In this groundbreaking contribution to Victorian and children s literature studies Marah Gubar proposes a fundamental reconception of the nineteenth-century attitude toward childhood. The ideology of innocence was much slower to spread than we think she contends and the people whom we assume were most committed to it--children s authors and members of the infamous cult of the child --were actually deeply ambivalent about this Romantic notion. Rather than wholeheartedly promoting a static ideal of childhood purity Golden Age children s authors often characterize young people as collaborators who are caught up in the constraints of the culture they inhabit and yet not inevitably victimized as a result of this contact with adults and their world. Such nuanced meditations on the vexed issue of the child s agency Gubar suggests can help contemporary scholars to generate more flexible critical approaches to the study of childhood and children s literature.