(Dis)Empowering Child Readers in the Golden Age of Children’s Literature

Victorian and Edwardian adult readers were used to being directly addressed by the narrators of the books they were reading. Jane Eyre, the homodiegetic narrator of Charlotte Brontë’s eponymous novel, confided in them, telling them about her most intimate feelings; the narrator of Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist addressed his ‘experienced’, ‘prudent’, ‘right-minded’ or ‘intelligent reader’ to justify his narrating skills and coax them into trusting him; the narrator of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary...