of scientific method, rationalism, and new areas of knowledge challenged ideas of personal immortality and drove many to find hopes for a regenerative future in their children. Also, as time passed and the rudiments of modern medicine appeared, people saw greatly increased chances for infant survival; in many cases, that perception appears to have opened the floodgates for wholehearted sentimental feelings for children, who would no longer so often discourage their parents' by dying young.
Meanwhile, of course, print technology developed and literacy was spreading. It was necessary to teach children to read and to give them material suited to the education adults deemed proper for them, but some also thought that giving them things they might want to read for pleasure would develop their literacy skills. Later, in the Victorian era, — 588- came another technology highly significant in the history of the child as subject: the development of the camera, which made the personal fetishizing of the past and widespread preservation of familial images possible. Photography, as Lewis Carroll, like the later billion-dollar camera industrialists, knew so well, went hand in hand with the contemplation of children and childhood; the hugely popular loving, aesthetic contemplation of children in culture seems to be a relatively recent phenomenon-and one in which Carroll has surely had a hand.
In the nineteenth century, boarding schools proliferated, as did various other professional educational practices, and, Aries suggests, these were important in creating a separate sphere for children and a distinct juvenile literature because they increased the distance between the worlds of adult and child and cast doubt upon the suitability of shared reading material. Literature from the eighteenth century on, of course, was a growing enterprise that included a developing market for books aimed at children; and by the time Lewis Carroll started inventing stories for the Liddell girls, commercial as well as heuristic and religious motives were coming to figure more and more in the making of children's fiction. Publishers of children's books, then, though they were mainly interested in getting across theology, moral ideology, and pragmatic lessons that would make people more industrious, had nevertheless printed The Arabian Nights' Entertainments for children (1791), collections of Mother Goose tales or nursery rhymes (1744, 1780, 1810, 1842), fairy tales (1729, 1768, 1849), and, in the mid-nineteenth century, a number of boys' adventure stories relating to school, exploration, colonialism, and travel (e.g., Frederick Marryat's Masterman Ready [1841] and Thomas Hughes's Tom Brown's Schooldays [1856]). Such reading, among other things, inculcated a sense of wonder and a penchant for fantasy, nonsense, pleasure, adventure, and vicarious power. (Fiction for girls, as it slowly developed and differentiated itself in the nineteenth century, tended to stress their domestic and Christian duties and their chances of demonstrating the moral responsibility and moral superiority of their gender, and it allowed much less scope for fantastic adventures.) But before Alice, children's books, whether by Rousseau-influenced, neo-Enlightenment humanists like Thomas Day (The History of Sandford and Merton [1783]) and Maria Edgeworth (Early Lessons [1801]) or by God-fearing Calvinists like Hannah More and Mary Martha Sherwood (The Fairchild Family [1818–1847]), were under the restraining thumb of the moralists. - 589-
Moral controversy swirled about the developments of children's literature and fantasy modes. Historically, fairy tales seem to have been connected with the mythology of superstitions and magical cults-in other words, with outlawed religions. At first, fairy tales were condemned for lacking ethical purpose and religious seriousness, but then more flexible educators and guardians of orthodoxy found they could be expropriated and used to inculcate correct behavior in much the same way as traditional Christian dream visions had been used. By the time Carroll wrote the Alice books, nearly all children's stories pushed religion and ethics, and even fantasy was serving disciplinary ends. (Later in his life, in Sylvie and Bruno and Sylvie and Bruno Continued [1889 and 1893], Carroll- perhaps I should say Dodgson-would use it for the same ends, and spoil his genius.) Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, which he calls a 'fairy-tale,' mock this sort of thing and claim fantasy, miracle, dream techniques, and the child for comedy.
Fantasy as a literary genre was developed in the Victorian era most notably by Carroll, Thomas Hood, George MacDonald, Charles Kingsley, and William Morris. It grew out of the Romantic movement-specifically from such late eighteenth-century historical phenomena as intensified interest in childhood, the collecting and setting down of folk tales and verse, the revival of interest in beast fables, and the burgeoning market for children's stories. It seemed important to some that children's powers of fancy be developed-especially since the Romantics prized imagination-and that people should find ways to stay in touch with the playfulness of childhood. The cult of the exotic, the cultivation of the self's visionary powers, the fascination with irrational states of mind (including dream states), the felt need for new or rejuvenated myths and symbols to meet the breakdown of religious orthodoxy and the crises of faith, all helped to produce fantasy fiction and make it respectable. Victorian fantasy proclaims the continuing need for a renaissance of wonder (Carroll, at the end of Wonderland, calls the waking world 'dull reality'-an astounding assertion if you think about it).
Before the Christian era, the classical male mind-set of the Greeks and Romans-in which children, being immature, were considered less human, less complex, and therefore less interesting than adults-had seemed relatively uncurious about the child as such. Christian dogma would change that indifference, though it would take a long time and -590- involve much historical contention. Robert Pattison has shown how deeply a divided early Christian heritage has colored thoughts about children. On the one hand there was Augustine's expounding of the orthodox doctrine of Original Sin and the damnation of human offspring without Christian salvation, baptism, and intervention into the corrupt, selfish nature of children. On the other side, preparing the way to see the child as a religious symbol, were the scriptural 'massacre of the innocents,' the advent and representation of Christ as a miraculous babe, the words of Jesus, 'Suffer little children… to come unto me for of such is the kingdom of heaven,' and the influential Pelagian heresy arguing for a primary innocence in the child. Pattison says that Augustine, in his Confessions, brought confessional autobiography and Original Sin into the world together, and if this is so, he pioneered the psychological novel: 'Augustine's doctrine laid the foundation for the child as literary image. He had connected childhood [including his own] and sin, made the infant an adult of sorts, and surrounded him with a fallen nature, which existed in that condition because of man's fallen will.' That doctrine, which makes salvation of the child a precarious matter of the utmost religious urgency, became especially influential in the Reformation and helped lead, in the age of growing literacy, to the severely moralistic, often Calvinistic religious tracts, manuals, education literature, and monitory children's stories that proliferated especially in the first half of the nineteenth century and that were popular at least until World War I. More generally it has fostered the influential notion that the child's fate is crucial but the child's moral nature is, by itself, lost, or at least dangerously weak and in need of vigilant adult protection from the world's wickedness and its own innate propensities to do wrong.
In the social and intellectual upheaval of the last half of the eighteenth century, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, one of the most influential theorists of childhood, countered such ideas in Emile (1762), his treatise on proper education, and in his own famous Confessions (1781): A Pelagian, he sees the child as naturally good and ideology about Original Sin as pernicious, but he does support the Augustinian idea of childhood's importance. Education is vital-that is, education which leads the maturing human being to preserve in itself the goodness of the natural child and harmonize the excellence of nature with culture. The natural child, for Rousseau, is conceived as innocent of the contradictions and conflicts that disrupt a harmonious relationship with the -591- world. Jacqueline Rose observes that for him sexuality-as culture had distorted it-and social inequality 'were realities that the child could be used to circumvent' or remedy. His idea, which he expresses both theoretically and autobiographically, is that, as Rose puts it, 'it is sexuality which most totally sabotages the child's correct use of language and its exact [proper, accurate] knowledge of the world.'
Rousseau himself was deeply influenced by John Locke, whose rejection of innate ideas, stress on a blank- slate image of the child, and belief in empirical experience as the determiner of the child's being and the adult's fate have been of great moment in shaping the ways people imagine and educate children. Locke put forth the idea of the child's proper education through direct encounter with the real world in which the problematic nature of language and its imperfections did not figure. According to Rose, for many to this day who follow these philosophers, the child is set up as an uncontaminated, 'pure point of origin in relation to language, sexuality, and the state.' Thus, Carroll's comic focus in the Alice books on the problematics of language for children and adults alike (e.g., puns, the involuntary nature of language, its subjectivity, Humpty Dumpty's assertion that words mean whatever he wants them to, 'the wood of no names') is one of his fiction's most original and important features. Rose notes that 'literature for children first became an independent commercial venture in England in the mid-to late-eighteenth century… when conceptualisation of childhood was dominated by… Locke and Rousseau,' and one could say the same thing about the novel in general, whose advent as the dominant popular genre parallels the advent of the child as a popular subject of representation. For both these philosophers, however, as for the strict
