Abstract
This article is concerned with Edith Nesbit’s literary representation of national regeneration through a very early stage of life, childhood, in The Story of the Amulet (1906). For the purpose of scrutinizing how children’s literature imagines regeneration in Edwardian England, I discuss the cult of nostalgia and childhood in Edwardian texts and take a closer look at how Nesbit’s Amulet, the first children’s text to use time travel, highlights the ways in which children create a nonlinear temporality that connects past, present, and future. The novel uses childhood as a counterbalance to the adult’s world because its child time travelers reinvent the history of the British Empire and look in on the future in such a way as to question the ideal of linear progress, which has long governed England. I ultimately argue that Nesbit’s child characters, as autonomous subjects of their time travel, establish their own perspective on the history of the British Empire, which differs from the older generation’s.
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Notes
The Edwardian era covers the short reign of King Edward VII (1901–1910) but it is commonly understood as continuing until 1914 right before the First World War.
Since Charles Darwin’s findings about natural selection came out, Victorian England constantly discussed collective degeneration.
This social reform was carried out partly as a response to the anxiety over the decrease in the birth rate, which posed a national efficiency question to English society. The average number of children that English women who married in the 1860s gave birth to was more than six, but 50 years later, it dropped to fewer than three. See Michael Anderson’s (1990) “The Social Implications of Demographic Change.”
See Jacqueline Banerjee’s (2007) “Ideas of Childhood in Victorian Children’s Fiction: The Child as Sinful.”
The Fabian Society was founded for the purpose of establishing democratic socialism—evolutionary rather than revolutionary—in Britain.
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Somi Ahn received her PhD in English from Texas A&M University. Her areas of interest include British Literature in Transition and Theories of Gender. Her dissertation is titled Age, Degeneration, and Regeneration in Fin-de-Siècle British Fiction. She published “The Metropolis and Female Citizenship in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Original Stories from Real Life” in Women’s Writing.
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Ahn, S. National Regeneration Through Childhood in Edith Nesbit’s The Story of the Amulet. Child Lit Educ 51, 348–360 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-019-09392-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-019-09392-7