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Vanessa Smith's Toy Stories: Analyzing the Child in Nineteenth-Century Literature presents a comparative analysis of twentieth-century psychoanalytic practice with children and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century imaginaries of childhood. Smith conceptualizes her term ‘toy stories’, as
applied to scenes and subplots […] in which children display aggression, destructiveness, or an urge to make amends in their play that seems out of kilter with conventional nineteenth-century versions of childhood, anticipating instead the kind of fraught object relating world that would eventually be disclosed by twentieth-century play therapy. (p. 137)
Through her analyses of children's toy-work, Smith unsettles our (assumed) perception of post-Romantic childhood innocence, insisting upon anger, envy and reparation as primal and primary to the child. Smith's attentive focus on the toy as a form of symbolic practice is an important intervention into the critical field of nineteenth-century literature. More widely, Toy Stories could be situated in relation to psychoanalytic criticism focusing upon the troubled production of childhood in literature, exemplified by Jacqueline Rose's The Case of Peter Pan; or, the Impossibility of Children's Fiction (1993).
Toy Stories’ focus on Klein and Anna Freud is itself implied as a reparative act, with Smith arguing that their insights have been elided by the critical turn to Donald Winnicott (p. 9). Smith places Klein and Freud within a literary genealogy, tracing the origins of their ‘controversies’ (p. 7) to tensions already at work in nineteenth-century representations of children and their ‘toy work’. However, Toy Stories is not a history of ideas: Smith does not seek to chart the precise cultural or socio-political history which would bring us from nineteenth-century literature to Klein and Freud; rather, the conflict between Klein and Freud appears as symptomatic, perhaps endemic, to mis/understandings of the post-Romantic child. Smith suggest