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After the first phase of industrialization in Britain, the child emerged as both a victim of and a threat to capitalism. This book explores the changing relationship between the child and capitalist society in the works of some of the most important writers of children´s and young-adult texts in the Victorian and Edwardian periods.

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Introduction Dead Ends and Blind Alleys: Young-Adult Literature and the Nineteenth-Century British Labour Market Family Business and Childhood Experience: Charles Dickens´s David Copperfield and Great Expectations Adventure Fiction and the Youth Problem: Robert Louis Stevenson´s Treasure Island and Kidnapped Commercialism and Middle-Class Innocence: E. Nesbit´s The Story of the Treasure Seekers and The Railway Children Educational Tracking and the Feminized Classroom: Frances Hodgson Burnett´s A Little Princess and The Secret Garden The Female Life History and the Labour Market: L. M. Montgomery´s Anne of Green Gables and Anne´s House of Dreams Conclusion: Childhood in the Age of Self-Branding Bibliography Index

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´...Parkes´s book is an insightful contribution to the scholarship on youth and capitalism, which deserves more attention from the fields of children´s literature and childhood studies´ Troy Boone, Children´s Literature Association Quarterly

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CHRISTOPHER PARKES is associate professor in English Literature at Lakehead University, Canada. He is the author of scholarly articles on children´s literature and eighteenth-century literature.

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