Christian believers, moral, social, and practical education, however defined, is the proper end of literature-not pleasure or any intrinsic interest. But they opened up childhood as a state of innocence, purity, and blankness, an enticing space for the projection of faith, hope, love, and desire. One key comparison to make between the child as a concept developed in the last two centuries and fiction is to see them both as sites where people could project themselves, could identify, could read what they wanted, could have hope of vicarious life for their own desires.
Adapting Rousseau's mode of introspection, his feeling for the goodness and the intensity of early life, and his sense of childhood's determining power, William Wordsworth gave nineteenth-century Britain -592- its romantic image of the child: the child as 'seer blessed,' 'father of the man,' the 'best philosopher,' 'trailing clouds of glory,' a 'darling of the pigmy size,' the seed from which the poet's mind grows, and a little intimater of immortality. His visionary contemporary Blake also made children central, showing how the child could be featured as both religious symbol-image of innocence and holiness-and social symbol of a fallen, exploitive world (victim of industrial cruelty, poverty, disease, neglect). Following Augustine, Rousseau, and Wordsworth, the child becomes in fiction a figure leading to self-identity and self-knowledge, and following Blake, the child becomes a sacrificial social victim or an innocent little lamb of God, a natural stand-in for the mystical, holy Christ. 'The purpose of the romantic image of the child,' according to Peter Coveney, was 'above all to establish a relation between childhood and adult consciousness,' but it was also to serve, in a world increasingly skeptical of supernaturalism, as an image of faith. The Romantics, Coveney asserts, 'were interested in growth and continuity, in tracing the organic development of the human consciousness, and also, in lowering psychic barriers between adult and child.' In writing of the child, their interests were adult. Nevertheless, in finding certain superiorities in a child's being over an adult's, they opened the way to the cult of the child. And the fear of losing touch with childhood, so pronounced in Wordsworth, is one of the chief generating motives not only for Carroll's work but for much of the distinguished fiction of the last two centuries. The novel needed the subjectivity of the child in order to become a powerful mode of psychological exploration and suggestiveness.
It was Charles Dickens, more than any other writer, who made children crucial subjects of faith, erotics, and moral concern, and nothing he did as a novelist was more influential than choosing to represent children. To know and tell the stories of life, it was necessary to understand and imagine what happened to children-to Oliver Twist, Smike, Little Nell, Tiny Tim, Paul and Florence Dombey,
When my thoughts go back, now, to that slow agony of my youth, I wonder how much of the histories I invented for such people hangs like a mist of fancy over well-remembered facts! When I tread the old ground, I do not wonder that I seem to see and pity, going on before me, an innocent romantic boy, making his imaginative world out of such strange experiences and sordid things! (David Copperfield)
I had it always in my fancy to surround the lonely figure of the child [Little Nell] with grotesque and wild… companions, and to gather about her innocent face and pure intentions, associates… strange and uncongenial. (The Old Curiosity Shop)
Of this mass impulse to regression that Dickens tapped, expressed, and helped to form, Carroll made his fiction.
Dickens regards the child as both a center of innocence (Nell, Oliver, Florence) and as the crux of developing personal and cultural history (David, Pip). For the light it brings to the concept and figure of the child as moral savior, the revealing custom of feminizing and infantilizing the essence of virtue, and to Alice, The Old Curiosity Shop is especially relevant. People devoured the novel and its pathetic child-heroine Nell not for its literary merit or for simple diversion-no character in Dickens has been more severely criticized or raucously mocked-but for the sake of faith: the girl-child is presented as something good to believe in, a narrated icon. The power of Little Nell is the power of religious feeling. As I have shown in Critical Reconstructions (1993), she represents quite literally an assumption of the traditional religious power of the Virgin Mary and holy Christian sacrifice into the female child. The aura, effects, and influence of the girl-child as moral guide and redeemer show up not only in the popular sentiment of the age but in the work of such intellectual sophisticates as George Eliot with her little golden-haired Eppie in Silas Marner (1861), John Ruskin in his quasi-devotional writings about feminine purity and the sanctity of girlhood, Henry James in What Maisie Knew, and, naturally, Lewis Carroll. The child had traditionally been seen as the proper object for religious and educational instruction. Now, in The Old Curiosity Shop, she becomes popularly the subject, embodiment, and teacher of worthy and sacred values.
That 'she,' of course, matters: it is almost always a girl, not a boy, who stands for pure goodness (the sacrificial-and feminized-Paul -594- Paul is the exception). Why? The boy in Dickens usually represents the struggling self; the girl is often the morally and spiritually perfect other, the ideal projection. The still-prevalent sexist Manicheism about children (see, for example, bad-boy Bart, good-girl Lisa in the animated hit TV show 'The Simpsons'), famously summed up in the nursery rhymes 'snips and snails and puppy dogs' tails; that's what little boys are made of,' and 'sugar and spice and everything nice; that's what little girls are made of,' feeds The Old Curiosity Shop and Lewis Carroll too (for example, note, in Wonderland, chapter 6, the quick change from boy baby to pig and the lines, 'Speak roughly to your little boy, / And beat him when he sneezes: / He only does it to annoy, / Because he knows it teases'). The rise of the novel, children's fiction, and the number of juvenile characters in literature did not create separate gender spheres, nor gender-specific social functions for males and females, but literature was a primary means of reflecting, transmitting, defining, and redefining important social images of gender. A boy in the time of the novel as dominant literary mode was supposed to grow up, find his manhood, become somebody, follow a vocation, make a living, achieve status, accomplish something, and, all in all, see and live life as a worldly process and profession of becoming, rather than just being. A girl was supposed to find love, which meant that she had to be, or at least seem, lovable and loving. A middle-or upper-class girl's fate, according to cultural ideology, would likely depend on being «attractive» and learning to please, serve, and ameliorate-to preserve and regenerate domestic harmonies and uphold spiritual and moral values. For the richer classes, the girl- child could be encouraged to behave modestly and nicely, dressed up and made pretty-aestheticized, idealized, and fetishized as a repository of civilized value. She was appreciated not for what she would become, but for the way she might appear to be: a breathing treasure, a pearl of great price, a lovely looking glass that would give people back pretty reflections in which they could find evidence of their noblest desires and their best selves. The expansion of wealth and of the middle classes meant that more and more families could aspire to have their own little Velazquez princesses.
In her cozy setting at the beginning of Looking-Glass, Alice typically represents the Victorian and modern wish to see the time of childhood as a bastion against the dangers and troubles of the grown-up world-a paradise at the beginning instead of the end of life. The Victorian girl-child could be posed and imagined as living proof that in a -595- hard and changing world it was possible to maintain and nurture sweetness and natural purity. She made an ideal raison d'être for life's struggle and also symbolized an escape from it. Childhood became a kind of wildlife refuge for the fancy and wonder that might seem impractical in adult life. It is true that the privileged Victorians tended to make ornaments of their little girls (and often their little boys too), but to see what that means, we must understand that «ornament» had the radiant force behind it that the «ornament» of stained glass would have had at Chartres: visible evidence for faith.
Like Dickens, the great female novelists of mid-nineteenth-century England-Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and George Eliot-also render the subjectivity of the child, using it to explore the inseparable questions of gender and self-identity. They adopted and also rejected gendered stereotypes of children. Jane Eyre represents in Helen Burns (closely modeled on Charlotte's older sister, Maria, cruelly mistreated at school and dead at eleven) the same sort of martyrdom of an idealized, sacrificial girl-child as Dickens shows in Nell and Florence Dombey. Brontë, however, effectively dismisses Helen as a model for living girls to emulate, makes Jane the hero and
