Distress about children growing up too quickly; apprehensions about the pressures associated with competitive exams; fears about sexual precocity, depression, and child suicide: these are likely to strike contemporary readers as comparatively recent concerns. But as Sally Shuttleworth reminds us in her commanding, formidably researched study of the rise of cultural interest in the mind of the child, such worries have beset parents (in Britain, at least) for nearly two centuries. The Victorians bequeathed to us not only their “family values” but also their parental anxieties.
Such moments of recognition occur repeatedly in The Mind of the Child, a comprehensive study of various investigations in the cognitive, emotional, and moral development of children conducted by both scientists and humanists from the 1840s to the end of the century. Like many historians of childhood, Shuttleworth credits John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau as laying the foundation for nineteenth-century child studies, but she is far less interested in the influence of originary figures than in the different paths taken by psychologists, physicians, behavioral scientists, journalists, biographers, and novelists in pursuing their subject. One of her most revealing discoveries is that, despite the array of disciplinary perspectives brought to bear, the field of evidence was communally shared. Child psychiatry gathered its findings as freely from biography and fiction as from clinical cases: not only the instance of Hartley Coleridge's arrested development but also the behavior of child characters in Dombey and Son (1848), The Mill on the Floss (1860), and Jane Eyre (1847) were frequently invoked as authoritative proof of scientific claims. And novelists—predominantly George Meredith, Henry James, Sarah Grand, and Thomas Hardy—often looked to social and evolutionary psychology in representing the mental content and emotional life of their child protagonists. Yet the results of these diverse researchers were anything but uniform. Even the psychologists and psychiatrists could not agree. While the former by and large tended to see the child as a Romantic “naïve innocent, living in a world of wonder and mythological fancy” (4), the latter viewed the same child behaviors with suspicion, especially as the century wore on. Prominent psychiatric writers such as James Crichton Browne and Henry Maudsley—fretting about inbreeding, atavism, and degeneracy—judged the child's mind to be not simply immature and irrational but “an animalistic product of a savage past” and sometimes even insane (4). If psychologists looked to the child with evolutionary hope, psychiatrists—spotting pathology everywhere—tended to despair.
Successfully charting the trajectory of child study through so many intersecting and intertwining disciplinary narratives requires unusual precision of thought and prose, as well as alertness to differences in epistemology and discursive logics. Shuttleworth deftly guides her reader through this crowded terrain of competing stories, in part by creating in the endnotes an overflow space for worthwhile digressions and additional examples (her notes and bibliography occupy more than 25 percent of the volume). Contextually, this ratio of argument to apparatus works surprisingly well, as does the careful arrangement of eighteen chapters of varying lengths and generic styles. Interspersed among historical accounts of key figures in the nineteenth-century development of child psychiatry and psychology are a score of close readings of fictional and real children (some familiar, others not) whose minds are disastrously opaque to their parents: along with her perhaps overly thorough analysis of Meredith's The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859), Shuttleworth provides compelling discussions of James's What Maisie Knew (1897) and Edmund Gosse's Father and Son (1907), to single out only two. She offers fine textual analyses of nonfiction works (revealing “the influence of the literary” on “the organizational structures” of such “scientific” texts as James Sully's Studies of Childhood [1895], for example [291]) and chapters on aspects of child behavior that fascinated scientists and humanists in equal measure (the chapter titled “Passion” is exemplary in this regard). Although she occasionally makes a topical reference that begs for an endnote so as to remain comprehensible to readers a decade or more hence, she has a sharp eye for the telling historical anecdote: in drawing our attention to the Linley Sambourne illustration of Richard Owen and T. H. Huxley examining, in Charles Kingsley's The Water-Babies (1863), a titular specimen, Shuttleworth incisively demonstrates the subtlety with which Victorian art and literature often went about critiquing scientific hubris. Remarkable, too, is her talent for summary—prominently displayed not only in her masterful conclusion but also in the final paragraphs of each of her many chapters.
Perhaps the most singular and significant contribution of this cross-disciplinary study is its demonstrating how materially interdependent were the various nineteenth-century investigations into the child mind—so enmeshed, indeed, that any single disciplinary perspective is exposed as offering only a partial, obstructed view of its subject. “Literary texts,” Shuttleworth reminds us, “helped frame the questions and categories” of child psychology and child psychiatry at the very moment when these “scientific” fields were first “emerging” (362). Well before Freud, that is, literature provided the deep structure for scientific inquiry into the child mind. That this is so should not only make us mindful of the epistemologically adulterated nature of scientific truth claims but also encourage us to resist the debilitating, counterproductive “two cultures” mentality that has dominated public discourse for more than half a century.
