Strange Dislocations: Childhood and the Idea of Human Interiority, 1780–1930

by Carolyn Steedman

Strange, deformed, and piercingly beautiful, the child acrobat Mignon sprang onto the public stage in 1795. No child at all, but a figment of Goethe’s fiction, Mignon appeared and reappeared in countless forms and guises over the next century. The meaning of this compelling creature is at the center of Carolyn Steedman’s book, a brilliant account of how nineteenth-century notions of childhood, like those expressed in the figure of Mignon, gave birth to the modern idea of a self.

During the nineteenth century, a change took place in the way people in Western societies understood themselves―the way they understood the self and how it came into being. Steedman tracks this development through changing attitudes about children and childhood as these appear in literature and law, medicine, science, and social history. Moving from the world of German fiction to that of child acrobats and “street arabs” in nineteenth-century Britain, from the theories of Freud to those of Foucault, she shows how the individual and personal history that a child embodied came to represent human “insideness.” Particularly important for understanding this change is the part that Freudian psychoanalysis played, between 1900 and 1920, in summarizing and reformulating the Victorian idea that the core of an individual’s psychic identity was his or her own lost past, or childhood.

Using the perspectives of social and cultural history, and the history of psychology and physiology, Strange Dislocations traces a search for the self, for a past that is lost and gone, and the ways in which, over the last hundred years, the lost vision has come to assume the form of a child.

Genres: History, Psychoanalysis, Nonfiction, Childrens

254 pages, Hardcover

First published June 30, 1998

About the author

Carolyn Kay Steedman, FBA (born 20 March 1947) is a British historian, specialising in the social and cultural history of modern Britain and exploring labour, gender, class, language and childhood. Since 2013, she has been Emeritus Professor of History at University of Warwick, where she had previously been a Professor of History since 1999.

Steedman graduated from the University of Sussex with an undergraduate degree in English and American Studies in 1968, and then completed a master's degree at Newnham College, Cambridge, in 1974. She was a teacher from then until 1982, when she joined the Institute of Education in the University of London as a researcher; for the 1983–84 year, she was a Fellow there, before lecturing at the University of Warwick, where she was appointed Senior Lecturer in 1988, Reader in 1991 and Professor of Social History in 1995. For the year 1998–99, she was Director of Warwick's Centre for Study of Social History. Steedman returned to Newnham College to complete her doctorate, which was awarded in 1989.

In 2011, Steedman was elected a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA), the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and social sciences.

Reviews

[C. B. · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is sort of potty, but I like it. It’s a short set of reflections on the themes of subjectivity, Goethe’s character Mignon from Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, and the history of childhood. It rests fairly heavily in places on the work of Judith R. Walkowitz and James R. Kincaid, but not without adding something new. I always adore Steedman’s writing. She’s one of the great treasures of modern British historiography.

[Quin Rich · Rating 3 out of 5]

Miss this one. I am pursuing graduate study on childhood, and I found this book to be quite unhelpful. It is an unsystematic, truncated, and poorly written text. Most problematically, it does not at all address the main topic it claims to be about, namely the historical emergence of a sense of interiority in/as a lost childhood. That would make for compelling and important reading if that's what this book were; unfortunately, that's not at all what this book is.

Part of the problem is Steedman's narrow archive; she reads a handful of texts from various domains, but does not sufficiently contextualize them. Furthermore, she does not carry a clear, sustained line of argument throughout the book. Instead, she will occasionally repeat her main claims at the beginnings or ends of chapters, and will then go on to offer several pages of historical detail that do nothing to further her thesis.

This book might be of interest to those who are already deeply immersed in the study of childhood and who already know what small detail they are looking for. But if one is at that stage, one would likely not be seeking out a book that claims to be the kind of broad, historical overview that this one does. Get this from the library to skim if you are already working on a relevant research project; but don't waste your time or money on procuring a copy of this to read in full.