Innocent or knowing? Shelley King on the portrayal of children in Victorian writing
When was the last time you thought of reading as "absorbing and voluptuous" or felt "rapt clean out of yourself" by the process? When was the last time "a story repeated itself in a thousand coloured pictures to (your) eye"? The phrases come from Robert Louis Stevenson's 1882 essay A Gossip on Romance and describe the sensations he believed accounted for the fact that "we read so closely, and loved our books so dearly, in the bright, troubled period of boyhood" or rather, childhood, to use the less gender-specific diction of our own time. Perhaps this attitude to fiction explains why the Victorian golden age of children's literature yielded a variety of classics that remain required reading for the literate child - or adult, for that matter. Treasure Island, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Peter Pan - all have continued to attract new generations of young readers in the many decades since their initial publication.