The Mind of the Child: Child Development in Literature, Science, and Medicine, 1840-1900.(Book review)

The Mind of the Child: Child Development in Literature, Science, and Medicine, 1840-1900, by Sally Shuttleworth; pp. x + 497. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2010, 35.00 [pounds sterling], $65.00.

When did our present-day understandings of childhood first emerge? The question has a long scholarly history, and the answer depends, of course, on what aspects of present understandings are emphasized. Philippe Aries's Centuries of Childhood (1962) became an essential reference point after its publication thanks to its provocative, if now largely discredited, claim that medieval society had no conception of childhood as a distinct phase of life. Since Aries, scholars have examined ideas about childhood in a vast array of cultural contexts and, within a broadly European tradition, located origins or prefigurations of contemporary views in writings by John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the Romantics, and scores of less celebrated commentators. In her copiously researched new study, Sally Shuttleworth focuses on the years 1840 to 1900, when, she argues, "the inner workings of the child mind became for the first time an explicit object of study across the cultural and disciplinary spectrum" (2)--when, that is to say, "incontrovertible shifts in understanding" helped establish many of the "frameworks of …