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Artful Dodgers: Reconceiving the Golden Age of Children's Literature. By Marah Gubar. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Conventional critical wisdom has long held that the Victorians were wedded to the Romantic idea of the inherent innocence of children and other "primitives" and that, consequently, Victorian writers often incorporated an idealized child in their works, a child that must be forever isolated from the "real" adult world in order to remain pure and incorrupt. Children's literature critics in the late 1980s and early 1990s applied this theory of the "cult of the child" to Victorian children's authors as well, advancing various arguments regarding how Lewis Carroll, J. M. Barrie, Francis Hodgson Burnett, and their contemporaries not only perpetuated this ideal in their child characters but also attempted to coerce their child readers into conforming to that naïve ideal. The account put forth by these critics held that these authors conceived of childhood, both in fiction and outside of it, as a nostalgic place of escape from the anxieties and uncertainties of adulthood, and that they tried their best to maintain that innocence both within and through the books they produced for children.
Gubar's book is a refreshing answer to this simplistic thinking. Gubar unabashedly takes on Jacqueline Rose, James Kincaid, Humphrey Carpenter, Jackie Wullschläger, and others, presenting an incisive, wide-ranging, and grounded argument that writers of the Golden Age of children's literature were "far more skeptical about Romantic primitivism than this account suggests," and that "on the contrary, they generally conceive[d] of child characters and child readers as socially saturated beings, profoundly shaped by the culture, manner, and morals of their time" (4). Gubar does not reject the "cult of the child" paradigm outright, conceding that idealization of children did indeed exist in Victorian thinking, but she contends that the critical assessment regarding Golden Age literature "must be reconceived to reflect the fact...