CHILDHOOD AND CHILDREN'S LITERATURE

The end of the nineteenth century, the period widely known as the fin de siécle, is often painted as a brief, riotous reaction to the repressive social regimes of Victorian Britain, and a decadent falling away from its high moral tone and preoccupation with classical culture. The outrageously extrovert behaviour of Oscar Wilde, the beautiful perversion of Aubrey Beardsley's drawings and erotica, the determination of a public elite to saturate the senses and so escape the ennui of everyday life characterize the popular image of this period. The quintessential fin de siécle character is, of course, Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray. Gray is the original Peter Pan – the boy who won't grow up – and in him it is possible to locate one of the central facets of the fin de siécle Weltanschauung: the adult's ambivalent feelings about childhood. At the end of the last century, childhood was regarded as both naïvely beautiful and brutishly threatening. From where did this ambivalence originate? To understand the conflicted nature of fin de siécle attitudes to children it's necessary to look back to the middle of the century, to the time when those who were parents in the 1890s were themselves children.

It is not true (though often said) that the Victorians invented childhood as we know it, or even that theirs was the first period simultaneously to idolize and resent its children. These antagonistic feelings no doubt go back as far as human society. However, in the course of Queen Victoria's long and full reign (1837–1901) the middle and upper classes evolved a more self-conscious and sustained myth of childhood than any that had gone before.