The Urban Child in Western Literature

by

Kristina West

• LAST MODIFIED: 24 October 2024
• DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199791231-0293

Introduction

From Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s 1762 Emile to Laura Ingalls Wilder’s 1932 onward Little House on the Prairie series, the child in Western literature has frequently been placed by its authors within a rural setting, with such placing naturalized as the child’s only and therefore inevitable location, particularly within 19th-century Romantic literature and during the early days of children’s literature in both the United Kingdom and the United States. However, as both the industrial revolution and the “golden age” of children’s literature advanced, the child more frequently found itself transported by its authors to a city environment, with such a shift—one frequently produced in terms of that very movement from one location to the other, thereby returning the narrative to one of the naturalized rural child—offering opportunities for exploring childhood in new and different ways. However, this shift also prompted constructions of the urban child as in some way deviant: displaced, precocious, inducted prematurely into the adult world, frequently criminalized or abandoned, and headed for a premature death in poverty and loneliness. As the twentieth century progressed from the displacement and challenges of the war years to a more regularized urban childhood in literature and other media both for children and adults, additional issues of race, gender, belonging, and identity arose; issues continuing into contemporary literature for and about children. This study will therefore examine textual constructions of the urban child, primarily in UK and US Anglophone literature due to the marked shift in its depiction with the advent of industrialization, although also in historical and anthropological studies where relevant, to consider how the urban landscape is utilized in productions of childhood in different time periods and for different purposes.

Overviews: Theories of Childhood

These sources contain a theoretical exploration of the child in literature, most containing but not limited to considerations of the urban child, and which engage with constructions of the child both within and beyond literature; for example, in historical sources and through sociological or psychological exploration. They rarely focus on individual texts but explore a wider range of sources. Zelizer 1985 looks at the changing role of children in society in terms of their value from an adult perspective, while Chamberlain 1900 considers the child’s role in relation to the adult. Ariès 1960 explores the evolution of Western understanding of childhood, while Ward 1990 considers the child in the city from an anthropological perspective. Abrams 1953 offers a critical background on Romanticism, thus situating the urban child within this context. While each of these texts takes a different focus from that of the urban child in fiction, each has a crucial role to play in cultural constructions of the urban child both inside and outside of literature.

• Abrams, M. H. The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953.

  Abrams’s seminal work on Romanticism has little to say directly on the literary figure of the Romantic child; however, its in-depth consideration of critical theory in relation to Romanticism provides an important backdrop to any study of the child within Romantic literature and its development from this point.

• Ariès, Philippe. Centuries of Childhood. London: Pimlico, 1960.

  Ariès’s much-cited work on childhood traces its origins in terms of a social and cultural presence in relation to developments in Western family life. As Western economies shifted from primarily rural to progressively urban, Ariès examines how the role of the child shifted concurrently.

• Chamberlain, Alexander Francis. The Child: A Study in the Evolution of Man. London: Walter Scott, 1900.

  DOI: 10.1037/13296-000

  Chamberlain’s anthropological study of the child encompasses a range of explorations from the evolution of the child as symbol (pp.10–29) to language (pp. 107–172) and femininity (pp. 397–440). It is of particular interest to this study in its consideration of how the child comes to garner meaning in adult discourse; the child and the savage (pp. 287–354) and the child as criminal (pp. 355–396), each of which categories also speaks to the evolution of the child in literature for and about children.

• Ward, Colin. The Child in the City. London: Bedford Square Press, 1990.

  Ward’s exploration of the relationship between children and the built environment is not focused on literary depictions, but takes a sociological approach that provides a valuable resource for any scholar of children and the urban in literature. Covers the move from country to city; experiences of belonging and estrangement; capitalism; and education, among many others.

• Zelizer, Viviana A. Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985.

  Traces the shift in modern Western and particularly US conceptions of childhood from late Romanticism to mid-twentieth century which is particularly relevant to any consideration of the urban child in terms of capitalism. Explores, for example, how the urban child has been valued in terms of its ability to contribute to the family economy through to its sentimental, but often still monetary value, in premature death.