The Precocious Child in Victorian Culture: Precocity in Fantasy and in Reality

This chapter reads Peter Pan as a study of the conflict at the heart of Victorian evolutionary discourse. In Peter Pan, we can see one iteration of a ‘Darwinian’ model of child development, in which its tragic losses are foregrounded. Through the bleakness embodied in Peter Pan, Barrie accounts for his era’s tenacity to the idea that growth is progress. Peter’s model of growth is therefore refuted by the Darling children in favour of a fantasy of progressive development. Peter Pan facilitates our participation in this fantasy, even as its protagonist performs its falsity. I then suggest that, in two works by child authors, adult and child are not clearly differentiated. Both in their precocity and in what they wrote, Daisy Ashford and Marjory Fleming challenge a progressive model of development and the idea of a ‘confirming conclusion’ in adulthood which this model facilitates. What has since been written about Ashford and Fleming reveals that critics cling to the idea that growth is progress and that precocious children fundamentally undermine this idea. Thus, this chapter reads Peter Pan, along with child-authored work and responses to it, as distillations of the representation and significance of the precocious child in Victorian culture.