Until the late twentieth century, literary scholars often assumed that Victorian scientific advances challenged the dominance of religion, theorizing that religious institutions and beliefs decline with modernity. More recently, scholars affiliated with the “religious turn” in Victorian studies have suggested Christian denominations gradually embraced scientific ideas, with new religious movements such as Spiritualism and Theosophy enabling Victorians to preserve elements of Christianity (e.g., belief in an afterlife) in a rapidly changing world. This chapter intervenes in these debates using two very different novels as case studies: Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890, 1891) and Marie Corelli’s The Sorrows of Satan (1895), both of which freely mix Christianity with science: Wilde blends Catholicism, neuroscience, and aestheticism, while Corelli creatively revises scientific theories to align with her heterodox faith. With their occult and pseudoscientific leanings these works ask us to reconsider what counted as religion or science and to redraw the boundaries of faith to encompass unorthodox trends.

Late-Victorian novelists responded variously to experimental physiology during a period of disciplinary upheaval in the mental sciences. In the 1860s, leaders in this field included polymathic philosophers such as Herbert Spencer and George Henry Lewes. By contrast, later researchers tended to be university-trained scientists using specialized techniques. In the 1870s, British neurologist David Ferrier and John Hughlings Jackson used clinical studies and controversial animal experiments to link parts of the brain with specific movements, emotions, and behaviors.

Some novelists reacted positively to these scientific developments. French naturalist Émile Zola embraced both evolutionary theory and experimental physiology, opining that novelists must ‘dissect piece by piece’ their fictional characters. Zola’s British admirers and imitators included George Gissing, George Moore, and Thomas Hardy.

Authors of genre fiction responded more ambivalently. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Grant Allen, and H. G. Wells favored literary forms that mimicked the scientific method. Wells’s scientific romances tested an imaginary hypothesis (say, human invisibility) against a series of controls, while Allen’s and Doyle’s detective fiction borrowed diagnostic techniques from Victorian medicine. Late-Victorian Gothic novels, meanwhile, explored anxieties accompanying scientific ‘progress’. Taken together, these examples suggest how Victorian fictions responded productively, if sometimes critically, to experimental practices.

So far, this book has focused on classic New Thought fiction for and about children written between approximately 1886 and 1930. But novels like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1903), A Little Princess (1905), Anne of Green Gables (1908), The Secret Garden (1911), and Pollyanna (1913) might not be remembered today without the intervention of another medium – film – that kept them consistently in the public eye. While many New Thought novels were made into silent films – take, for instance, Mary Pickford’s renditions of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1917), Pollyanna (1920), and Little Lord Fauntleroy (1921) – interest in the genre peaked in the 1930s, when the Great Depression increased public appetite for New Thought.

In twenty-first-century psychology and self-help literature, the “inner child” refers to an original or true self that serves as a repository of wisdom for its adult counterpart. This chapter traces the modern inner child back to Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy and her protégée Emma Curtis Hopkins, the leading New Thought teacher of the 1880s and 1890s. Hopkins described an idealized “Man Child” within each adult woman who could lead her to spiritual serenity and worldly success. Frances Hodgson Burnett fictionalized different versions of this figure in her short story Sara Crewe (1888) and her blockbuster novel Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886), whose eponymous child hero helps his mother achieve undreamed-of wealth and status. Little Lord Fauntleroy also serves as his mother’s proxy outside of the domestic sphere, allowing her to reach personal goals without appearing inappropriately ambitious. The novel’s enormous popularity may have stemmed from this symbiotic relationship between mother and son. Then as now, the inner child helped women reconcile social pressures to be selfless and giving with career pursuits and self-indulgent behavior. The persistence of the inner child suggests that contemporary feminism still has work to do in enabling women to embrace opportunities without guilt.

Chapter four turns to Canadian author Lucy Maud Montgomery. New Thought offered Montgomery an escape from the rigid Presbyterianism of her rural Prince Edward Island community and helped assuage her chronic depression and insomnia. Ultimately, New Thought was not enough to save the author, who committed suicide in 1942. But New Thought pervades her fiction, particularly Anne of Green Gables (1908), which features an inspired girl child in the New Thought mold.Anne Shirley’s revitalizing influence on her adoptive parents, her healing of a dying baby, and her transformative imagination all signal her conformity to this role. So do her homosocial relationships with female “kindred spirits” like her “bosom friend,” Diana Barry. Close relationships between women were a common feature of New Thought novels, which appealed to lesbian and bisexual readers and women seeking escape from oppressive marriages. The conclusion of this chapter turns to Montgomery’s later novel, the adult-themed comedy The Blue Castle (1926), to show that New Thought was more than a passing fancy for the author. Rather, it was a coping strategy that she returned to throughout her life and explored in various genres, from children’s literature to romances for adult readers.

This introduction provides an overview and brief history of New Thought and Christian Science in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly not only in America but also in Britain and Canada. The introduction also describes how popular literature written for and about children circa 1900 helped spread New Thought ideas while simultaneously critiquing them. As I explain, New Thought proved especially popular with female novelists and readers seeking escape from domestic duties and greater opportunities outside of the domestic sphere. Finally, the introduction includes a chapter breakdown outlining which works and concepts will be discussed later in the book.

Chapter two turns to Henry James’s supernatural classic, The Turn of the Screw (1898), to show the backlash of the literary intelligentsia against New Thought and the inner child. This chapter reads The Turn of the Screw as a critical response to Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy that mocks the book’s saccharine portrayal of innocent children and its New Thought overtones. While siblings Miles and Flora initially resemble Lord Fauntleroy in their youth, beauty, and apparent innocence, their subsequent actions could not be more different. Whereas Burnett’s protagonist heals his grieving mother and depressed grandfather and brings them spiritual peace, Miles and Flora lead their governess to the brink of madness by consorting with evil spirits. James, who wrote so perceptively about the inner life of a child a year earlier in What Maisie Knew (1897), deliberately portrayed Miles and Flora as opaque, unsympathetic, and allied with dark forces. In so doing, he skewered New Thought's relentless idealization of children as conduits to God. He also paved the way for more recent depictions of evil children in horror fiction and in films such as The Bad Seed (1956), The Omen (1976), or We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011).

Chapter three discusses Frances Hodgson Burnett’s classic novel The Secret Garden (1911) and her lesser-known work, The Dawn of a To-morrow (1906), as feminist, Christian Scientist responses to the rest cure. This cure, which was invented by Philadelphia neurologist Silas Weir Mitchell in the 1870s, involved bed rest, isolation, and force feeding. Burnett herself underwent at least three modified rest cures during her lifetime, but lasting relief of her symptoms eluded her. In The Secret Garden, child protagonist Mary Lennox stands in for charismatic leader Mary Baker Eddy, who died shortly after the serial version of The Secret Garden began its run in The American Magazine in November 1910. Mary Lennox heals her bedridden cousin Colin Craven by convincing him to abandon a regimen of enforced bed rest and social isolation. Colin’s father, Archibald Craven, is likewise healed of his depression when he sees the changes Mary has wrought in his son. By showing a young girl curing hysterical males, Burnett inverted the gender politics of the rest cure and contradicted its key principles.

Chapter five examines the work of American writer, lecturer, and feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman. While not a children’s author per se, Gilman foregrounded motherhood and childcare in her polemical works and her fiction. She also included unexpected borrowings from New Thought in her novels and life writing. For instance, Gilman’s utopian novel Herland (1915), which appeared serially in her self-published Forerunner Magazine (1909–1916), resonates with Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (first edition 1875). Gilman's all-female utopia, in which parthenogenesis has replaced sexual reproduction, resembles Eddy's imagined future in which “there will be no more marrying nor giving in marriage” and women and men will increasingly resemble one another in body and mind. The Herlanders’ worship of a loving “Mother Spirit,” their reverence for maternity, and their practice of communal child-rearing likewise mirror Eddy's androgynous “Father-Mother God, all-harmonious” and her emphasis on maternal feeling. Herland thus fulfills Eddy's millennial predictions as well as Gilman's feminist ideals.