The first book-length look at childhood in Edwardian fiction, this book challenges assumptions that the Edwardian period was simply a continuation of the Victorian or the start of the Modern. Exploring both classics and popular fiction, the authors provide a a compelling picture of the Edwardian fictional cult of childhood.

Childhood in Edwardian Fiction is a collection of original critical essays that explore the Edwardian cult of childhood as expressed in fiction between 1901 and 1914

Contents Notes on Contributors Worlds Enough and Time: The Cult of Childhood in Edwardian Fiction; A.E.Gavin  and A.F.Humphries PART I: THE CHILD LOST Pagan Papers: History, Mysticism, and Edwardian Childhood; P.March-Russell Cult or Cull?: Peter Pan and Childhood in the Edwardian Age; K.L.McGavock Intangible Children: Longing, Loss, and the Edwardian Dream Child in J. M. Barrie's The Little White Bird and Rudyard Kipling's 'They'; A.E.Gavin PART II: THE CHILD AT PLAY IN HOME AND GARDEN The Edwardian Child in the Garden: Childhood in the Fiction of Frances Hodgson Burnett; J.Darcy Playing at House and Playing at Home: The Domestic Discourse of Games in Edwardian Fictions of Childhood; M.Beissel Heath Separated Lives and Discordant Homes: The Otherness of Childhood in D. H. Lawrence's Early Fiction; A.F.Humphries PART III: SOCIETY'S CHILD Exhibiting Childhood: E. Nesbit and the Children's Welfare Exhibitions; J.Bavidge 'Girls! Girls, Everywhere!': Angela Brazil's Edwardian School Stories; M.Smith Towards the Modern Man: Edwardian Boyhood in the Juvenile Periodical Press; S.Olsen PART IV: SAVAGERY AND THE CHILD Primitive Minds: Anthropology, Children, and Savages in Andrew Lang and Rudyard Kipling; K.Sands-O'Connor Truth and Claw: The Beastly Children and Childlike Beasts of Saki, Beatrix Potter, and Kenneth Grahame; E.Hale Murdering Adulthood: From Child Killers to Boy Soldiers in Saki's Fiction; B.Gibson Index