Claudia Nelson's latest book demonstrates once again that she is one of the best-read academics in the Victorian period. Spanning children's literature, speculative fiction, domestic novels, nineteenth-century journalism, and advice manuals, Nelson's text provides an in-depth analysis of what she identifies as “age inversion”: representations of children and adults who fail to act their age, by either being old before their time or acting far younger than their years would suggest. At one point, Nelson observes, “If we wish to generalize about age inversion overall, then, I suggest that we see it as a kind of generational colonization” (106). The greatest strength of Nelson's text, however, is that she does not generalize; instead, she attends with great specificity to the multiple meanings of age inversion within divergent generic and sociopolitical contexts, providing an immensely useful analysis of the role played by age, not simply as a record of one's life span but as a descriptor of character and behavior. In tracing the social desires and anxieties captured in depictions of characters that do not conform to the expectations of their age group, Nelson compellingly identifies a “general instability of age categories in the Victorian era” (4).

Her work is divided into five sections, examining the “old-fashioned child,” the “arrested child-man,” “women as girls,” “girls as women,” and “boys as men.” While at first glance there seems to be repetition, with the first chapter and the final two both addressing children who act old before their time, the first chapter instead sets up a very specific example of age inversion: the “old-fashioned child,” to use the Victorian term, who Nelson identifies as “a distinct subset of the breed” (13). Examining well-known figures such as Charles Dickens's Paul Dombey, alongside lesser-known figures, such as Jeanie Hearing's Elf (from the 1887 novel of the same name), Nelson argues that depictions of children who “seemed like pocket versions of adults” (12) served as the means of expressing complicated attitudes toward progress. Viewing such children as instances of “the uncanny” (8) at work, Nelson asserts that characters such as Paul Dombey are both attractive and repellent because they speak to conflicting ideological values at work in Victorian culture: as both “innocent” child and heir to his father's business, little Dombey is forced to “embody principles that are at once incompatible with one another and central to Victorian society” (19).

While I am loathe to generalize about a text that is careful not to generalize—Nelson throughout, for example, looks at both positive and negative representations of each of the figures in her study, accounting for changing social attitudes and for representations of protagonists and villains alike—Nelson's text does suggest that age inversion was seen as less of a problem for females than for males in the Victorian period. Despite, for example, figures such as Mr. Dick and Dora Spenlow from Dickens's David Copperfield, who suggest that there is something charming in the child-man and lacking in the child-wife, Nelson demonstrates that the reverse is also often true, particularly by the end of the century. Childishness in women might be “perverse,” but it was also “desirable” (77), while the same in men elicited responses that were often equivocal and at times wholly critical. This is so, Nelson asserts, because debates about social purity, evolution, and degeneration displaced the Romantic child-man of the early Victorian period with a far more threatening figure, that of the atavistic throwback who failed to uphold the proper masculine, reproductive role within the nation and empire. Reading unexpected child-men such as Dracula in Bram Stoker's classic text—who Van Helsing describes as “only a child” (65)—Nelson reveals the dark side of Victorian representations of childlike men, those who represent the violent half of the childhood binary of Romantic innocence/innate savagery. Because the Victorian ideal of womanhood was constructed according to the sheltered, protected female, however, Nelson asserts that “Victorian society was often more comfortable with a corresponding stasis where women were concerned” (75). Thus, as with the titular character of Dinah Mulock's 1850 novel, Olive, childishness preserves her attractiveness, with Olive described as having a “clinging sweetness . . . a type of true woman” (80), while even “bad” child women, such as the egotistical Hetty Sorrel from George Eliot's Adam Bede, are geared more “toward being rather than doing” (86), making them far less threatening figures than the atavistic child-man.

Nelson's final two chapters address “girls as women” and “boys as men,” and in these she again argues that age inversion in girls is presented as less problematic than in boys, with the similarity between girls and women in the Victorian period allowing for age inversion to be more readily acceptable for females; for young boys, however, acting like an adult always had economic connotations, lending their precocity a far more troubling aspect. Figures such as Henry Mayhew's Watercress Girl, for example, despite being worthy of pity, nevertheless also fulfill the expectations of lower-class girlhood, assuring the reader that “competent child-women . . . can both stand in for their fathers as economic providers and do their mothers' job by keeping the household running smoothly” (113). Precocious child-men, by comparison, by being too closely linked with economic concerns, betray a problematic or tragic self-absorption—as seen in Tom Gradgrind in Dickens's Hard Times and Little Father Time in Jude the Obscure—leading not to the support but to the possible destruction of the family. For Nelson, the anxieties surrounding the precocious boy suggest, not that such figures are abnormal, but rather that the pressures of manhood and its concomitant expectations of economic success make boyhood precocity “a problem within the norm itself, given the prevalence of the use of paid labor as the chief socializing mechanism for masculinity” (162).

Nelson's readings of literary and social texts are convincing, but the greatest strength of her study is its expansiveness. Wide ranging in subject matter but attentive to the nuances of genre and historical period, this text contributes significantly to the study of age in the Victorian period, reminding us that it is not only children and the elderly who are subject to categorization according to their years.