Module Information

This 3rd year option module combines close textual analysis, literary history, and material and visual culture, as well as contemporary historical contexts, in order to examine the representation and role of childhood in Victorian literary culture. The module's interest in historical context and also material and visual culture may make it of particular interest to students studying joint honours with history, education, or art.

Victorian Childhoods examines representations of childhood across a range of genres and readerships in the period 1850-1900. The module will challenge stereotypes about Victorian childhood that frequently figure the child as either a 'street urchin' or a being of unblemished innocence. We will consider our texts from the perspective of their engagement with a wide range of contextual issues, such as educational reform, evolutionary debate, the Woman Question, and child labour campaigns. We will also discuss issues of genre and audience and juxtapose representations of childhood in both 'high' and 'low' forms of literature. Henry James famously commented in 1899 that "great fortunes, if not great reputations...are made by writing for schoolboys". What role does genre and audience play in determining reception and literary value? The texts under consideration encompass writing that appears to be for adults. Yet to what extent do some of these texts target both adults and children, and how does that affect our analysis of the ways in which childhood is constructed in the text? In this module we will consider contextual issues, assess both Victorian and more recent critical responses to writing for and/or about children, and engage in our own close textual analysis in order to deepen our understanding of the wide ranging nature of the child as a symbolic figure in Victorian literature and culture.