy Ashford, The Young Visiters (London: Chatto and Windus, 1984), 22. Subsequent citations will be given in parentheses. Unlike the previous editorial practices described by Alexander above, the 1984 Chatto and Windus edition, ‘aims to reproduce the original in all aspects’, correcting only ‘simple slips of spelling and punctuation’ (‘A Note on the Text’, in The Young Visiters, 78–79 (79)). It therefore perpetuates the indignity, but not the dishonesty, with which Ashford’s text has been treated. In line with standard practice, I will not correct punctuation and spelling errors that feature in this edition, or in Fleming’s work.
107.
Nesbit, Story, 25.
108.
Nesbit, Story, 25–26.
109.
Nesbit, Story, 125.
110.
Barrie, ‘Preface’, in The Young Visiters, 7–13 (9).
111.
Fleming’s sexual desire has, of course, no bearing on her sexual availability to its object, since it has no bearing on her capacity to give meaningful consent.
112.
While Isabella evidently tries to influence what Fleming writes, however, the only corrections she makes to that writing relate, as Plotz observes, ‘to spelling and neatness; she makes no effort to censure Marjorie’s sometimes profane comments on life, love, and crime’ (Plotz, ‘The Pet of Letters: Marjorie Fleming’s Juvenilia’, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, 17/4 (1992), 4–9 (4)). In this respect, Isabella opposes Fleming’s later editors; while they retain Fleming’s errors in spelling, in order to make her knowledge appear innocent, Isabella corrects impediments to the expression of that knowledge in all its ‘profanity’.
113.
Ray, 91.
114.
John Brown, ‘Marjorie Fleming: A Story of Child-Life Fifty Years Ago’, in Macbean, 155–203 (188).
115.
Brown, 189.
116.
Brown, 189.
117.
Juliet McMaster, ‘“Adults’ Literature,” By Children’, The Lion and the Unicorn, 25/2 (2001), 277–299 (283).
118.
Ray, 95.
119.
Ray, 95.
120.
Ray, 94.
121.
Carol Mavors notes a similar tendency to read Lewis Carroll as ‘innocent’ based precisely on evidence which might make the uninitiated viewer see paedophilia: his photographs of naked female children (Carol Mavors, Pleasures Taken: Performances of Sexuality and Loss in Victorian Photographs (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), pp. 7–11.)
122.
Ashford, ‘Author’s Foreword’, xxiv; Brunner, last accessed 4 September 2016).
123.
Alexander and McMaster, 1.
124.
Halverson, 241. As Halverson herself admits, she ‘replicate[s] this tendency’ in her article, as I do in the first part of this chapter (Halverson, 241).
125.
Beer, 106.

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Laing, R. (2024). The Precocious Child in Victorian Culture: Precocity in Fantasy and in Reality. 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_5

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