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“This book is the story of five writers who could not grow up, and who transformed their longing for childhood into a literary revolution” (p. 3). Jackie Wüllschlager's intelligent and well-written study is a sociocultural and psychological account of the rise of that striking literary phenomenon of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras known as the Golden Age of children's literature. Until the 1865 publication of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, children's literature in England consisted mainly of morality tales, lurid “penny dreadfuls,” and nursery rhymes. The next 50 years would witness a pouring forth of children's books destined to become classics—rich in fantasy, appealing to adults and children alike, and respected by literary critics. It marked the beginning of children's literature as a genre in its own right. Not one of the five authors Wüllschlager places at the center of this phenomenon identified himself primarily as a children's writer. Yet all are remembered for the children's classics they produced, while their other works have sunk into obscurity. It is the mesh between a changing social milieu that became ready for such a literature, and the particular psychological factors and creative abilities in the writers who produced it, that is Wüllschlager's main focus.
Until the 19th century, childhood was seen as a way station to adult status and responsibility, not as a valued phase of life. For the Victorians, however, childhood became highly privileged and romanticized. The eroding of conventional religious values (to be replaced by a new, secular morality), the rise of the middle classes and the nuclear family, and repressive Victorian attitudes toward sexuality all contributed to a view of childhood as a time of bliss, innocence, and goodness—Eden before the fall. At the