Victorian Children Quotes

Question 1

Who coined the term the “discovery of children”?

Answer 1

Philippe Ariès

Question 2

What was the paradigm shift regarding the way 18th century people viewed children?

Answer 2

Children no longer seen as ‘miniature adults’, became aware of differing social and psychological needs of infants.

Question 3

James R. Kincaid on the ‘invention’ of the child

Answer 3

‘“the child” was invented in the late eighteenth century to occupy an empty psychic and social space.’

Question 4

James R. Kincaid on adults projecting through/onto children

Answer 4

‘Childhood can be made a wonderfully hollow category, able to be filled up with anyone’s overflowing emotions, not least overflowing passion.’

Question 5

Sally Shuttleworth on the ‘invention’ of the child

Answer 5

‘between 1840 and 1900 … the inner workings of the child mind became for the first time an explicit object of study’.

Question 6

Sally Shuttleworth on the historical continuity of Victorian perceptions of children

Answer 6

‘Our current concerns about child sexuality, or nervous breakdowns in the face of educational pressures, are prefigured in this era.’

Question 7

Sally Shuttleworth on the range of constructions of children

Answer 7

‘There was no unanimity, no single Victorian construction of the child mind.’

Question 8

Take a breath.

Answer 8

Breath taken.

Question 9

Jean-Jacques Rousseau on the erroneous understandings of children predating his era

Answer 9

‘They are always looking for the man in the child, without considering what he is before he becomes a man.’

Question 10

William Wordsworth on the effects of industrialisation on children in The Prelude, Book V

Answer 10

‘the monster birth / engendered by these too industrious times’

‘no child, / But a dwarf man’.

Question 11

William Wordsworth’s influential epigram on children in “My Heart Leaps Up”.

Answer 11

‘The Child is father of the Man’.

Question 12

Sally Shuttleworth on the class divisions concerning the treatment of children

Answer 12

‘Forced to work from an early age, the working classes were not deemed to inhabit the same sphere of childhood as the middle classes.’

Question 13

Sally Shuttleworth on the demonstration of adult anxiety in imagining child sexuality in Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898)

Answer 13

Novel suggests ‘how far adult psychological stability might depend on imaginative investment in a realm of childhood purity’.

Question 14

The governess’s derisive comments directed at Flora after presuming her guilty in The Turn of the Screw (1898)

Answer 14

‘hard … common and almost ugly,’ her speech ‘might have been that of a vulgarly pert little girl in the street.’

Question 15

The governess’s changed view on Miles in The Turn of the Screw (1898)

Answer 15

It seemed ‘as if he had had, as it were, no history … there was in this beautiful little boy something extraordinarily sensitive,’ which ‘struck me as beginning anew each day.’

Question 16

Sally Shuttleworth on the didactic purpose of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898)

Answer 16

‘James’s tale functions as a challenge to all those who seek to cast their own projections onto the figure of the child’

Question 17

Martha Sherwood’s didacticism in History of the Fairchild Family (1818-1847)

Answer 17

‘All children are by nature evil, and … pious and prudent persons must check their naughty passions in any way they have in their power.’

For her this includes:
- a father taking his children to view a rotting corpse on a gibbet
- a child burnt to death when she disobeys her parents

Question 18

What are the names of the children in The Turn of the Screw (1898)?

Answer 18

Flora and Miles

Question 19

Quote from Ch.1 of Oliver Twist that allows us sympathy toward him (and other poor children)

Answer 19

‘Oliver cried lustily. If he could have known that he was an orphan, left to the tender mercies of churchwardens and overseers, perhaps he would have cried the louder.’

Question 20

James Kincaid on the adult sexualisation of child purity

Answer 20

‘This purity, this harmlessness is presented as a complete vacancy … Purity, it turns out, provides just the opening a sexualizing tendency requires.’

Question 21

Which Dickensian children are placed to evoke the reader’s sympathies?

Answer 21

Jo, the Crossing Sweeper in ‘Bleak House’
Oliver Twist

Question 22

How does Jo die in Bleak House?

Answer 22

Saying the lord’s prayer - dies before finishing it from pneumonia aided by Allan Woodcourt

Question 23

What was the “Law of Recapitulation”?

Answer 23

The belief that children repeat stages of the human race’s development as they age

Question 25

Dicken’s description of the world to which homeless children were subjected in ‘Oliver Twist’

Answer 25

‘The cold, wet, shelter’s midnight streets of London; the foul and frowsy dens, where vice is closely packed’

Question 26

In which Dickens novel does Little Nell die?

Answer 26

The Old Curiosity Shop (1840)

Question 27

Passage from Barrett Browning’s “The Cry of the Children”

Answer 27

‘And well may the children weep before you!’

‘They know the grief of man, without his wisdom; / They sink in man’s despair, without its calm; / Are slaves, without the liberty in Christdom’

Question 28

What kind of political impact did Kingsley’s ‘The Water-Babies’ have?

Answer 28

Chimney Sweepers’ Regulation Act went through within the year it was published (despite substantial delays before)