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UCLA UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title The Fabian Child: English and American Literature and Socialist Reform, 1884-1915 Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2q169884 Author Hollander, Amanda Farrell Publication Date 2015 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles The Fabian Child: English and American Literature and Socialist Reform, 1884-1915 A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in English by Amanda Farrell Hollander 2015 © Copyright by Amanda Farrell Hollander 2015 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION The Fabian Child: English and American Literature and Socialist Reform, 1884-1915 by Amanda Farrell Hollander Doctor of Philosophy in English University of California, Los Angeles, 2015 Professor Joseph E. Bristow, Chair “The Fabian Child: English and American Literature and Socialist Reform, 1884-1915” intervenes in current scholarship that addresses the impact of Fabian socialism on the arts during the fin de siècle. I argue that three particular Fabian writers—Evelyn Sharp, E. Nesbit, and Jean Webster—had an indelible impact on children’s literature, directing the genre toward less morally didactic and more politically engaged discourse. Previous studies of the Fabian Society have focused on George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, and Beatrice Webb and Sidney Webb to the exclusion of women authors producing fiction for child readers. After the Fabian Society’s founding in 1884, English writers Sharp and Nesbit, and American author Webster published prolifically and, in their work, direct their socialism toward a critical and deliberate reform of ii literary genres, including the fairy tale, the detective story, the boarding school novel, adventure yarns, and epistolary fiction. Chapter One examines Evelyn Sharp’s radical sexual politics and how her many stories elucidate the connections between women’s suffrage and other socialist causes such as housing reform and blood sport. Sharp shows how Victorian ideas of gender performance are often constructed around those who wish to identify or present their gender in a way that diverges from their sex, particularly difficult when generic tropes cast boys and girls in specific, highly delineated roles. Chapter Two tracks the growing socialist impulses of Nesbit’s novels, The Enchanted Castle and Harding’s Luck, which depict children forming friendships across class lines and experimenting narratorially with their own roles as protagonists. Harding’s Luck also, with its disabled hero, shows a growing tension within Fabian socialist thought between the ability of socialism to achieve individualism and a growing fanaticism within the Society for eugenics and collectivism. Chapter Three analyzes how, in the United States, Fabian thought drives the social reform in Jean Webster’s final two novels, Daddy-Long-Legs and Dear Enemy, both bestsellers that brought debates about institutional reform, female agency, and genetic destiny to the child reader. iii The dissertation of Amanda Farrell Hollander is approved. Helen E. Deutsch Marissa K. López Virginia A. Walter Joseph E. Bristow, Committee Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2015 iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 1 Chapter One: “The Antithesis of Cricket” Gender, Cross-Dressing, and Non-Normative Bodies in the Works of Evelyn Sharp 21 Chapter Two: “More Like a Boy Than a Book” Nesbit’s Reshaping of Popular Fictional Genres 111 Chapter Three: “Hooray, I’m a Fabian!” Social Reform and Eugenics in Jean Webster’s Daddy-Long-Legs and Dear Enemy 190 Conclusion 257 Bibliography 261 v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am incredibly grateful for the mentorship and support of Joseph Bristow. His guidance and enormous generosity as a scholar have shaped my experience in graduate school. I appreciate his insight and the remarkable scope of his intellect and teaching. Working with him on this dissertation has been a privilege I will not forget. His impact on my writing—both academic and creative—has left an indelible mark. One of the best aspects of this project has been the chance to collaborate with my committee members. Helen Deutsch offered both wonderful feedback on the dissertation and set a model for creativity in scholarship that I hope to emulate as I move forward with my career. Marissa López helped me sort through many of my ideas and gave me new ways to reconsider and expand my reading. Last but not least, Virginia Walter helped me to build the rubric of the dissertation. I consider myself incredibly fortunate to have worked with each of them. My thinking on Fabian socialism started in Jonathan Grossman’s seminar and he was one of the first advocates for my work on Jean Webster. I also am thankful to have met Diana Maltz, whose conviviality and work on Mabel Dearmer influenced this project. The camaraderie of the following made intellectual work both exciting and rewarding: Shirley Tung, Amy Wong, Julia Callander, Leigh-Michil George, Marilu Medrano, Anthony Camara, Fuson Wang, Michael Nicholson, Deborah Donig, Alexandra Zobel, Lindsay Wilhelm, Sina Rahmani, Jordan Wingate, Dustin Friedman, Alethia Shih, and Taylor Walle. Three other unsung heroes of this dissertation are Jeanette Gilkinson, Michael Lambert, and Janel Munguia. Lastly, I want to thank my family and friends, especially my parents, Richard and Georgia-Jean, who understand how railway trains and magic can go on at the same time. vi AMANDA HOLLANDER EDUCATION: M.A., English, Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies, University of York, UK, 2006 Thesis, “The Boards in the Books and the Books on the Boards: Frances Burney and the Theatrical.” B.A., English, Kenyon College, 2004 Graduated Cum Laude with High Honors in English Literature. Thesis, “Richardson’s Hermaphroditic Pen: Mary Astell’s Feminist Voice in Clarissa.” PUBLICATIONS: “This Story Begins,” SCBWI Bulletin, March/April 2015 Petra, picture book (ages 4-8), Simon & Schuster, forthcoming in 2016 CONFERENCE PAPERS: “Liberty in the Age of Eugenics: Non-normative Bodies in Fabian Socialist Children’s Fiction.” Children’s Literature Association, Richmond, June 2015 “Not an Exit but a Bang: Posthumanism and Polyphony in the Young-Adult Novel.” Modern Language Association, Vancouver, January 2015 “‘More Like a Boy Than a Book’: E. Nesbit, Child Empowerment, and the Reshaping of Popular Fictional Genres.” Children’s Literature Association, Biloxi, June 2013 “‘King Lear was old and tired’: Teaching Children’s Editions of Shakespeare.” UCLA Medieval and Early Modern Student Association Conference, Los Angeles, June 2013 “‘The Life and Letters of Judy Abbott’: Epistolary Adaptation and Appropriation of the Orphanage in Daddy-Long-Legs.” Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association, Scottsdale, October 2011 “Educating Clarissa.” American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Montreal, March 2006 vii Introduction The children mingled with the adults, and spoke and were spoken to. Children in these families, at the end of the nineteenth century, were different from children before or after. They were neither dolls nor miniature adults. They were not hidden away in nurseries, but present at family meals, where their developing characters were taken seriously and rationally discussed, over supper or during long country walks. And yet, at the same time, the children in this world had their own separate, largely independent lives, as children. —-A. S. Byatt, The Children’s Book (2009) In these lines from A. S Byatt’s novel, The Children’s Book, the narrator builds a portrait of an emerging type of child—the Fabian child, understood and engaged with as a sophisticated and intelligent individual.1 Byatt’s novel depicts the Wellwood family, headed by matriarch Olive, who is an author of children’s stories and an active member of the socialist Fabian Society. Olive’s children are not of the Victorian “seen but not heard” model, nor are they constrained. Instead, they are active spokespeople for themselves, each unique and leading their own distinct lives, leading Olive to produce specialized novels for each child. The character of Olive Wellwood owes a great deal to fin-de-siècle children’s writer and Fabian socialist E. Nesbit. Olive struggles to support her large family and remain active as a writer and socialist. A critic and novelist herself, Byatt weaves together fact and fiction in one of the first works in either genre to recognize the importance of Fabian authors’ contributions to children’s literature. 1 A. S. Byatt, The Children’s Book (New York: Random House, 2009), 39. 1 Unlike Byatt’s Children’s Book, modern scholarship has largely ignored the remarkable relationship between the work of the Fabian Society and the emergence of a new type of children’s literature that diverges from religious or moral didacticism to engage with children’s political and social lives. Byatt is one of the few writers to draw on the critical link between the Society’s founding and a corresponding shift in children’s literature during the fin de siècle. My dissertation takes Byatt’s acclaimed work of fiction as a starting-point for examining how three Fabian writers—the English authors Evelyn Sharp (1869-1955) and E. Nesbit (1858-1924), and American novelist Jean Webster (1876-1916)—reform rather than revolutionize existing genres in order to extend socialist thought and agency to children and especially the child reader. Although Byatt’s Children’s Book has reinvigorated interest in the Fabian Society, there are comparatively few critical inquiries into the wealth of literary works that many noted Fabians produced. To be sure, there are several studies that direct their attention to prominent literary luminaries George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) and H. G. Wells (1866-1946).2 It is fair to say that Shaw’s and Wells’s standing among leading Fabians is similar to that of the married economists Beatrice Webb (1858-1943) and Sidney Webb (1859-1947), whose writings have been subject to extensive debate.3 But practically all studies of Fabian literary works tend to marginalize or entirely ignore the contributions of E.