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Men in Wonderland
The Lost Girlhood of the Victorian Gentleman Introduction
"A boy phenomenon, perhaps?" suggested Nicholas. "There is only one phenomenon, sir," replied Mr. Crummles impressively, "and that's a girl."
(Charles Dickens, "Nicholas Nickleby")
THIS BOOK explores the intimate relationship between middle-class men and little girls in nineteenth-century British culture. Men in Wonderland traces the ways in which a number of male authors in this period construct girlhood and analyzes the exact nature of their investment in the figure of the girl. The idealization and idolization of little girls, long acknowledged features of the Victorian era, cannot be thought of without reference to a pervasive fantasy of male development in which men become masculine only after an initial feminine stage. In this light, little girls represent not just the true essence of childhood, but an adult male's best opportunity of reconnecting with his own lost self. The works of the individuals discussed at length in the study ahead-Wordsworth, De Quincey, Dickens, Ruskin, and Carroll-exhibit in various ways this male myth of feminized origin. Juxtaposing these literary texts and art forms with a range of other cultural productions such as philanthropictracts, conduct books, government reports, fine art, and popular journalism, Men in Wonderland demonstrates both the evolution of the idea of the ideal girl in the nineteenth century, and the manifestation of the concept of original girlhood in genres that would seem less driven by personal motivations. Although this fantasy of development by no means holds universal sway, it nevertheless makes its way into general currency because of its appeal to an important and influential strain in nineteenth-century discourse, a strain that is noticeably middle class, religious, paternalist, sentimental, nostalgic, and conservative.
Recognizing the existence of such a historical phenomenon brings numerous benefits to Victorian studies. In particular, this perception fuels the reassessment of the oeuvres of a variety of literary artists, especially inasmuch as it complicates the narratives of pedophilic desire that have habitually been employed to explain the work of the nineteenth century's most infamous girl-lovers (Ruskin and Carroll figuring here as the two most familiar examples of the type). More broadly, the identification of such a paradigm advances our understanding of such important characteristics of the age as its fraught constructions of masculinity, its obsession with loss, its rampant sentimentality, and its intense valorization of the little girl at the expense of mature femininity.
In many ways, to point out that the Victorians thought of early childhood as a feminine era is to state the obvious. After all, here at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the world of infancy and young childhood is still largely perceived as a female domain: not only does the care of little children continue to be primarily woman's responsibility, but the terms with which the early period of childhood is characterized-a time of "softness" and "vulnerability," requiring "gentleness" and "protection"-remain resolutely feminized. For these reasons, Freud's account of the process by which human beings come to understand sexual differentiation remains problematic: because of the feminine aura of those early days, it is hard to swallow his theory that all children initially believe themselves to be "little men," and that only upon noticing their "lack" do little girls regretfully give up this fantasy. If childhood is a feminized world now, it was even more so in the nineteenth century: whereas male babies today are soon dressed in clearly coded "masculine" apparel and colors, large numbers of Victorian photographs of scowling boys in short frocks exist to remind us that brothers and sisters used to be "clothed alike," as Coleridge wistfully recalls in "Frost at Midnight." Although the breeching ceremony of the early modern period-the great day when a six- or seven-year-old boy would shed his girlish dress and don trousers-had more or less fallen into obscurity for the Victorians, it was not until the twentieth century that boys, in any of the social classes, would wear obviously gendered clothing before this relatively advanced age. Perhaps more significantly, for many boys of the middle and upper classes the age of six or seven signaled the removal from maternal or feminine care in the home into the masculine world of the school: up until this point, their lessons would have taken place alongside their sisters in a female-staffed nursery. Trousers and school thus marked the end of the first phase of existence for boys; girls of these classes, still wearing petticoats and pursuing their education, for the most part, at home, experienced no such division between early and later childhood. Given that the garments and worlds left behind continued to be female, then, the first six years of male life in the nineteenth century carried a clear stamp of femininity, especially when viewed in retrospect. While it may be a critical commonplace that the Victorians adhered to a rigid system of gender separation, in this particular instance it seems that young boyhood crossed the line, and actually looked more like girlhood.
It is, however, one thing to notice that the early lives of boys found them wearing versions of female clothing and lodged in the female-controlled zones of the house, and quite another to register the depth of passionate investment in nineteenth-century writings that both insist that perfect childhood is always exemplified by a little girl, and that, despite the logical and biological impossibilities of the stance, lament a man's lost girlhood. To understand the climate that fostered the growth of a fantasy of primary and ideal femininity, it is necessary to examine the beliefs that informed the Victorians' fascination with the idea of the child. The account here begins with a brief summary of the general historiography of childhood in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century studies, and then moves to a consideration of the complicated and contradictory origins of the concept.
Since the publication of Philippe Ariès's Centuries of Childhood in 1962, it has generally been accepted that the idea of childhood is a fairly recent invention. According to current explanations, childhood's birth is coincident with the rise of the middle class in late-seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, and its infancy appears to draw strength from the twin sustenances of the Evangelical movement and Romantic thought. Historians document the growth of philanthropic concern for children, which manifests itself in institutions like the Foundling Hospital, the burgeoning Sunday school movement, and early campaigns for the abolition of exploitative labor, while those on the literary trail register the central importance of the child in the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, William Blake, and William Wordsworth. Contemporary scholarship claims that this interest in the child grows ever more particularized as the nineteenth century progresses: by virtue of the rapid pace of industrialization and population expansion, runs the argument, the plight of the laboring and the indigent child becomes hugely obvious and eventually energizes massive legislative reform and the erection of comprehensive educational and social welfare systems for the working-class child. Investigating Victorian domestic ideology's construction of the inviolable middle-class home, feminist critics and historians contend that the life experience of the child of comfortable means came to be shaped with comparable rigor in this period. This is also an era, it is maintained, in which the child and its properties become the subject of specialized legal and medical discourse. Furthermore, the figure of the child evolves into a dominant icon both for elite and popular consumption: six hundred thousand copies of Cherry Ripe, an engraving by the Royal Academician John Everett Millais, are not enough to satisfy public demand in 1880, while Charles Dickens's thirty-year career furnishes a veritable kindergarten of child heroes and heroines for the collective mind.
This overview gives a sense of the highly visible centrality of the child in any number of arenas and at all class levels in Victorian life. More difficult to describe is the meaning carried by the idea of the child in this period for the influential middle-class community that constitutes the primary focus of this study. Because the era of childhood was of paramount significance to two powerful, and apparently opposed, systems of thought, one would expect to find deep and irresolvable contradictions embedded at the heart of the nineteenth century's perception of children. On the one hand, to thinkers as various as Locke, Rousseau, and Wordsworth the child represents a pure point of origin, deeply connected to the natural and primitive world, and as yet unmired by the sullying forces of language, sexuality, and society. On the other, the eighteenth-century revival of hard-line Puritan attitudes in some strains of the Evangelical movement brought to the fore the doctrine of the primary corruption of human nature: the child comes into this world as a bearer of original sin, a creature of fundamental depravity. And yet in spite of this radical disagreement, these two different visions of the child turn out to be remarkably amenable to each other in the daily practice of nineteenth-century life and discourse. Up until fairly recently, the secular bent of literary and historical studies has resulted in a disproportionate emphasis upon the prominence of the Romantic idea of the child in the Victorian period: consequently the Evangelical perspective, and its perceived extremism, has been given relatively short shrift. In the past fifteen years or so, however, the importance of acknowledging the deeply religious, if complicated and often conflicted, character of at least the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century has become more widely appreciated. In consequence a more balanced view of the child's combined heritage is now beginning to emerge.
Between the 1730s and 1830s the Evangelical movement galvanized British Christianity, affecting practically all denominations from the established to the Nonconformist sects. While Evangelicals came to be active in every sphere of social reform in the nineteenth century, the primary tenor of this new religious enthusiasm was essentially personal and domestic: adherents were encouraged to scrutinize with unprecedented intensity the states of their own souls and those of others, especially family members, and to conduct with great reverence such home-centered activities as private and family prayers, meditation, and Bible study. Within such a regimen of spiritual examination, attention to the child was particularly marked. This watchfulness, however, took various different and sometimes competing forms. For those Evangelicals, both inside and outside the Church of England, who subscribed to Calvinistic doctrines of original sin, it was imperative to guide and educate children to give them the best opportunity of redeeming themselves, so they might obtain God's grace.
To modern, and even to many contemporary standards of judgment, the strict codes of supervision and punishment levied by zealots endeavoring to save children from their corrupt natures often ran dangerously close to cruelty. Even though this residue of earlier theological thinking insisted on the fundamental wickedness of children, it nevertheless concurred with the otherwise opposed Romantic code in placing tremendous emphasis on the care of the child, and in seeing the world as a continual source of moral danger. Many other Evangelically minded Christians, however, found themselves turning away from theories of original sin toward ideas more overtly compatible with Romanticism's idealization of children: in this frame of mind, Scripture could, for example, be reinterpreted in line with Wordsworth's ideas about the child, and thus "texts urging us to become as little children were now about innocence, rather than, as in Puritan dogma, about obedience." Children, then, were to be closely observed because they offered adults glimpses of an original heavenly purity. Perhaps not surprisingly, those whose secular or religious beliefs promoted such a glorified view of childhood could on occasion be just as exacting as the most doctrinaire Calvinist on the subject of acceptable child behavior.
These different strains of Victorian Christianity, then, found themselves variously in contention and agreement with Romanticism's view of the child as pure and innocent, but ultimately colluded with its insistence upon the central importance of childhood. While such theoretical positions had obvious implications for the ways in which children were perceived, just as significant were the derived effects of Evangelical Christianity's relocation of the sacred from the supernatural and ecclesiastical, to the personal and familial, realm. In this essentially domestic religion, the ideal Christian home and its occupants became "objects of sentimentalization, bordering on worship." The mid-nineteenth-century crisis of belief that famously struck down many middle-class Evangelicals, causing them to turn away from institutional religion and search elsewhere for salvation, strengthened this sense that the family, and most particularly, the child at its heart, offered an alternative access to grace and purity. On a still deeper level, the story of Adam's ejection from Paradise in Genesis, previously important to the perception of childhood because of its explanation of the source of original sin, increasingly offered itself as a myth of personal development to middle-class Victorian individuals, both religious and otherwise. Evangelical Christianity's drive toward self-examination had led the way to making religious narratives much more personally applicable: now, as John Gillis puts it, whether or not orthodox belief was present, the Garden of Eden "ceased to be a place, and became a stage of life," the time of childhood (7). In a move that has huge significance for this particular project, such retrospective imagining of the early years of life as a paradise of innocence and purity not only placed an absolute line of division between childhood and adulthood, but also declared that same adulthood to be a time of postlapsarian guilt and gloom.
Understanding both why this model was so compelling to middle-class men and why those childhood years were most satisfyingly embodied in the figure of a little girl will be a major task in the chapters ahead. For now, we can notice in broad outline a couple of factors touched upon earlier. Men from comfortable backgrounds in this period were far more likely to have experienced a definitive break between those early years in the feminized nursery and their subsequent careers in the wider world than women of their class, whose lives were generally expected to be bounded by the home. Furthermore, this same gendering of the home, and its concurrent transformation into the locus of the sacred, not only had the effect of creating that domestic, and now much vilified, paragon, the Angel in the House, but also her ideal daughter. On those occasions when paradise was imagined as the primary, lost stage in the journey of life, rather than the sanctified home, then the perfect little girl formed its most apt symbol.
While this project plainly situates itself within the historiography of childhood, it simultaneously has relevance and allegiance to a number of other important scholarly arenas. My analysis owes a huge debt to the pioneering labors of academic feminism over the past twenty years, particularly to its careful explication of nineteenth-century constructions of the feminine, and the concomitant emergence and consolidation of domestic ideology. Furthermore, this study finds a home in the burgeoning world of masculinity studies, a field that has recently grown out of the work of these feminist precursors. Like many of the works in this area, the present investigation is part of the movement to complicate our understanding of the complexities and contradictions that both challenged and supported nineteenth-century gender ideology: while earlier historical and critical studies often reproduced the Victorians' division of the "separate spheres," now "the 'private' is being reformulated to take account of men, in the same way that the scope of the 'public' has been progressively enlarged to take account of women." Although my work has benefited from contemporary examinations of the subtle stratifications and shifting patterns within the English class system, and of the anxious constructions of different styles of masculinity, in the nineteenth century, Men in Wonderland takes a relatively broad swathe of middle-class male life as its area of investigation. The term gentleman is thus included in the book's full title simply to indicate that the principal subjects of this study are of the well-to-do classes.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Men in Wonderland by Catherine Robson Copyright © 2001 by Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission.
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