n as an idealised symbol of Childhood in the Golden Age of Children’s literature. Peter Pan, Pantheism and The Muse of Childhood. 3014 Words.

In this essay, I will discuss, with reference to Peter Pan and The Wind in the Willows, and C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and The Wardrobe. I will explore the influence of Pantheism in The Golden Age of Children’s Literature and why the figure Pan was popularised in, and inspired writing for children in the Victorian and Edwardian Period.

Background.

The period , from 1880 to the end of the Edwardian Era and occasionally beyond was known as ‘The Golden Age’ of Children’s Literature and Illustration. Where previously little literature specifically for children existed, other than fairy tales, nursery rhymes and religious writing for children, greater access to education, improved literacy, and wider publication to books through improved printing technology, encouraged authors to write for children specifically. During this time, synergies between social, political, and artistic ideology influenced many aspects of literature.

References Pan and Pantheist adopted by the Romantic writers of the eighteenth were adopted by Victorian and Edwardian writers who explored the idea of an all-encompassing God with deeper connections to nature. Several prominent late Victorian and Edwardian writers, particularly those writing for children, identified with a yearning to connect with the natural world.

Popular illustrators from ‘The Golden Age of Illustration,’ such as Arthur Rackham, Edmund Dulac, and Heath Robinson, were renowned for illustrating works inspired by fairy-tale, mythology and folk-law. The period also coincides with The Education Act of 1880, which made school attendance from the ages of five to ten years old compulsory.

In the collected essays, ‘Worlds Enough & Time, Childhood in Edwardian Fiction’, within the introduction, the editor argues that it was the Edwardians who made ‘the child central to Childhood’, that children were ‘imaginative, free and distinct from adults. ‘ Suggesting that before this period children were largely represented as ‘little adults’. However, in Secret Gardens, A Study of the Golden Age of Children’s Literature, by Humphrey Carpenter, the author asserts that Romantics, including Blake and Wordsworth, (who were both associated with Pantheist ideology,) recognised the child’s view of the world as differing from that of an adult. Carpenter did not believe the view that the child was a lesser version of the adult or a concept that evolved in the Edwardian Era.

The concept of childhood as separate from adulthood is not new. Brueg