Romanticism and Children's Literature in Nineteenth-Century England.

Publication: The Journal of English and Germanic Philology

Publication Date: 01-APR-93

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COPYRIGHT 1993 University of Illinois Press

Edited by James Holt McGavran, Jr. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1991. Pp. vi + 265. $35.

Although the contemptuous dismissal of "kiddie literature" has certainly abated in the last decade, the segregation of children's literature as a field of study seems to persist in academic circles. By bringing child-texts and so-called "adult" texts in fruitful apposition to each other and by showing their common concern in defining and redefining "the Romantic figure of the child" (p. 11), this collection of eleven original essays performs a valuable task. Indeed, the high quality of most of these contributions should help to break down further the obstinate notion that works written for juveniles somehow lack the required Arnoldian "high seriousness" or Jamesian craftsmanship of canonized adult classics.

Purists might immediately seize on the title of this collection and contend that it is misleading in both its historical and generic implications. "Romanticism," after all, here not only covers, as one might expect, figures such as Blake, Wordsworth, the Lambs, and Coleridge, but also includes Victorians such as Carroll, Ewing, Burnett, and even E. Nesbit, a writer whose finest and most representative writing was done in the Edwardian era. Likewise, "Children's Literature" turns out to be an equally elastic term. Works about children--Wordsworth's "Idiot Boy," say, or Coleridge's famous projection of a "bright imagined future for the infant Hartley" in "Frost at Midnight" (p. 8)--are considered together with texts actually written for children, such as the Alice books or...

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