In 1963, Philippe Aries’ groundbreaking work, Centuries of Childhood, was published in English, and ever since no significant scholarly work on the subject of children has challenged Aries’ idea that childhood is a post-Renaissance “invention.” Some debate has, however, centered on whether childhood was invented as a distinct category in the service of an enlightened and increasingly compassionate recognition of the special needs of children or whether childhood, as an idea or social abstraction, must serve the demands of disciplinary society and its diffuse and elusive powers. Neither story fully satisfies: the former risks a sentimentalizing account that obscures the social uses to which childhood is routinely put, while the latter strips away all private practice and the ambiguity (and sufferings) of lived experience, however unknowable that experience might be. The subject continues to interest and to plague us, I think, because the figure of the abused child continues to occupy center stage in dramatic public narratives of many sorts. Monica Flegel's interesting and informative book Conceptualizing Cruelty to Children in Nineteenth-Century England: Literature, Representation, and the NSPCC largely takes the view that the conceptualization of cruelty to children, and the concomitant rise of social welfare and casework, are instruments of social construction if not social control. Flegel is also careful to point out that the abused child is not a “stable entity” (3) and describes her study as an effort to “trace the persistence of, and divergence from, pre-existing stories and representations of child endangerment in order to reveal the irresolvable contradictions located within a rationality of childhood and of child endangerment that exists to this day” (4).

The book takes as its launching point the development in England of the NSPCC (National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children)—an interesting choice since the Society was a private charity rather than a government-sanctioned and funded social welfare organization. It thus predated the full empowerment of the state to intervene, to use the familiar phrase, in the best interests of the child. Flegel is thus able to discern a closer connection between the discursive tactics of the Society and the rhetorical tropes of the Victorian novel—in particular, to show how the NSPCC, relying upon ground already trod in the pages of the nineteenth-century novel, reimagined child cruelty as a “classless” crime—dependent upon character flaw, say, rather than social position. Flegel uses her skills as a literary critic to analyze the language in early case studies of the Society, finding an important distinction between the more novelistic case studies and the task-specific and purely descriptive casework narratives that would ultimately dominate the discourse of social welfare. The gradual disappearance of the story-oriented case study as a primary genre is, to Flegel's mind, somewhat lamentable. In her view, novels, and the case studies that are at least partly indebted to their narratives, represent “complex reactions to and understanding of a concept that was still, largely, under construction” (38). The book is closed on this more open construction of child endangerment with the advent of social welfare, Flegel suggests, leaving only the barren and decidedly nonliterary literature of the at-risk youth.

Subsequent chapters explore specific instances in the late Victorian history of child protection, including rhetorical links between children and animals (the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals preceded the NSPCC), the discourse of child performance (think of Mayhew's acrobats and Sissy Jupe), child labor and child abuse, and the idea of the juvenile delinquent. All of these chapters offer helpful insight and provide sources that will be new to some readers.

Among the most fascinating of these is the chapter on child performance, which takes up compelling intersections between Caroline Norton's 1836 poem “A Voice from the Factories,” Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby (1839) and Hard Times (1853), Wilkie Collins's Hide and Seek (1854), Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor (1861), and Amy Walton's A Peep Behind the Scenes (1877). This material offers rich opportunity for exploration first of all because acting “automatically” calls into question the subject's status as genuine, foregrounding artificiality and the idea of the self as performance, so that in these narratives, the false front of the stage performance is contrasted with the backstage “reality” of exhaustion and exploitation. Necessarily, though, a focus on the “true story” behind the performance begs the question of truth in the often sensationalized narrative of the performing child; I would have liked to know more about the public will to drama that is inherent in both the performance of the child on stage and the drama of the narrative of the exhausted child performer.

The child performer was distinguished from the “performance” of narratives of child abuse. But as Flegel points out, the “child performer … was … a source of anxiety because it encapsulated contradictory narratives about what it meant to be a child,” and this “meant that the question of whether or not one should take pleasure in its performance was equally problematic” (74). Quoting from Caroline Norton's “A Voice from the Factories,” Flegel focuses on the mutual gaze of audience and performer, the seeing and being seen that complicates the experience of child performance, and the problem of “naturalness” that this raises. In Flegel's suggestive reading of A Peep Behind the Scenes this problem of seeing is discussed in terms of Tom and Louisa Gradgrind's fascinated and longing glimpse of the circus world of Sissy Jupe—in contrast with the longing gaze of the waif in A Peep who views the world beyond the boundaries of the theater with wonder. Flegel points out the difficulties of representation here, in that there is a problem of the “relative attractiveness of theatrical labor, compared to the more ‘respectable’ labor most working-class children faced” (102). This leads to a very suggestive discussion of Mayhew's child laborer/performers.

This book should be of interest to scholars and historians of nineteenth-century childhood, offering new readings of familiar texts as well as the presentation of altogether new material. It is a significant contribution to scholarship on the ideological work of childhood in the Victorian period.