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Article ID: CBB001213305

Darwin and 1860s Children's Literature: Belief, Myth or Detritus (2012)

Journal of Literature and Science
Volume: 5, no. 2
Issue: 2
Pages: 5-21
Publication date: 2012
Language: English

Publication Date: 2012
Edition Details: Part of a special section, “Literature, Science, and the Natural World in the Long Nineteenth Century”

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Darwinism Children and science Juvenile literature Science and literature 19th century Great Britain Darwin, Charles Robert

Everyone found themselves living in a Darwinian world in which old assumptions had ceased to be assumptions, could be at best beliefs, or myths, or, at worst, detritus of the past. (Gillian Beer, Darwin's Plots 6) In the immediate aftermath of the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species (1859), three significant children's literature texts were published: Margaret Gatty's Parables from Nature (third series; 1861-64), Charles Kingsley's The Water-Babies (1863) and Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865). The impact of Darwin and evolution on these three texts has been noted and examined, but critical readings tend to neglect one key trope that links these three texts: they are children's literature, written and marketed with the child reader in mind. Yet because books for children are generally bought and read by adults before children access them, children's literature inevitably has a dual audience of both children and adults. The texts considered here, which are ostensibly for children, are in fact more about children, and function to educate both the child and adult reader about what childhood and children are in the wake of Darwinian challenges to popular understanding of nature, the child, and the role of science-based literature. That fiction should reflect and react to contemporary controversies and changes in the construction of the natural world is not surprising, but these three texts do far more than simply register the impact of Darwinian ideas on Victorian society, or seek to explain the correct response to the new ideas to child readers. Parables from Nature, The Water-Babies and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, published in quick succession so close to the Origin, represent three divergent responses to the Darwin-inspired controversy which was circulating through both scientific circles and the general public. These texts reflect, reinterpret, respond to and help to shape the new ideas of nature and the child, and so exemplify the way that old constructions of nature and the child became, in Beer's words, beliefs, myths or detritus in the post-Darwinian world

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Article McKechnie, Claire; Alder, Emily (2012) Introduction: Literature, Science, and the Natural World in the Long Nineteenth Century. Journal of Literature and Science (pp. 1-4). unapi

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