Jenny Bourne Taylor

Between atavism and altruism: the child on the threshold in Victorian psychology and Edwardian children's fiction

Edith Nesbit’s The Story of the Amulet was published in 1906; Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden appeared in 1911. Both stories involve stepping between one world and another — a central narrative device in the genre of ‘children’s literature’ which emerged during the latter part of the nineteenth century.1 Both embody two aspects of crossing the threshold between here and ‘elsewhere’: the fantasy of the quest, a move forward to adventure and discovery, and the dream of the retreat to the garden, the primal ‘good place’, the heart of home. In The Story of the Amulet the four children acquire half an ancient Egyptian amulet and embark on a search to unite it with the other half by passing through an arch created by the magical swelling of the charm to enormous size and thus moving into different segments of the past. They explore a series of past civilizations, including pre-dynastic Egypt, Tyre, Atlantis, the Egypt of the Pharaohs, Britain on the eve of Caesar’s conquest, and, on one brief occasion, a Utopian future, in which they meet a little boy, ‘Wells’. In The Secret Garden, Mary, the physically and emotionally stunted child of Anglo-Indian parents, is sent to live at her uncle’s home Misslethwaite Manor on being orphaned by a cholera epidemic in India, and finds physical, emotional and moral regeneration when she discovers and tends a hidden garden.

Bastardy and nationality: the curious case of William Shedden and the 1858 Legitimacy Declaration Act

ABSTRACT This article explores the complex law of illegitimacy in the nineteenth century and its relationship to questions of national belonging and subject-hood, thorough the use of a specific legal case study – that of Shedden v Patrick, a dispute over legitimacy and property which opened in 1804 and lasted until 1869. William Shedden was born in America of a Scottish father, who had married his mother, but after his birth. His claim that he should inherit the Shedden family estate in Scotland, as both his fathers lawful son and a natural-born British subject, brought together a bewildering array of laws, as formal and informal partnerships in the former colony, together with the discrepant legitimacy codes of England and Scotland, were brought to bear on inheritance claims based on laws of nationality and domicile. Sheddens fight to prove his legitimacy led to the passing of the Legitimacy Declaration Act in 1858, but it also gave rise to a series of legal debates on the nature of personal status, and to the complex ways in which both personal legitimacy and nationality operate as legal fictions. Here I trace how the twists and turns of the case, in 1808, the 1840s and the 1860s, illustrate different facets of these debates on legitimacy and national belonging, and also their intersection with other lines of exclusion drawn around the legal identities of both family and nation. ‘Bastardy’ was a profoundly troubled category in the mid-nineteenth century, partly because it highlighted the difficulties of defining legal identity itself.