Mrs Ewing, Mrs Molesworth, Frances Hodgson Burnett and E. Nesbit were the most popular children's authors of their day. Their books have come to symbolize to succeeding generations a convention, entrenched as firmly as folklore, in which childhood is as halcyon as society is stable. Yet they led extraordinary, unconventional lives. It seems that who the Victorians actually were, how they wished to be seen, and how they have come down to us, are very different things. An analysis of these four women and their works uncovers a rich variety of paradoxes. Their books never echo their own irregular lifestyles, but revere a family idyll, though they show happiness in Utopia is elusive. Their fictional families seethe with lonely, anxious individuals longing to fulfil themselves, aware that their first duty is owed not to self but to the family. The resulting struggle echoes the tug-of-war between duty and progress, the twin-headed Hydra of late-Victorian thinking. The texts continually test boundaries and examine norms. The strong Victorian hierarchical family looks increasingly like a fortress in a siege of unprecedented and rapid social change, defending searing doubts about religion, gender, class and work.

It is impossible fully to understand the ethos and impetus of an age without an understanding of the hopes, fears and expectations for its children. Mrs Ewing wrote her first work, Melchior's Dream and Other Stories, in 1862; E. Nesbit's last full- length children's book, Wet Magic, was published in 1913. This book will attempt to draw back the curtain a little on the beliefs and values of the Victorians and Edwardians during this period through the lives and literature of these four major contributors to the image of childhood.

THE CHILD IN THE TEXT

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries celebrated childhood as never before. Early nineteenth-century writers such as Wordsworth, Coleridge and Blake saw childhood as a state of simplicity, an exemplar in a world of adult blight. Out of this grew, as Dickens's works show, a consciousness of the frailty of childhood and of adult responsibility for the child in society.