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. Bruegel’s Renaissance Painting, ‘Children’s Games’, depicting children at play with toys, and games illustrates how child’s play was not a Victorian or Edwardian phenomenon. Religion promised Victorians rewards in the hereafter. The Victorians received instruction on literacy in churches, so would have been aware of scriptures such as Corinthians, 13:11 11 When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things’. The Victorians may have differentiated between childhood and the child being a little adult. However, market forces dictated not all childhood was celebrated or equal for all children. Working-class children still lived and worked in extremes of poverty and oppression. Many prominent writers who associated with Fabianism and Pantheism, knew, and commented on changes within the social and political landscape during the Victorian era. They had seen rural workforces migrate to larger towns and cities, and how the landscape irrevocably changed. Child labour was rife. The Education Acts of 1870 and 80’ did not bring immediate change.

From the mid-nineteenth century, writers such as Charles Dickens and