"Children in Fiction" by Agnes Repplier is a critical essay examining the portrayal of children in nineteenth-century literature, arguing that most fictional children fail to convincingly represent the reality of childhood. Repplier opens by taking issue with Rudyard Kipling's depiction of children in his stories. She acknowledges the painful authenticity of "Baa, Baa, Black Sheep," in which the misery and deterioration of a lonely, half-blind boy named Punch is rendered with bitter, almost autobiographical truth. However, she finds his other child characters unconvincing. The drummer boys Lew and Jakin in "Drums of the Fore and Aft" strike her as overdone, and characters such as "His Majesty the King" and Wee Willie Winkie represent a persistent literary fantasy rather than genuine observation. Wee Willie Winkie, a child of six who rides into danger to protect a grown woman and routs twenty armed men with a single word, embodies what Repplier calls a kind of mock heroism that is both absurd and faintly vulgar, tinged with the provincial self-congratulation that Matthew Arnold criticized in other writers. This leads Repplier to identify a broader problem in popular fiction: the prevailing belief that a child in a story must be precocious, sparkling, and perpetually engaging. Such children lose all credibility. She cites a critic from the Contemporary Review who objected to writers like Florence Montgomery for stripping childhood of its natural unconsciousness and teaching fictional children to pose as picturesque beings whose flaws are charming rather than simply human. The "corrective" child, who sees through and judges her parents with painful clarity, and the patronizing child, who addresses his father as "Puppy," are identified as tiresome and false types. Repplier then turns to Frances Hodgson Burnett's Little Lord Fauntleroy as a prime example of the sentimentalized ideal child. She cannot separate him from his velvet suits and lace collars, his perpetual picturesqueness, and his unrealistic goodness. While his generosity is appealing, she contrasts his supposedly unconscious virtue with the entirely believable strutting self-importance of Dickens's little Paul Dombey, and finds Fauntleroy's artless perfection far less credible. Baby Saint Elizabeth, another Burnett creation, she dismisses as a prig. Against these false types, Repplier holds up examples of children she finds genuinely persuasive. Molly Danvers, from the English novel Sir Charles Danvers, is offered as a refreshingly real child: not particularly pretty, not precocious, not described in loving detail of wardrobe, but possessed of a natural, loving heart. The scene in which Molly mourns her dead terrier, pressing her head against her uncle's waistcoat and observing that her dog's face "looked worse than screaming," is praised as a masterpiece of realistic description precisely because it is at once heartbreaking and gently comic. The essay reaches its highest point of enthusiasm when Repplier turns to Victor Hugo's Quatre-Vingt-Treize and its depiction of three small children, René Jean, Gros Alain, and the infant Georgette, spending a single day alone. They examine a wood-louse, watch a bee, and methodically destroy a rare old book, tearing out its pages with innocent concentration. They speak in monosyllables, act rather than discourse, and are wholly and naturally themselves. Hugo's children, Repplier argues, are painted with minute and joyful truth born of long patient observation. Beside their absolute unconsciousness, the Wee Willie Winkies and Lord Fauntleroys of popular fiction reveal themselves as Utopian fantasies. The chivalry, brilliance, and conspicuous virtue of the story-book child cannot compete with the birdlike contentment and unselfconscious reality of three small creatures depicted by a master who actually watched and understood children rather than idealizing or performing them. Throughout the essay, Repplier's central argument remains consistent: authentic literary children require honest observation, not flattering projection, and the best fiction resists the temptation to make children into miniature adults, moral emblems, or picturesque accessories.
By Agnes Repplier · First published 1888 · Genre: Literary Criticism, Essay Collection, Children's Literature Analysis