Introduction

The Introduction argues that the precocious child is a neglected but productive focus for the study of Victorian literature, childhood, autobiography, and science. It points to the ubiquity of the precocious child in writing of the long nineteenth century, from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Émile, ou de l’Education (1762) to Thomas Hardy’s Jude The Obscure (1895), and the increasing critical interest in this figure in nineteenth-century studies. Marah Gubar’s Artful Dodgers (2006) and Claudia Nelson’s Precocious Children and Childish Adults (2013) are keynotes in the study of precocity, but Gubar focuses exclusively on children’s literature, and Nelson almost exclusively on canonical fiction. I argue that the precocious child has a particular significance in the context of the evolutionary discourse which permeated Victorian culture, overlooked in the literary focus of Gubar’s and Nelson’s seminal works. I suggest that the theory of recapitulation invited Victorians to extrapolate from the growing child to the evolving species. Thus, the child is a means to depict, explore, or elide the tension between progressive and non-progressive models of evolution. The precocious child undermines the equation of growth with progress and thereby facilitates other ways of imagining both individual and species development in Victorian culture.