1 Charles Lamb, review of Wordsworth’s ‘The Excursion’ in: Quarterly Review (October 1814), republished in: John Wain (ed.), Contemporary Reviews of Romantic Poetry (London: George G. Harrap & Co. Ltd., 1953), pp. 68-70, p. 69. 2 With sociology in particular the case is different: it has done much work in analysing childhood as a contingent, constructed identity. See for just some classic examples for instance: Martin Barker, Comics, Power, Ideology, and the Critics (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989); Chris Jenks (ed.), The Sociology of Childhood, Essential Readings (London: Batsford Academic and Educational Ltd., 1982); Chris Jenks, Childhood (London: Routledge, 1996); Allison James and Alan Prout (eds), Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood, Contemporary Issues in the Sociological Study of Childhood (London: The Falmer Press, 1990, repr. 1997); Jane Pilcher and Stephen Wagg (eds), Thatcher’s Children? Politics, Childhood and Society in the 1980s and 1990s (London: The Falmer Press, 1996); Allison James, Alan Prout, and Chris Jenks, Theorizing Childhood (London: The Falmer Press, 1997); Rex and Wendy Stainton Rogers, Stories of Childhood: Shifting Agendas of Child Concern (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992). 3 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies (London: Routledge, 1994), p. xii. 4 Sandra Kemp and Judith Squires, ‘Introduction’ to: Sandra Kemp and Judith Squires (Eds), Feminisms (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 3-12, p. 12. 5 There are children’s literature critics who do claim an engagement with, and adoption of, ‘adult’ literary theories and approaches, but see my chapter ‘Childhood and Textuality: Culture, History, Literature’ in Karín Lesnik-Oberstein (ed.), Children in Culture: Approaches to Childhood (London: Macmillan, and New York: St Martin’s Press, 1998), pp. 1-28, for an extensive analysis of the problems with these claims. 6 The issue of how ‘children’s literature’ and ‘adult’ literature might be defined and differentiated is itself part of ongoing debates. 7 See for a more extensive discussion of this issue my article ‘Oliver Twist: The Narrator’s Tale’, Textual Practice, 15:1 (2001), pp. 87-100. 8 All references are to the following edition: George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, edited by Carol T. Christ (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1994). 9 John W. Cross, George Eliot’s Life (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1885). 10 Kathryn Hughes, George Eliot: The Last Victorian (London: Fourth Estate, 1998). 11 Leslie Stephen, George Eliot (London: Macmillan & Co., Limited, 1902), p. 5. 12 Hughes, pp. 319-20. 13 Frederick Karl, George Eliot: A Biography (London: HarperCollins, 1995), p. ix. Karl is referring to Ruby Redinger’s George Eliot: The Emergent Self (New York: Knopf, 1975). 14 John Rignall, ‘Portrayal of Childhood’, in John Rignall (ed.), The Oxford Reader’s Companion to George Eliot (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 52. 15 Letter from George Henry Lewes to John Blackwood, March 5, 1860, quoted in George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, edited by Carol T. Christ (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1994), p. 429. 16 Karl, p. 330. 17 For some of the few examples of critics who do not link the childhood episodes in The Mill on the Floss to Eliot’s ‘life’ see: R. H. Lee, ‘The Unity of The Mill on the Floss’ (1964) in R. P. Draper (ed.), George Eliot: The Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner, Casebook series (London: Macmillan, 1977), pp. 140-59; Sally Shuttleworth, George Eliot and Nineteenth Century Science: The Make-Believe of a Beginning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). My arguments in this chapter have, however, to do with different issues than those mentioned by Lee and Shuttleworth. 18 Barbara Hardy, Particularities: Readings in George Eliot (London: Peter Owen, 1982), p. 58. 19 R. P. Draper, ‘The Fictional Perspective: The Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner’, in R. P. Draper (ed.), George Eliot: The Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner, pp. 234-51, p. 234, p. 236. 20 F. R. Leavis, ‘The Early Phase’ (from F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition (London, Chatto & Windus, 1948), pp. 18-24), included in George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, edited by Carol T. Christ, pp. 483-88, p. 483. 21 Hughes, p. 18. 22 Hughes, pp. 301-2. 23 From a review of The Mill on the Floss in Spectator, April 7, 1860, included in: George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, edited by Carol T. Christ, pp. 441-4, p. 441. 24 Gordon S. Haight, George Eliot’s Originals and Contemporaries: Essays in Victorian Literary History and Biography, ed. Hugh Witemeyer (London: Macmillan, 1992), p. 14. 25 Karl, p. 20. 26 For one of the few other discussions I have been able to find on textual sources for a childhood section of The Mill on the Floss and subsequent implications, see: Lila Harper, ‘An Astonishing Change in Metaphor: Tom’s Education and the Shrew-Mouse’, George Eliot-George Henry Lewes Studies, 38-39 (September 2000), 76-9. 27 All references are to the following edition: Catherine Sinclair, Holiday House: A Book for the Young (London: Ward Lock & Bowden, Limited, not dated). 28 There are more studies of the influence of ‘adult’ literature on children’s literature. See for just one example: Ulf Boëthius, ‘“Us is near bein’ wild things ourselves”: Procreation and Sexuality in The Secret Garden’, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, 22: 4 (Winter 1997-98), 188-95. 29 F. J. Harvey Darton, Children’s Books in England: Five Centuries of Social Life, third edition revised by Brian Alderson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (1932) 1982), p. 220. 30 George Eliot, Selected Critical Writings, edited by Rosemary Ashton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 318. 31 Harvey Darton, p. 221. 32 See for a more extensive argument of this claim my article ‘The Psychopathology of Everyday Children’s Literature Criticism’, Cultural Critique, 45 (Spring 2000), 222-42. 33 Daniel Vitaglione, George Eliot and George Sand (New York: Peter Lang, 1993), p. 7. Vitaglione’s reference is to: Patricia Thomson, George Sand and the Victorians (London: Macmillan, 1977). 34 With thanks to my former colleague Phillipa Hardman for suggesting this idea to me, as she related the idea of inserting a text into a memory of an own childhood to claims of not being able to remember whether a memory derives from a photograph or from ‘real life’. 35 A. S. Byatt, introduction to A. S. Byatt (ed.), The Mill on the Floss (London: Penguin, 1979), p. 31. The quote from Lewes is from George Henry Lewes, Life and Works of Goethe, book III, ch. 5 (London: Everyman, no date given, orig. publ. 1855), p. 154. 36 The most important text to have analysed childhood as a historically shifting and changing category is: Philippe Ariés, Centuries of Childhood (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973, orig. publ. 1959). 37 Karl, p. 19. 38 Jean Perrot, ‘The World of Children’s Literature: France’, in Peter Hunt (ed.), The International Companion Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature, (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 717-25, p. 720. 39 Margaret Kinnell, ‘Early Texts Used by Children’, in Peter Hunt (ed.), The International Companion Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature, pp. 141-51, p. 149. 40 See for more extensive analyses of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and John Locke not as the ‘discoverers’ but the ‘inventors’ of ‘childhood’: Jacqueline Rose, The Case of Peter Pan or: The Impossibility of Children’s Literature (London: Macmillan, 1984, repr, 1995); Karín Lesnik-Oberstein, Children’s Literature: Criticism and the Fictional Child (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994, repr. 2000), especially chapter 3 ‘On Knowing the Child: Stories of Origin and the Education-Amusement Divide’, pp. 69-99. 41 Margaret Homans, ‘Eliot, Wordsworth, and the Scenes of the Sisters’ Instruction’, included in: The Mill on the Floss, edited by Carol T. Christ, pp. 584-5. 42 Gillian Avery, ‘The Family Story’, in Peter Hunt (ed.), The International Companion Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature, pp. 338-47, p. 339. 43 My formulations here refer to Jean-François Lyotard’s critique of the real in, for instance, The Postmodern Explained to Children. Correspondence 1982-1985 (London: Turnaround, 1992, orig. publ. 1986). 44 For a more extensive analysis of constructions of ideas of ‘nature’ with regard to childhood in both criticism and fiction, see Stephen Thomson, ‘Substitute Communities, Authentic Voices: the Organic Writing of the Child’, in Karín Lesnik-Oberstein (ed.), Children in Culture: Approaches to Childhood, pp. 248-73. 45 F. R. Leavis, ‘The Early Phase’, pp. 482-4.
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