Childhood in the Edwardian period was a subject of deep concern,
fascination, and even obsession. Despite Romanticism’s idealization of the child and Victorian advances in education, it was the Edwardians who truly made the child central to ‘childhood’ and childhood
central to the Zeitgeist. Nowhere was this more evident than in
fiction. Edwardian novels and short stories focused on children to an extent not before seen, nor continued in the same way after the outbreak of World War I. Literary children were no longer merely
‘incipient adults’ (Keating 221), but were beings in their own right: imaginative, free, and distinct from adults. In the Edwardian period for ‘the first time it was widely recognized that children ... have
different needs, sensibilities, and habits of thinking; that they cannot be educated, worked, or punished like adults; that they have rights of their own independent of their parents’ (Rose 178). Paternalistic ‘seen and not heard,’ ‘spare the rod and spoil the child’ notions of
childhood were being swept away and children became protected, longed for, and recognized as having their own needs and desires.
