“Six impossible things before breakfast”: becoming an adult in five Golden Age children’s novels

In this study, I consider five eminent children’s novels of the Golden Age period, 1860-1920, The Water-Babies by Rev. Charles Kingsley, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll, The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett, and Peter and Wendy by J. M. Barrie, to illustrate that the central concern of all of these novels is how a child grows up and into what adulthood it grows. I argue that, by considering child selfhood within the larger discourses of modernity, we can uncover what we understand as essential to our humanity and how we imagine that humanity throughout both childhood and adulthood. This dissertation offers new language to Marah Gubar’s kinship model of childhood, standing upon Charles Taylor’s postsecular theory to offer the concepts of the porous child and the buffered adult as a means to uncover how Golden Age children’s literature understands the relationship between child characters and the adulthood on their horizon.

The history of children’s literature scholarship mirrors the history of our cultural conceptions of childhood, which has generally prioritized the anxieties, desires, and hopes of adults over children. However, scholarship interested in understanding children’s literature and the children it employs in its stories needs to develop new intellectual footholds that acknowledge the child’s personhood. To works towards this end, I offer language from postsecular theory to enrich the kinship model of scholarship that I argue ensures that the child and the adult remain in relationship with each other, on a spectrum of development, discernment, and discourse.