Dickens, Charles. Nicholas Nickleby. 1839. Ed. Michael Slater. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978. Prin... more Dickens, Charles. Nicholas Nickleby. 1839. Ed. Michael Slater. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978. Print. Martineau, Harriet. Deerbrook. 1839. Ed. Valerie Sanders. London: Penguin, 2004.Print. Sewell, Elizabeth Missing. Ursula: A Tale of Country Life. London: Longmans, 1886. Print. Yonge, Charlotte M. The Daisy Chain. 1856. London: Virago, 1988. Print. ———. Heartsease. 1854. London: Macmillan, 1901.Print. ———. The Pillars of the House. 1873. London: Macmillan, 1901.Print. ———. The Young Stepmother. 1861. London: Macmillan, 1889. Print.
This chapter considers Philip Pullman’s neo-Victorian Sally Lockhart narratives (1985-90, 1994) a... more This chapter considers Philip Pullman’s neo-Victorian Sally Lockhart narratives (1985-90, 1994) alongside a Victorian sensation novel, Wilkie Collins’ No Name (1862). Juxtaposing these oppositional texts from different moments reveals what they share. Both examine standard notions of family by focusing on a young female orphan, who learns that she can achieve and maintain domestic security only if she also has financial security and vice versa. Both fictions depict domestic ties as commodities, and the law as incapable of keeping pace with a domesticity represented as contingent and fluctuating in value and values. Both protagonists respond to their unusual family circumstances by becoming resourceful entrepreneurs who direct their energies towards the acquisition of money in a way that illustrates money’s connection to family. Both texts ultimately erase their protagonist’s earning power, replacing this with a happy marriage, recalling Thiel’s analysis that ‘as late Victorians we h...
abstract:This interview focuses on the question of what adoption studies can bring to childhood s... more abstract:This interview focuses on the question of what adoption studies can bring to childhood studies. Nelson points out that adoption studies, which concern not only adopted children and relinquishing mothers but also adult adoptees and birth mothers late in life, can help to inform investigations of temporality, and perhaps particularly queer temporality. Invoking novels from Frankenstein to Bleak House to Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight saga, this conversation notes that both adoption scholars and scholars of family and age studies must recognize that an adult is not only an adult but also a former child, that adulthood itself is not unitary but a matter of multiple stages and shifting relationships, and that the literature of adoption often overturns “conventional” paradigms of family in multiple ways.
Topologies of the Classical World in Children's Fiction, 2019
As we conclude this examination of texts that use particular topologies of the past in their rede... more As we conclude this examination of texts that use particular topologies of the past in their redeployment of the classical world, one of the more pressing questions might be why the combination of the classical world and this short list of spatial metaphors constitutes such an attractive matrix for the working out of concerns about citizenship, agency, suffering, and the place of the individual within the family. While the power and perdurability of classical mythology is clearly part of the allure of neoclassical settings and characters, it does not by itself completely explain the utility of these frameworks to our various authors’ projects. After all, a number of the authors with whom our work has engaged—including Rick Riordan, Tony Abbott, Alan Garner, Caroline Dale Snedeker, and N. M. Browne, among others—have shown similar interest in other kinds of mythological or historical settings, in some cases emphasizing the position of the classical as merely one segment of a vast int...
Papers: Explorations into Children's Literature, 2003
In his interesting study 'Making the Australian Male: Middle-Class Masculinity 1870-1920'... more In his interesting study 'Making the Australian Male: Middle-Class Masculinity 1870-1920', Martin Crotty argues that turn-of-the-century Australians firmly rejected the androgynous, domesticated gender role that both children's fiction and the public schools had offered Australian boys in the 1870s... Work such as Crotty's should help to inspire any number of reexaminations of the masculine gender role in texts that sought to acculturate young readers before, during, and after the Great War.
International Research in Children's Literature, 2022
This article discusses the Picturebooks for Peace series, a collaboration between China, South Ko... more This article discusses the Picturebooks for Peace series, a collaboration between China, South Korea, and Japan focusing primarily upon World War II. In examining this series, we ask what these works are testifying to, how they represent trauma, and how picturebooks from countries with distinct political and cultural outlooks have been conceived and received in the different milieus. Our major contention is that it is through the manipulation of time and space that the creators of these works seek to persuade readers of the validity of their message. We look first at the picturebooks from China and South Korea, which share an ideological position inasmuch as they use the trauma caused by the Japanese invasion and its aftermath (including the Korean War) to criticise war's inhumanity. The second part of the article deals with the four Japanese picturebooks, which reflect on the reasons for or essence of war. The article then discusses the narrative and aesthetic devices these boo...
Topologies of the Classical World in Children's Fiction, 2019
This chapter examines E. Nesbit’s The Story of the Amulet (1906), C. S. Lewis’s The Silver Chair ... more This chapter examines E. Nesbit’s The Story of the Amulet (1906), C. S. Lewis’s The Silver Chair (1953), Roger Lancelyn Green’s Mystery at Mycenae (1957), Caroline Lawrence’s Roman Mysteries series (2001–9), K. M. Peyton’s Roman Pony trilogy (2007–9), Katherine Marsh’s The Night Tourist (2007) and The Twilight Prisoner (2009), and Tony Abbott’s Underworlds series (2011–12). All these texts involve journeys that can be plotted upon maps geographical and/or chronological, with the consequence that the major cognitive metaphor is HISTORY IS A MAP. Here family is not the site of trauma but rather a zone for the exercise of agency on the part of the young protagonist who must effectively visit an underworld to retrieve or make a family relationship and to come to terms with death. These books suggest that while the past is associated with death, it is also a haven from death.
Dickens, Charles. Nicholas Nickleby. 1839. Ed. Michael Slater. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978. Prin... more Dickens, Charles. Nicholas Nickleby. 1839. Ed. Michael Slater. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978. Print. Martineau, Harriet. Deerbrook. 1839. Ed. Valerie Sanders. London: Penguin, 2004.Print. Sewell, Elizabeth Missing. Ursula: A Tale of Country Life. London: Longmans, 1886. Print. Yonge, Charlotte M. The Daisy Chain. 1856. London: Virago, 1988. Print. ———. Heartsease. 1854. London: Macmillan, 1901.Print. ———. The Pillars of the House. 1873. London: Macmillan, 1901.Print. ———. The Young Stepmother. 1861. London: Macmillan, 1889. Print.
This chapter considers Philip Pullman’s neo-Victorian Sally Lockhart narratives (1985-90, 1994) a... more This chapter considers Philip Pullman’s neo-Victorian Sally Lockhart narratives (1985-90, 1994) alongside a Victorian sensation novel, Wilkie Collins’ No Name (1862). Juxtaposing these oppositional texts from different moments reveals what they share. Both examine standard notions of family by focusing on a young female orphan, who learns that she can achieve and maintain domestic security only if she also has financial security and vice versa. Both fictions depict domestic ties as commodities, and the law as incapable of keeping pace with a domesticity represented as contingent and fluctuating in value and values. Both protagonists respond to their unusual family circumstances by becoming resourceful entrepreneurs who direct their energies towards the acquisition of money in a way that illustrates money’s connection to family. Both texts ultimately erase their protagonist’s earning power, replacing this with a happy marriage, recalling Thiel’s analysis that ‘as late Victorians we h...
abstract:This interview focuses on the question of what adoption studies can bring to childhood s... more abstract:This interview focuses on the question of what adoption studies can bring to childhood studies. Nelson points out that adoption studies, which concern not only adopted children and relinquishing mothers but also adult adoptees and birth mothers late in life, can help to inform investigations of temporality, and perhaps particularly queer temporality. Invoking novels from Frankenstein to Bleak House to Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight saga, this conversation notes that both adoption scholars and scholars of family and age studies must recognize that an adult is not only an adult but also a former child, that adulthood itself is not unitary but a matter of multiple stages and shifting relationships, and that the literature of adoption often overturns “conventional” paradigms of family in multiple ways.
Topologies of the Classical World in Children's Fiction, 2019
As we conclude this examination of texts that use particular topologies of the past in their rede... more As we conclude this examination of texts that use particular topologies of the past in their redeployment of the classical world, one of the more pressing questions might be why the combination of the classical world and this short list of spatial metaphors constitutes such an attractive matrix for the working out of concerns about citizenship, agency, suffering, and the place of the individual within the family. While the power and perdurability of classical mythology is clearly part of the allure of neoclassical settings and characters, it does not by itself completely explain the utility of these frameworks to our various authors’ projects. After all, a number of the authors with whom our work has engaged—including Rick Riordan, Tony Abbott, Alan Garner, Caroline Dale Snedeker, and N. M. Browne, among others—have shown similar interest in other kinds of mythological or historical settings, in some cases emphasizing the position of the classical as merely one segment of a vast int...
Papers: Explorations into Children's Literature, 2003
In his interesting study 'Making the Australian Male: Middle-Class Masculinity 1870-1920'... more In his interesting study 'Making the Australian Male: Middle-Class Masculinity 1870-1920', Martin Crotty argues that turn-of-the-century Australians firmly rejected the androgynous, domesticated gender role that both children's fiction and the public schools had offered Australian boys in the 1870s... Work such as Crotty's should help to inspire any number of reexaminations of the masculine gender role in texts that sought to acculturate young readers before, during, and after the Great War.
International Research in Children's Literature, 2022
This article discusses the Picturebooks for Peace series, a collaboration between China, South Ko... more This article discusses the Picturebooks for Peace series, a collaboration between China, South Korea, and Japan focusing primarily upon World War II. In examining this series, we ask what these works are testifying to, how they represent trauma, and how picturebooks from countries with distinct political and cultural outlooks have been conceived and received in the different milieus. Our major contention is that it is through the manipulation of time and space that the creators of these works seek to persuade readers of the validity of their message. We look first at the picturebooks from China and South Korea, which share an ideological position inasmuch as they use the trauma caused by the Japanese invasion and its aftermath (including the Korean War) to criticise war's inhumanity. The second part of the article deals with the four Japanese picturebooks, which reflect on the reasons for or essence of war. The article then discusses the narrative and aesthetic devices these boo...
Topologies of the Classical World in Children's Fiction, 2019
This chapter examines E. Nesbit’s The Story of the Amulet (1906), C. S. Lewis’s The Silver Chair ... more This chapter examines E. Nesbit’s The Story of the Amulet (1906), C. S. Lewis’s The Silver Chair (1953), Roger Lancelyn Green’s Mystery at Mycenae (1957), Caroline Lawrence’s Roman Mysteries series (2001–9), K. M. Peyton’s Roman Pony trilogy (2007–9), Katherine Marsh’s The Night Tourist (2007) and The Twilight Prisoner (2009), and Tony Abbott’s Underworlds series (2011–12). All these texts involve journeys that can be plotted upon maps geographical and/or chronological, with the consequence that the major cognitive metaphor is HISTORY IS A MAP. Here family is not the site of trauma but rather a zone for the exercise of agency on the part of the young protagonist who must effectively visit an underworld to retrieve or make a family relationship and to come to terms with death. These books suggest that while the past is associated with death, it is also a haven from death.
Beginning with Rudyard Kipling and Edith Nesbit and concluding with best-selling series still ong... more Beginning with Rudyard Kipling and Edith Nesbit and concluding with best-selling series still ongoing at the time of writing, this volume examines works of twentieth- and twenty-first-century children's literature that incorporate character types, settings, and narratives derived from the Greco-Roman past. Drawing on a cognitive poetics approach to reception studies, it argues that authors typically employ a limited and powerful set of spatial metaphors - palimpsest, map, and fractal - to organize the classical past for preteen and adolescent readers. Palimpsest texts see the past as a collection of strata in which each new era forms a layer superimposed upon a foundation laid earlier; map texts use the metaphor of the mappable journey to represent a protagonist's process of maturing while gaining knowledge of the self and/or the world; fractal texts, in which small parts of the narrative are thematically identical to the whole, present the past in a way that implies that history is infinitely repeatable. While a given text may embrace multiple metaphors in presenting the past, associations between dominant metaphors, genre, and outlook emerge from the case studies examined in each chapter, revealing remarkable thematic continuities in how the past is represented and how agency is attributed to protagonists: each model, it is suggested, uses the classical past to urge and thus perhaps to develop a particular approach to life.
The first critical edition of the beloved classics that established Edith Nesbit as a major child... more The first critical edition of the beloved classics that established Edith Nesbit as a major children's writer provides extensive guidance to help today's reader navigate the enchanting world of the Bastable family. Nelson situates Nesbit's groundbreaking stories in the context of British popular culture at the dawn of the twentieth century.
Especially evident in Victorian-era writings is a rhetorical tendency to liken adults to children... more Especially evident in Victorian-era writings is a rhetorical tendency to liken adults to children and children to adults. Claudia Nelson examines this literary phenomenon and explores the ways in which writers discussed the child-adult relationship during this period.
Though far from ubiquitous, the terms "child-woman," "child-man," and "old-fashioned child" appear often enough in Victorian writings to prompt critical questions about the motivations and meanings of such generational border crossings. Nelson carefully considers the use of these terms and connects invocations of age inversion to developments in post-Darwinian scientific thinking and attitudes about gender roles, social class, sexuality, power, and economic mobility.
She brilliantly analyzes canonical works of Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, William Makepeace Thackeray, Bram Stoker, and Robert Louis Stevenson alongside lesser-known writings to demonstrate the diversity of literary age inversion and its profound influence on Victorian culture.
By considering the full context of Victorian age inversion, Precocious Children and Childish Adults illuminates the complicated pattern of anxiety and desire that creates such ambiguity in the writings of the time. Scholars of Victorian literature and culture, as well as readers interested in children’s literature, childhood studies, and gender studies, will welcome this excellent work from a major figure in the field.
The eleven contributors to The Girl’s Own explore British and American Victorian representations ... more The eleven contributors to The Girl’s Own explore British and American Victorian representations of the adolescent girl by drawing on such contemporary sources as conduct books, housekeeping manuals, periodicals, biographies, photographs, paintings, and educational treatises. The institutions, practices, and literatures discussed reveal the ways in which the Girl expressed her independence, as well as the ways in which she was presented and controlled. As the contributors note, nineteenth-century visions of girlhood were extremely ambiguous. The adolescent girl was a fascinating and troubling figure to Victorian commentators, especially in debates surrounding female sexuality and behavior.
The Girl’s Own combines literary and cultural history in its discussion of both British and American texts and practices. Among the topics addressed are the nineteenth-century attempt to link morality and diet; the making of heroines in biographies for girls; Lewis Carroll’s and John Millais’s iconographies of girlhood in, respectively, their photographs and paintings; genre fiction for and by girls; and the effort to reincorporate teenage unwed mothers into the domestic life of Victorian America.
The Victorians were passionate about family. While Queen Victoria's supporters argued that her in... more The Victorians were passionate about family. While Queen Victoria's supporters argued that her intense commitment to her private life made her the more fit to mother her people, her critics charged that it distracted her from her public responsibilities. Here, Nelson focuses particularly on the conflicting and powerful images of family life that Victorians produced in their fiction and nonfiction—that is, on how the Victorians themselves conceived of family, which continues both to influence and to help explain visions of family today.
Drawing upon a wide variety of 19th-century fiction and nonfiction, Nelson examines the English Victorian family both as it was imagined and as it was experienced. For many Victorians, family was exalted to the status of secular religion, endowed with the power of fighting the contamination of unchecked commercialism or sexuality and holding out the promise of reforming humankind. Although in practice this ideal might have proven unattainable, the many detailed 19th-century descriptions of the outlook and behavior appropriate to fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, and other family members illustrate the extent of the pressure felt by members of this society to try to live up to the expectations of their culture. Defining family to include the extended family, the foster or adoptive family, and the stepfamily, Nelson considers different roles within the Victorian household in order to gauge the ambivalence and the social anxieties surrounding them—many of which continue to influence our notions of family today.
When Massachusetts passed America’s first comprehensive adoption law in 1851, the usual motive fo... more When Massachusetts passed America’s first comprehensive adoption law in 1851, the usual motive for taking in an unrelated child was presumed to be the need for cheap labor. But by 1929—the first year that every state had an adoption law—the adoptee’s main function was seen as emotional. Little Strangers examines the representations of adoption and foster care produced over the intervening years. Claudia Nelson argues that adoption texts reflect changing attitudes toward many important social issues, including immigration and poverty, heredity and environment, individuality and citizenship, gender, and the family. She examines orphan fiction for children, magazine stories and articles, legal writings, social work conference proceedings, and discussions of heredity and child psychology. Nelson’s ambitious scope provides for an analysis of the extent to which specialist and mainstream adoption discourse overlapped, as well as the ways in which adoption and foster care had captivated the public imagination.
Maternal Instincts brings together seven new essays exploring conflicting visions of motherhood a... more Maternal Instincts brings together seven new essays exploring conflicting visions of motherhood and sexuality in a period during which both terms were undergoing radical change. Representations of both concepts mutated to accommodate different cultural contexts and individual ideologies. Drawing upon sources including literature, film, medical handbooks, popular science, and legal records, the articles here collected construct a vision of motherhood as alternately idealized, discredited, and fragmented by virtue of its connection with sexualities licit and illicit.
"Sex education" extends beyond the classroom and beyond childhood. As this collection of seven ne... more "Sex education" extends beyond the classroom and beyond childhood. As this collection of seven new essays shows, many kinds of texts have tried to shape their audiences' sexual understanding, from 19th-century erotica to 20th-century sermons on abstinence, marriage manuals to feminine-hygiene pamphlets, Hollywood comedies about sexual coming-of-age to picture books validating homosexuality. Together, the essays in Sexual Pedagogies seek to illustrate the many responses that Anglophone culture has had to changes in sexual mores. Focusing on three nations, this anthology examines the interplay of radical and conservative ideologies of sex, noting the influence of market forces, cultural beliefs about childhood and gender, and in some cases geopolitics. The competing agendas and assumptions of sex educators past and present have much to tell us about the society in which we live.
Bringing together children's literature scholars from China and the United States, this collectio... more Bringing together children's literature scholars from China and the United States, this collection provides an introduction to the scope and goals of a field characterized by active but also distinctive scholarship in two countries with very different rhetorical traditions. The volume's five sections highlight the differences between and overlapping concerns of Chinese and American scholars, as they examine children's literature with respect to cultural metaphors and motifs, historical movements, authorship, didacticism, important themes, and the current status of and future directions for literature and criticism. Wide-ranging and admirably ambitious in its encouragement of communication between scholars from two major nations, Representing Children in Chinese and U.S. Children's Literature serves as a model for examining how and why children's literature, more than many literary forms, circulates internationally.
The family was central to Victorian ideology, and yet the long nineteenth century saw considerabl... more The family was central to Victorian ideology, and yet the long nineteenth century saw considerable change in the family unit. The onset of industrialization and the expansion of the British Empire meant that there were demands and opportunities away from the home. This led to changes in traditional ways of life and the ways in which people lived together as 'families'. The volumes in this collection focus on various aspects of family life. The experience of childhood is addressed not just from an adult perspective, but also using sources written by children and adolescents. The roles of the husband and father, frequently portrayed as emotionally distant disciplinarian or as a drunken abuser, are explored, as are the roles of wife and mother. Documents are selected to focus on exceptions, as well as the norm. Finally, the extended family and the substitute family are looked at. These include not only kin-based family groups, but also servants, lodgers, foster care, adoption and variations of social welfare.
The Victorians were passionate about family. While Queen Victoria's supporters argued that her in... more The Victorians were passionate about family. While Queen Victoria's supporters argued that her intense commitment to her private life made her the more fit to mother her people, her critics charged that it distracted her from her public responsibilities. Here, Nelson focuses particularly on the conflicting and powerful images of family life that Victorians produced in their fiction and nonfiction--that is, on how the Victorians themselves conceived of family, which continues both to influence and to help explain visions of family today.
Drawing upon a wide variety of 19th-century fiction and nonfiction, Nelson examines the English Victorian family both as it was imagined and as it was experienced. For many Victorians, family was exalted to the status of secular religion, endowed with the power of fighting the contamination of unchecked commercialism or sexuality and holding out the promise of reforming humankind. Although in practice this ideal might have proven unattainable, the many detailed 19th-century descriptions of the outlook and behavior appropriate to fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, and other family members illustrate the extent of the pressure felt by members of this society to try to live up to the expectations of their culture. Defining family to include the extended family, the foster or adoptive family, and the stepfamily, Nelson considers different roles within the Victorian household in order to gauge the ambivalence and the social anxieties surrounding them--many of which continue to influence our notions of family today.
Invisible Men focuses on the tremendous growth of periodical literature from 1850 to 1910 to illu... more Invisible Men focuses on the tremendous growth of periodical literature from 1850 to 1910 to illustrate how Victorian and Edwardian thought and culture problematized fatherhood within the family. Drawing on political, scientific, domestic, and religious periodicals, Claudia Nelson shows how positive portrayals of fatherhood virtually disappeared as motherhood claimed an exalted position with imagined ties to patriotism, social reform, and religious influence.
The study begins with the pre-Victorian role of the father in the middle-class home —as one who led the family in prayer, administered discipline, and determined the children’s education, marriage, and career. In subsequent decades, fatherhood was increasingly scrutinized while a new definition of motherhood and femininity emerged. The solution to the newly perceived dilemma of fatherhood appeared rooted in traditional feminine values—nurturance, selflessness, and sensitivity. The critique presented in Invisible Men extends our contemporary debate over men’s proper role within the family, providing a historical context for the various images of fatherhood as we practice and dispute them today.
Feminist criticism of nineteenth-century literature has traditionally repudiated the "angel in th... more Feminist criticism of nineteenth-century literature has traditionally repudiated the "angel in the house"--a domestic figure who was kept in her place, isolated from the world of power and patriarchy and any influence over it except through her children. Claudia Nelson, in looking at children's fiction of 1857-1917, finds that the figure of the angel appeared as an ideal not just in literature intended for young women, but also in books for boys. Her book is an exploration of the changing ideals of masculinity disseminated in popular writing for children over a sixty-year period and of the implications of her discoveries for feminist scholarship, much of which she challenges.
Nelson argues that during the early Victorian period in children's literature, as in popular adult fiction, the idealized figure of the androgynous angelic boy recurs, enshrined as the avatar of a "manliness" that has little to do with what we today would recognize as stereotypical masculinity. Such works were saturated not only by religion but also by the religion of femininity.
In this book, we are introduced to many boys' novels that are rarely read today, and we are taught to look with new eyes at old favorites like Kipling, Stevenson, Grahame, Barrie, and Nesbit. Nelson covers such genres as the school novel, the historical tale, the adventure, and the fantasy, along the way demonstrating a tremendous breadth of reading of feminist and social history theory, as well as of children's literature. Her writing is jargon-free and her insights into the cultural importance of Victorian children's fiction highly illuminating. Among the first serious studies of this subject, it will be of interest to literary and feminist scholars of the Victorian and early modern periods.
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Papers by Claudia Nelson
Though far from ubiquitous, the terms "child-woman," "child-man," and "old-fashioned child" appear often enough in Victorian writings to prompt critical questions about the motivations and meanings of such generational border crossings. Nelson carefully considers the use of these terms and connects invocations of age inversion to developments in post-Darwinian scientific thinking and attitudes about gender roles, social class, sexuality, power, and economic mobility.
She brilliantly analyzes canonical works of Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, William Makepeace Thackeray, Bram Stoker, and Robert Louis Stevenson alongside lesser-known writings to demonstrate the diversity of literary age inversion and its profound influence on Victorian culture.
By considering the full context of Victorian age inversion, Precocious Children and Childish Adults illuminates the complicated pattern of anxiety and desire that creates such ambiguity in the writings of the time. Scholars of Victorian literature and culture, as well as readers interested in children’s literature, childhood studies, and gender studies, will welcome this excellent work from a major figure in the field.
The Girl’s Own combines literary and cultural history in its discussion of both British and American texts and practices. Among the topics addressed are the nineteenth-century attempt to link morality and diet; the making of heroines in biographies for girls; Lewis Carroll’s and John Millais’s iconographies of girlhood in, respectively, their photographs and paintings; genre fiction for and by girls; and the effort to reincorporate teenage unwed mothers into the domestic life of Victorian America.
Drawing upon a wide variety of 19th-century fiction and nonfiction, Nelson examines the English Victorian family both as it was imagined and as it was experienced. For many Victorians, family was exalted to the status of secular religion, endowed with the power of fighting the contamination of unchecked commercialism or sexuality and holding out the promise of reforming humankind. Although in practice this ideal might have proven unattainable, the many detailed 19th-century descriptions of the outlook and behavior appropriate to fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, and other family members illustrate the extent of the pressure felt by members of this society to try to live up to the expectations of their culture. Defining family to include the extended family, the foster or adoptive family, and the stepfamily, Nelson considers different roles within the Victorian household in order to gauge the ambivalence and the social anxieties surrounding them—many of which continue to influence our notions of family today.
Drawing upon a wide variety of 19th-century fiction and nonfiction, Nelson examines the English Victorian family both as it was imagined and as it was experienced. For many Victorians, family was exalted to the status of secular religion, endowed with the power of fighting the contamination of unchecked commercialism or sexuality and holding out the promise of reforming humankind. Although in practice this ideal might have proven unattainable, the many detailed 19th-century descriptions of the outlook and behavior appropriate to fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, and other family members illustrate the extent of the pressure felt by members of this society to try to live up to the expectations of their culture. Defining family to include the extended family, the foster or adoptive family, and the stepfamily, Nelson considers different roles within the Victorian household in order to gauge the ambivalence and the social anxieties surrounding them--many of which continue to influence our notions of family today.
The study begins with the pre-Victorian role of the father in the middle-class home —as one who led the family in prayer, administered discipline, and determined the children’s education, marriage, and career. In subsequent decades, fatherhood was increasingly scrutinized while a new definition of motherhood and femininity emerged. The solution to the newly perceived dilemma of fatherhood appeared rooted in traditional feminine values—nurturance, selflessness, and sensitivity. The critique presented in Invisible Men extends our contemporary debate over men’s proper role within the family, providing a historical context for the various images of fatherhood as we practice and dispute them today.
Nelson argues that during the early Victorian period in children's literature, as in popular adult fiction, the idealized figure of the androgynous angelic boy recurs, enshrined as the avatar of a "manliness" that has little to do with what we today would recognize as stereotypical masculinity. Such works were saturated not only by religion but also by the religion of femininity.
In this book, we are introduced to many boys' novels that are rarely read today, and we are taught to look with new eyes at old favorites like Kipling, Stevenson, Grahame, Barrie, and Nesbit. Nelson covers such genres as the school novel, the historical tale, the adventure, and the fantasy, along the way demonstrating a tremendous breadth of reading of feminist and social history theory, as well as of children's literature. Her writing is jargon-free and her insights into the cultural importance of Victorian children's fiction highly illuminating. Among the first serious studies of this subject, it will be of interest to literary and feminist scholars of the Victorian and early modern periods.