This volume is arranged over three parts and consists of sixteen chapters, including Gavin's own introduction, teasing out the fluctuating constructions of children in British literature over an impressively long period (1200–2010). This ambitious proposal begins with a reminder of the many conflicting perceptions made of today's children by media, parents, marketers, and legal bodies who are preoccupied with the child's role in modern society. This reminder serves the collection's wider objectives to identify and trace broad shifts in how the child has been constructed in literature—here understood as a window into the society in which it was produced. The volume's chronological order is effective in revealing patterns and developments, while individual essays succeed in exposing the smaller shifts, contradictions, and inevitable continuities across the centuries. Some essays are more successful in this than others (notably by Kline, Knowles, O'Malley, McGillis, Hillel, and Pinsent). Particular themes that recur across chapters include child death (Kline, Knowles, McGillis, Wood, and Hillel), violence (Knowles and Wood), innocence (Thiel, Pinsent, and Dodou), and nostalgia (McGillis and Pinsent).

In part 1 (“Medieval and Early Modern Literature”) Kline attempts to finally put the “Ariès effect” to rest by exploring how children were represented in “canonical Middle English [literature]” (22). It is inevitable that Ariès would be cited in a book on childhood, but Kline provides more than yet another refutation of Ariès's thesis with his own insights into the need to place age into discussions of subjectivity. Knowles's chapter provides an equally strong start to the volume. Knowles looks to rehabilitate Shakespearean child characters and explore their often pivotal roles in Richard III, King John, and Macbeth. The essay finishes with an enlightening contrast with subsequent adaptations of these plays, revealing each century's modifications of child characters to suit contemporary notions of childhood. Munro's chapter retains the focus on drama by exploring seventeenth-century child writers and actors. While pointing to the precociousness of infant poets and child players, Munro nevertheless interprets the evidence as showing the construction of docile, unthreatening, and dependent children—a contradiction that is never fully explained. Lamb's essay concludes part 1 by taking up one of the dominant debates in children's literary studies over the role of didacticism and pleasure. One of the most interesting contributions this essay makes is to the way seventeenth-century schoolboy texts aimed to construct a “scholarly manhood.” The essays in part 1 make a strong start to the volume. The reader gains a sense of current trends in the historiography, while individual essays point to new insights into medieval and early modern literature.

O'Malley's essay marks the beginning of part 2 (“Eighteenth-Century, Romantic, and Victorian Literature”) by examining the most famous of eighteenth-century books in children's literature, Robinson Crusoe. By looking at the development of Crusoe according to a model of childhood development, O'Malley suggests that the book's paradoxes between, for example, individualism and island domesticity or paternal disobedience and the rewards gained from such behavior mirror the anxieties and “competing impulses” (96) of eighteenth- century society. McGillis's essay moves us into the era of Romantic literature and the child who is both natural and supernatural. Romantic ideals of purity, health, joy, and otherworldliness were encapsulated in childhood, a state of being barred from adults who no longer inhabited the childish state. McGillis's very interesting essay demonstrates the complexities between innocent and knowing children, and the oftentimes dualistic understanding of the child in Romantic poetry. Wood's equally strong essay picks up on the theme of children as figures of angelic purity. Exploring these tropes in Victorian literature, she traces the figure of the angelic child in Charles Dickens, Hans Christian Anderson, and George MacDonald before contrasting this with the other powerful trend toward Victorian realism in the figure of Alice from Alice in Wonderland. Thiel's essay follows on from these by looking at Victorian child innocence versus depictions of child degeneracy. Drawing on the child pickpockets of Oliver Twist, and popular “Street-Arab tales,” Thiel places Victorian depictions of criminal children in a wider context of prison reform and legal debates about the age of culpability. Thiel's essay is also one of the few to examine depictions of girls, and it provides an important discussion of degeneracy in girl characters. Hillel's essay moves smoothly on to late Victorian child-rescue literature. Picking up on Thiel's previous chapter, Hillel investigates in greater depth the figure of the homeless child, or Street-Arab. Hillel's chapter is one of the strongest in exploring societal mores via the literature. She convincingly shows that child-rescue organizations consciously deployed literature and poetry to solicit sympathy (and donations). Her discussion does a service to the volume as a whole by explicitly demonstrating the ways children's literature could be a powerful medium in society. Coming through clearly from the essays in part 2 are the tensions and ambiguities characterizing children in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature. The essays in this section admirably show how child characters were poised between innocence and degeneracy, naturalness and savagery, angelic purity and criminality, reflecting many of the social and legal debates of the time.

Gavin's own essay begins part 3 of the volume (“Edwardian, Modern, and Contemporary Literature”), moving the reader into Edwardian and twentieth-century representations of children. Insightfully surveying three key texts of childhood, Peter and Wendy, The Blue Lagoon, and The Education of Uncle Paul, she demonstrates the Edwardian taste for a never-ending childhood. Humphries's essay explores the shifts in power in early twentieth-century writing. Developing out of a backlash against Victorian sentiment, Humphries focuses on child characters who dissent from adult, and society's, authority. As Humphries suggests, imagination, wonder, and a determination to enjoy, but also to cling to, childhood characterizes much of this literature. March-Russell brings us forward firmly into modernist approaches to the child, positing that the child was a catalyst for debates concerning identity. The opening of this essay deals not only with child characters but also with how adults were represented, and often attacked, as childish. As such, the essay offers a different approach to children in literature that is both interesting and slightly out of place in this collection. Pinsent's essay explores post–World War II conditions that influenced how children, and children in literature, were understood. This essay makes an important contribution to the volume (along with the chapters by Thiel and Hillel) in its focus on working-class children. Indeed, what emerges most strongly from Pinsent's analysis is the interest authors and the public had in the so-called ordinary child. Family and parent-child relationships are the focus of 1970s children's literature, according to Sands-O'Connor. Replacing loved, or sometimes absent, parents in earlier literature, 1970s tales demonstrated greater interest in unstable family structures. This, coupled with greater interest in representing selfish parents and general social anxieties, made child characters more likely to be independent. Sands-O'Connor includes an interesting, although brief, discussion of migrant authors whose child characters display much greater optimism and hope. It is a pity that this is the only place in this volume where migrant experiences are discussed because even this brief section suggests fascinating insights are to be gained from looking more closely at the authors of children's literature themselves. The final chapter in this volume is Dodou's essay on post-1970s literature. Looking at child characters primarily in Ian McEwan's novels, Dodou finds that such authors deliberately sought to explore contemporary concepts of childhood. Picking up the theme of innocence, Dodou identifies a new focus on the child's moral culpability. Like Thiel's and Hillel's earlier chapters, Dodou uncovers literary constructions against legal and welfare agendas, suggesting that authors critiqued dominant social motifs when creating literary children.

Gavin is to be congratulated on editing such a coherent volume, which successfully tracks bigger shifts in literature as well as society's construction of childhood, while each essay nevertheless retains its individual focus and nuance. As a whole, this volume provides a helpful overview of where scholarship on children's literature is currently placed. As such, it would provide a useful addition to the library of anyone interested in specific periods of British children's literature as well as those looking to gain a wide-ranging view of the ways the child has been presented across time.