Lies and Imagination: Precocity in Children’s Literature

In this chapter, I argue, first, that in key contributions to scientific Child Study precocity is vilified to an extent that exceeds all but the most pejorative literary depictions. This is concurrent with an emphasis on two supposed differences between adults and children in general: first, that the child is defined by her imagination and, second, that, therefore, she lies. I then read the child protagonist’s storytelling in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princess (1905) as a study of the moral status of children’s lies, to argue that Sara legitimises a different relationship between child and adult from the prevalent one of hierarchical difference. For the precocious child narrator of Nesbit’s Treasure Seekers series, Oswald Bastable, meanwhile, the ‘imagination’ is not unique to children. Through Oswald, Nesbit celebrates a more equal relationship between child and adult. This chapter thus argues that the vilification of precocity in Child Study reflects an almost belligerent tenacity to the idea that adults have progressed beyond childhood and that the fact that precocious children are celebrated in some of the most inventive works of Victorian children’s literature reflects the imaginative possibilities of thinking about development outside the restrictive frameworks of linearity, hierarchy, and teleology.