Victorian Childhood: Self and Society in the Nineteenth Century

Victorian Childhood: Self and Society in the Nineteenth Century is a Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies tutorial taught by Lise Sanders.

Course Description
This course provides an introduction to changing cultural conceptions of childhood in the nineteenth century. We will read novels (Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist and George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss) alongside poetry (William Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience and Elizabeth Barrett Browning's The Cry of the Children) and children's literature by Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, Rudyard Kipling, Frances Hodgson Burnett and J. M. Barrie. These texts will be studied in the context of sociological analyses of children's experience such as Henry Mayhew's London Labor and the London Poor and in light of labor legislation throughout the century. We will also address the construction of childhood and adolescence in popular culture through the study of boys' and girls' magazines, many of which increasingly depicted children as the future of the British empire. This writing-intensive project-based course is designed to appeal to students interested in literature and cultural studies, history, and child studies.

Learning Goals

 * Multi-Cultural
 * Project-based
 * Reading
 * Writing