Exhibiting Childhood: E. Nesbit and the Children’s Welfare Exhibitions

Abstract

Edith Nesbit’s reputation as a quintessential Edwardian children’s author is due as much to her involvement in the social context of her times as to the nature of her work, which is often hailed as marking the beginning of modern children’s fiction. This essay seeks to place Nesbit in a very particular context — her involvement with the Children’s Welfare Exhibition held at London’s Olympia from 31 December 1912 to 11 January 1913 — but also seeks to show how that context cannot be seen as an inert backdrop to the development of Nesbit’s writing, or to the kind of fiction it produced. Rather, a reading of the Exhibition’s own rhetoric suggests that literature was co-opted by those concerned with the lives of Edwardian children, and helped to define categories of childhood around welfare issues.