Lewis Carroll
The author of arguably the most famous work of children’s literature to come from the Victorian era can only be expected to play a major role in the book. And, indeed, huge chunks of text are devoted to examining Alice’s adventure not just in Wonderland and on the other side of the mirror, but also Alice’s much less famous Adventures Under Ground (which is actually just the original manuscript which eventually became the more famous trip to Wonderland).
Margaret Gatty
Way less famous than Lewis Carroll, the only reason that Gatty is not more interesting is that—as far as anybody knows—she never took pictures of nude young girls. She is a major figure in this book because she was certainly an eccentric personality: she chose children’s literature as the perfect vehicle to instruct kids not merely in morality, but in the absolute untruth about all those nasty theories Charles Darwin was spreading about this nonsense he termed natural selection and evolution of the species.
Rudyard Kipling
Kipling might not be the first name that comes to mind when thinking about Victorian writers of children’s literature, but he is the guy who created Mowgli and wrote Kim. Of much greater interest, perhaps is The Compete Stalky & Co., a much less well-known collection of stories presenting a distinctly anti-school perspective that surely must have been much more popular among actual kids.
Charles Darwin
Certainly, Kipling would have to come to mind long before Darwin when contemplating kit lit writers during the long—long—reign of Queen Victorian. Darwin offers context at first directly with his “Biographical Sketch of an Infant” and then later as he took his place alongside Marx and Freud as the triple threat of the ideological shift which took place over the course of the century. By the time Gatty came along, Darwin’s theories about evolution had virtually worked its way into every aspect of sociological debate, including education and child-rearing.
