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In 1937, Pamela Whitlock and Katharine Hull, aged 15 and 16, sent children’s writer Arthur Ransome a full manuscript of their novel The Far-Distant Oxus. Reviewers and critics contemporary to Whitlock and Hull, as well as recent scholars, often interpret the young authors’ work in ways that undermine their authority as writers, framing the novel as naive mimicry of Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons. In this chapter, Smith reframes The Far-Distant Oxus as a case study that reveals the challenges and rewards of understanding child authorship—and imitation in particular—as both a creative and professional practice, the complexities of which are accessible through careful consideration of publication history, attentive close reading, and a nuanced approach to child agency.

This intimate exchange between real children and the stories we tell about them is at the fore of juvenilia studies, as scholars examining texts children produce must balance attention to the young person as author or artist with a critical awareness of systems of publication, reception, and analysis that are typically managed by adults. The focus of this paper is an investigation into the challenges of researching and writing about child-produced culture amid the often-overpowering constructs of childhood that surround it, taking two young artists as case studies: Daphne Allen, and Pamela Bianco, whose work can be challenging to access in ways that arise in part from the idiosyncrasies of their cultural moment, understood here as one that combined lingering Romanticism and burgeoning modernism. Analysis of the two child artists suggests that both were savvy and self-aware in negotiating, through their art, the discourses that surrounded them; it also presents methodologies that may be useful to other scholars in the field of juvenilia studies more broadly.

This paper argues early British painting books are important threshold texts. In content and form, they bridge artistic movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—from Pre-Raphaelitism to modernism—and demonstrate a shift in constructions of child artists—from ideas of the young as artists-in-training to modernist paradigms of the “innocent eye.”

Between Generations recuperates a tradition of adult-child collaboration in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British children’s literature and culture, charting the emergence of new models of authorship and a growing cultural imperative to recognize the young as active, creative agents. The book examines the intergenerational partnerships that generated pivotal texts from the Golden Age of children’s literature, from “The Pied Piper” to Peter Pan, and in doing so challenges popular critical narratives that read actual young people solely as social constructs or passive recipients of texts. The spectrum of adult-child partnerships included within this book’s chapters make clear that the boundary between fictive collaborations and lived partnerships was not firm but that, instead, imaginative and material practices were mutually constitutive. Adults’ partnerships with young auditors, writers, illustrators, reviewers, and co-conspirators reveal that the agentic, creative child was not only a figure but also an actor, vital to authorial practice. These collaborations were part of a larger investigation of the limits and possibilities of child agency taking place in a range of discourses and cultural venues, from education reform to psychology to librarianship. Throughout, the book considers the many Victorian writers and thinkers, from Robert Louis Stevenson to Friedrich Froebel, who question the assumed authority of adults, who write about children as both passive and subversive subjects, and who self-consciously negotiate, alongside real children, the ideological and ethical difficulties of listening to and representing children’s perspectives.