How the child lost its tail: Evolutionary theory, Victorian pedagogy and the development of children's literature, 1860--1920 (Charles Kingsley, Rudyard Kipling)

This dissertation argues that Victorian anxieties about human evolution shaped an unlikely genre: children's literature. The extremely popular and influential theory that the development of the individual repeated the evolution of the species, "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny," turned the child into a vestige of mankind's primitive ancestry, an animal just beginning a climb up the evolutionary ladder. Around this animal child, I contend, the "golden age" of children's literature (1860--1920) was forged as an experimental pedagogy for becoming human. Literary critics generally claim that this "golden age" reveled in Romantic fancies of eternal childhood. In response, I show that the newly reinvented genre explored a developmental narrative just as central to Victorian culture as the social progress represented by the Bildungsroman. This project offers a new way to read the "golden age" of children's literature that complicates how we understand nineteenth-century conceptions of development. It also reveals a fantastic encounter between Victorian literature and science that has been invisible in critical scholarship. Children's literature. I argue, adopted the theory of recapitulation as a narrative pattern and a pedagogical goal. Charles Kingsley's The Water-Babies and Lewis Carroll's Alice books exposed the tumult of human development left wholly to Darwinian nature and sought to cure the child of a bestiality figured as either original sin or paralyzing purposelessness. Part of a later generation more comfortable with Darwinism, Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Books, Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan of the Apes and Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden located within evolutionary development a perfect stage, either purely savage or partly cultivated, that retained the richness of phylogenic and ontogenic youth. Though widely divergent in their uses of recapitulation, the texts studied here each advanced an implicit theory that human evolution and child development relied on imagination, and thus they found a pivotal place for literature within the scientific narrative of ascent. In looking to a genre too often ignored in scholarship, I uncover an ongoing literary and pedagogical conversation about what it meant to become human in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.