Judith Plotz. Romanticism and the Vocation of Childhood. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001. ISBN 0-312-22735-3. Price: US$55.

The subject of Judith Plotz's study is absorbing and fascinating: the construction of the Romantic Child in the nineteenth century. Clearly the result of an immense amount of work, Romanticism and the Vocation of Childhood can be recommended to every student of Romanticism for its lively and provocative account. The presentation is good also, despite a few blemishes such as a failure to tabulate the abbreviations satisfactorily and an irritating number of typographical errors. (At one hilarious moment De Quincey is quoted as saying of his mother "Austere she was in a degree which fitted her for the lady president of rebellious nurseries"; the word he actually used was "nunneries".) But all in all it is a book to be respected and drawn on for its wealth of information even if some, like me, will question a few of its conclusions. The overall (rather shaky) thesis is that the rise of the cult of childhood, which by the turn of the century had become overwhelmingly present, was largely due to the writings of the early Romantics, and that they had had little regard or care for the crowd of real and suffering children in their midst, often victimized and living in squalor. Wordsworth's protests at the effects of industrialism on children are elbowed aside and Coleridge's writings on behalf of children in the cotton-factories ignored in favor of the assertion that such writers were more concerned with their own individual problems and with promoting a comfortable detachment. There is truth in this, clearly, but it distorts the larger picture, where one needs to consider the role of children in the development of the bourgeois home, with its encouragement of solitude, its stress on individual development and its pre-Freudian insistence on the protection of innocence as a refuge from the impersonal demands made by society at large. The sufferings and even bestialization of children, particularly in urban areas, might be deplored, but these were often assumed to be an unavoidable concomitant of the growth and culture of individualism, an assumption which was only gradually questioned. This was (and remains) a much bigger phenomenon than was displayed by the small group of writers dealt with here, who should be judged against the much larger proportions involved. There are other reasons why the initial approach might mislead potentially sympathetic readers. With its reproduction on the dust-jacket of the well-known Max Beerbohm cartoon of William "Wordsworth in the Lake District at cross-purposes", the mock-Gothic lettering of the title and its first chapter concerning the Romantic child in the later nineteenth century, which involves repeated assumption that Wordsworth was mainly responsible for the reverential attitude to children among some Victorians, the book might well be construed as either a comprehensive attack on Wordsworth or at best an invitation to an unsympathetic response to him and his associates. The author is wary of some of the claims made for childhood by Romantic thinkers, particularly Coleridge's observation that children naturally think in wholes before they learn to analyze—a mode of thought which he saw as a crucial resource in the preservation of healthy mental function in the adult. As Plotz acutely notes, Piaget observed precisely the same phenomena in his studies of children but reached a diametrically opposed conclusion. What Coleridge saw as a sign of grace he regarded as dangerous; in his eyes, only as children learned to disregard their own tendency to holism and to acknowledge the consciousnesses of other people through socialization, could they hope to move towards satisfactory adult behavior. She herself seems to side with Piaget, despite the possibility that Coleridge's view …