The Mind of the Child: Child Development in Literature, Science, and Medicine, 1840-1900, by Sally Shuttleworth

Two bodies of material co-exist uneasily in this book. One explores child growth, normalities and abnormalities, and care in nineteenth-century literary texts from the canonical to the now little-known, from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Dickens's Dombey and Son to Sarah Grand's The Heavenly Twins and The Beth Book, from Gosse's Father and Son to Frances Hodgson Burnett's The One I Knew Best and Hannah Lynch's The Autobiography of a Child. (It would have been good to know a little about the principles of selection.) The other is represented by chapters on the burgeoning nineteenth-century literature of child psychiatry and the broader child-study movement of the end of the century. It is the relations posited between these two groups of writing which are uncertain. Often the connection seems to be coincidence rather than cause or correlation. Professor Shuttleworth remarks that ‘It is no coincidence’ that the Journal of Psychological Medicine begins in the same period as ‘the first great Victorian novels of child development’ (p. 40)—but, if not a coincidence, what is the nature of the connection? Elsewhere she writes of ‘a decisive clustering of literary and medical texts’ (p. 58); and later of anxieties about child sexuality in medical literature which ‘find their counterpart’ in writing by Charlotte M. Yonge and J.M. Barrie (pp. 195–6). Such language and formulations hint at a weak organisational and explanatory model. In so far as there is evidence that one set of writers read the other, the traffic seems to have been predominantly one way: contributors to the medical, psychiatric and child-development literature drew heavily on literary texts to develop their analyses—whether James Crichton Browne drawing examples from Anna Jameson and Derwent Coleridge's memoir of his brother Hartley, Robert Brudenell Carter referring to Dombey and Son, James Sully using the autobiographies of George Sand and Pierre Loti, or Leonard Guthrie in 1907, making extensive use not only of George Eliot's Mill on the Floss but also the writings of Charles Lamb, Harriet Martineau, De Quincey and Dickens.

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