Inventing childhood

Writing about Little Women in his book Twenty-Five Books That Shaped America, Thomas C. Foster comments about "a thirty-five year period that invented childhood." During this period in literary history, Lewis Carroll published Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), Louisa May Alcott wrote Little Women (1868), Mark Twain produced The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and L. Frank Baum gave us The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900).

Each of these books is now regarded as a classic in children's literature, although not all of them were intended for children when they were written. Twain thought he was writing Tom Sawyer for adult readers, for example. It was supposed to be a nostalgic reminder of the days of youth.

Foster's point, however, is that these books gave readers, both adults and children, a different way of thinking about childhood. Earlier Charles Dickens had given readers greater sympathy for children in such novels as Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby, showing how they were so often put to work at a young age or neglected in orphanages or mistreated in schools. These later novels, building on Dickens, elevated "childhood to a state of grace, touched by safety, adventure, comfort, love, play, and even magic, qualities about which a great many children of that era dared not even dream," Foster writes.

Today it seems difficult for most of us to conceive of a time when children were widely regarded as just miniature adults, capable of making their own way in the world. Once children routinely worked in factories and brothels, were sent to sea or enlisted to beat drums on battlefields. In some places such things may be still be happening, but these novels helped change society in those parts of the world where they have been read.