Notes on the Victorian Construction of Childhood

The idea of “childhood” itself is a fraught idea. Though it can be spoken of in the singular, as a universal event that all of us who have made it to adulthood have gone through, each of us has had our own childhood. This childhood is different based on so many socioeconomic and demographic factors, as well as gender, and geographic, considerations.

 So of course, we really speak of childhood in the abstract, as a separate place, free from adulthood and as a place to be a child and to practice being an adult. This practicing is both in the games of play that children and the stories that we tell them. By constructing a world outside the day to day realities of the world outside, the world of the imagination is a safe space to be anything and to do anything.  But it is also important not to give wholly instrumental values to the idea of play. It does recreate the world but play itself is also very important for its own sake. As Robert Louis Stephenson notes in his essay “Child’s Play”:

For children think very much the same thoughts and dream the same dreams, as bearded men and marriageable women.  No one is more romantic.  Fame and honour, the love of young men and the love of mothers, the business man’s pleasure in method, all these and others they anticipate and rehearse in their play hours.  Upon us, who are further advanced and fairly dealing with the threads of destiny, they only glance from time to time to glean a hint for their own mimetic reproduction.  Two children playing at soldiers are far more interesting to each other than one of the scarlet beings whom both are busy imitating. 

What we do have as universals now about a broad-stroke unifying “childhood” is an invention that correlates with the rise of industrial capitalism. These are the stories that arose in the nineteenth century with the brothers Grimm and Edward Lear and the stories of Hans Christian Andersen. This flowering of Victorian Era was in the next century taken in by Walt Disney and painted in technicolor.

The Victorian Era was not all prefiguring technicolor. In his examination of the Manchester of the early Victorian era, Friedrich Engels notes that the life is hard, where the working-class lives in “enfeebled conditions” that cause people to “age prematurely and die early” (116). This pushes the mortality rates to the point where there is a mortality rate for children of the working classes where 57 percent of their children die before they turn five. This is opposed to the upper classes, where a frighteningly high 20 percent of children will die (120). Added to the privations of the living conditions, many children are put to work, so that a child of nine is sent to work in the mill for six and a half hours daily, increasing to twelve-hour days when they become what we would call teenagers (160). Children, in their masses, were forced to become adults in terms of entering the workforce because of need in their families for another worker and the lack of formal education options for most lower-class children. The stories that are passed down to us for consumption by children do not show this working-class life. The closest we come to realistic portrayals that remain in the popular imagination of this other side comes from the pen of Charles Dickens, where we see the suffering of Tiny Tim or the wiliness of Pip or Oliver Twist.

 It is through writers like Nesbitt and Graham and Milne via Disney that an ideal childhood is drawn. It is idyllic and pastoral. Importantly, there are no adults. The common theme of child alone is highlighted later by the English Author Roald Dahl in his book “James and the Giant Peach,” where on the very first page we see James living a happy life, up until his parents are “suddenly got eaten up (in full daylight, mind you, on a crowded street) by an enormous angry rhinoceros which had escaped from the London Zoo” (Dahl 1). Although the Golden Age of Children's Literature constructs the child as an "other" separate from adults, children in our texts frequently play adult roles. The situations in the text forces children to play-act these roles, so that the characters learn and grow through taking on the adult role as well as presenting the reader with the situation to model in their minds the reactions they would have – both an escapist and a didactic function for the readers. In the rest of this essay, we will examine two examples of children behaving as adults by discussing the situation, the presence or absence of adults, and the effect such behavior has upon the child and on those around him or her in Lewis Carrol’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, as well as Robert Louis Stephenson’s Treasure Island. We will explore such issues on how the adult role presented as a developmental step, a game, or a combination of the two, and what it implies about "real" adults and the children as grown-ups. In both texts we will see that there is a central turning point where the main character must take an adult role and gain agency which becomes the crux of the story.

We begin with Alice. For the Alice books, there are a lot of different levels of creation and points for interpretation and analysis. We have the creation of the stories, as Charles Dodgson making up fanciful scenes for little Alice Liddell and his other pre-pubescent muses, stories “made up almost wholly of bits and scraps, single ideas which came of themselves (281 from Alice on Stage). Then these stories were put to paper and published as the original 1865 Alice's Adventures in Wonderland with the sequel Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There coming six years later. It received its Disney version in 1951, in a version of Alice evolved from the original Tenniel illustrations of the original publication.

There are a couple of things that are very striking at looking at the texts and their evolution over time. The first is that the individual scenes in the chapters are incredibly episodic. The movie version of the story that American children are first presented with is one where there is no separation between the first adventure in Wonderland and the second adventure in the looking-glass world. The writers of the Disney can conflate the two stories and pick and choose to create their own arc for Alice as well as excising the stories that do not necessarily fit into a context of what an American child is supposed to know. Animators will not be able to draw footnotes to explain why a lion and a unicorn would be fighting, but at the time same time, Carroll’s writing is such that on the face a fight between a lion and a unicorn is entertaining on the surface level and would translate to the absurd action that is present in so much more of the book.

As a follow-on from this episodic nature is that there is very little natural arc to speak of. The logic is that of a dream. As Peter Coventry puts it, it is a commentary on Victorian life, “But it is not simply that. It is not simply anything. Even in this first and greatest work, there is a content not far removed from nightmare. Alice in Wonderland has the claustrophobic atmosphere of a children’s Kafka. It is the frustrated ‘quest’ for the ‘Garden’ which in the event is peopled with such unpleasant creatures” (from Escape 331). What defines the Alice books from the very beginning is this nightmare logic. As the reader first meets Alice, they see Alice “beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister in the bank and of having nothing to do (Wonderland 7). It is there wild dreaming of the book her sister is reading that the famous white rabbit streaks by, and “burning with curiosity she ran across the field after it, and was just in time to see it pop down a large rabbit hole under the hedge,” following the rabbit down the hole “never once considering how in the world she was to get out again.” (Wonderland 8). Though there is no clear demarcation for the reader or for Alice that Alice has gone asleep, this dream logic and the episodic nature takes hold as Alice tries to go home. The creatures that she meets are never very helpful, from a confounding caterpillar to the Duchess giving Alice a child that turns out to be a small pig, to meeting the Cheshire Cat, foregrounding the nightmare logic: “We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad. // “How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice. // “You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here” (Wonderland 51).

This madness of the Cheshire cat, and his claimed madness of Alice makes the reader question what we are doing in Wonderland or in the Looking-Glass world at all. There is a casual cruelty with which the world treats Alice and tosses her on to her next adventure so that Alice herself becomes as like the red queen: “it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!” (Looking glass 127). Being in these separate places is heightened by the fact that there are few recognizable and identifiable adult figures around except those identified by royal title. And even those characters, given hierarchical titles, are drawn as somewhat fanciful and grotesque by Carroll and Tenniel. Even at this level, once the queens are running Alice through mock-lessons, they are diminished, as Gillian Avery says, to a “manganese absurdity” (326).

Both the Looking-Glass world and Wonderland are mirrors to the world of the bourgeoise Victorian child, where adults were absent and absurd if present. The main choice that Alice makes is the fact of following the white Rabbit down the rabbit hole where she finds herself upside-down. These episodes that characterize the Alice books are scary and absurd while Alice is passed around to experience these scenes without a knowledge of what is happening, or even a real knowledge of a goal. The central point of the entire story comes just at the end. Alice has been brought to give evidence in a mock-trial, mock as all things are in the adult world and as all things are in wonderland. She has been growing, and then she realizes the absurdity of the entire situation and cries out ““Who cares for you?” Said Alice (she had grown to her full size by this time).  “You’re nothing but a pack of cards!” (Wonderland 98).  Of this scene, Nina Auerbach writes “Although her size changes seem arbitrary and terrifying, she in fact directs them; only in the final courtroom scene does she change size without first wishing to, and there, her sudden growth gives her the power to break out of a dream” (338). Here the reader sees the character’s the physical and mental growth into a more mature person. Alice is no longer just following the episodes, but she has taken control of the world that she had created in her own mind by calling it out and recognizing the fact that the dream world is just that, one created in the slumber.

On the other side of Wonderland is Treasure Island. Where Alice tried to navigate a world of strange creatures dictating to her actions, the world of Treasure Island, and the hero Jim Hawkins, the world is one made up of adults, and predominately male adults at that. Treasure island is an adventure tale, but also one where there are several possible figures to emulate and to follow. What the reader finds in Treasure is a moral ambiguity between the world of the Pirate and the world of respectable culture. This is drawn, as Bradley Deane writes, instead of a clear black and white, but in Treasure Island “Stevenson offers what amounts to an alternative ethical code, one that frames the characters' incessant judgments of one another and of themselves, and one which sets the terms in which masculinity can be defined” (365).  What is notable about Jim’s developing moral system is that even as the narrator of his own tale, there is a desire to live in both camps – whipping clean those distinctions between the black and the white and living in a world of gray.  The author Avi, writing in the introduction of the Aladdin edition of Treasure Island, notes that there is draw to the character of Long John Silver, one that made Stephenson think to title the book after Silver originally. Silver is supposed to be a bad guy, as Avi writes, “there is very little good to say about Long John Silver. He’s a thief and a killer. He lies. He switches allegiance often, depending on who is winning at the moment. And yet, and yet…he is a wonderful, truly loveable rogue, who gives more life to the tale than any other character” (xvi). The reader sees Jim as the protagonist because he is the narrator. The story is his, but again like in the Alice books, we find a character that is largely a victim of circumstance. In one of the key scenes of the book, Jim sees Silver murder a sailor who is reluctant to join the mutiny. There exists in the book a larger narrative plot that Jim is a part of, but not necessarily the driving force behind the events. This is not bad for Jim or Stephenson’s young readers. Treasure Island, like Wonderland, exists as a separate place where the protagonist can put on mom and dad’s clothes but are only on the surface of this secondary world. For Deane, this secondary world for Jim is the very nature of the play ethic that Stephenson describes in his essay quoted the introduction to this essay – play itself as both mirroring the adult world, but entirely separate from the adult world:  Their game accommodates horror and brutality, and its score is kept by counting the lives of the remaining players. When Jim is given the chance to score a kill of his own, the scene emphasizes both the continuity between pirates and boys and the subversion of Christian moralizing by the play ethic” (399). 

It is with this scorekeeping that we see Jim playacting the adult role in what is the moral center of the book. Though surrounded by other deaths, Jim has not been the agent for one until his skirmish with Israel Hands in chapter 26. The fight-as-play is noted by Jim in his narration of the tale: “It was such a game as I had often played at home about the rocks of Black Hill Cove” (251). In a fight to the death, even then Jim’s reflections show his childish nature. As Alexandra Valint notes: “In general, adult characters openly and proudly take responsibility for their kills, but Jim’s slaying of Hands is oddly disassociated from him. He shoots his weapons without “my own volition” and “without a conscious aim.”” (12). Jim is ultimately successful in the fight. Israel Hands dies at Jim’s hands, but it is oddly passive voiced. Here is the moment of the highest action, the one where Jim Hawkins has the chance to join the world of the adults, and his first murder just…happens. This scene reinforces the character’s immaturity and he again fades back into a participant but not a driver of his own plot.

Jim’s reticence to act and his own agency are reflected in the very end of the novel as well. The ship returns with only and handful of the people whop set out to go to Treasure Island, this other place. They have been successful in their venture, “All of us had an ample share of the treasure, and used it wisely or foolishly, according to our natures” (339). It is as if the act of returning erases the whole adventure as anything but a story that the reader had just read. Jim as the narrator tells what others did with their share, but the reader is left to wonder how much Jim had or what he did with his, other than setting aside and telling his story.

With both the Alice books and Treasure Island, the reader can see that the idea of Victorian Childhood as constructed through the texts aimed at those children have several commonalities. Both for the female Alice and the male Jim, the world of childhood is a separate place, but the imagination makes it such that the riverbank or home at your mom’s inn is not enough. The characters are mostly passive, as participants in their own stories. What is notable is in comparing the make up of the world around them. For Alice, the world is dominated by nonhuman creatures or if they are humanoid, grotesque simulacra of mostly female adults. For Jim, the ideal world is one where there are no women. This is a world where even the bad guy is a loveable rogue, but it allows the reader to live in the adult world of moral ambiguity much more than they would get from reading Pilgrim’s Progress. This gendered difference between the worlds is on the second level of acculturation. If theses stories are on the surface about action, and creating fun universes, they do reflect the larger world that the author was trying to create. As Nina Auerbach writes in the introduction to Forbidden Journeys, “women lived the condition Carroll, MacDonald, and Barrie longed for. If they were good, they never grew up” (1). Not entering the world of men, however, is not an option for male children, so books like Treasure Island allow the reader to be observers in that world. The reader lives Jim’s story as they do Alice’s, but Wonderland is much harder to find.

Bibliography

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Avi. “Introduction”. Stevenson, Robert Louis. Treasure Island. Aladdin Paperbacks, 2000.

Coveney. “Escape”. Alice in the Wonderland: Authoritative Texts of Alices Adventures in Wonderland through the Looking-Glass the Hunting of the Snark. Backgrounds Essays and Criticism. Norton, 1992.

Dahl, Roald. James and the Giant Peach. Penguin, 1995.

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Dodgson, Charles Lutwidge. “Alice on the Stage”. Alice in the Wonderland: Authoritative Texts of Alices Adventures in Wonderland through the Looking-Glass the Hunting of the Snark. Backgrounds Essays and Criticism. Norton, 1992.

Engels, Friedrich. The Condition of the Working Class in England. Oxford University Press, 2009.

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Valint, Alexandra. "The Child’s Resistance to Adulthood in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island: Refusing to Parrot." English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, vol. 58 no. 1, 2015, pp. 3-29. Project MUSE, muse.jhu.edu/article/563527.