In this groundbreaking contribution to Victorian and children's literature studies, Marah Gubar proposes a fundamental reconception of the nineteenth-century attitude toward childhood. The
ideal and ideology of innocence was much slower to spread than we think, she contends, and the people whom we assume were most committed to it-children's authors and members of the infamous
"cult of the child"-were in fact deeply ambivalent about this Romantic notion.
In a series of attentive close readings of both famous and unjustly neglected texts, Gubar shows how such writers as Lewis Carroll, Frances Hodgson Burnett, and J. M. Barrie often resisted the
growing cultural pressure to erect a strict barrier between child and adult, innocence and experience. Rather than urging young people to mold themselves to match a static archetype of artless
simplicity, they conceived of children as precociously literate, highly socialized beings who-though indisputably shaped by the strictures of civilized life-could nevertheless cope with such
influences in creative ways. Often accused of producing escapist literature which idealized the child as a wholly natural being, they instead grappled quite self-consciously with the question
of how much power and autonomy young people can have, given their status as dependent, acculturated subjects.
In the process of tracing how Golden Age authors explored the vexed issue of the child's agency, Gubar offers a new account of the rise of the child narrator, the vogue for child actors, and
the emergence of children's theatre. iArtful Dodgers is essential reading for anyone interested in literary and dramatic representations of children.
