During the late Victorian period, Charles Darwin’s theories took the world by storm, and the impact of evolution on research into the developing human mind was impossible to overlook. Thereafter, the study of children and childhood became a means to theorise, imagine, and apply the concept of evolution in a broad range of cultural productions. Beginning with the watershed Victorian era, From Alice to Algernon examines the creative transformation these theories underwent as they filtered through the modern novel, especially those that examined the mind of the child.

By examining the connection between authors and trends in child psychology, author Holly Blackford explains why many modern novels began to focus on child cognition as a site for intellectual and artistic exploration. In each chapter of this book, select novels of the late-nineteenth or twentieth century are paired with a specific moment or movement from the history of developmental psychology. Novels such as Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and Henry James’s What Maisie Knew, or Radclyffe Hall’s less-canonical The Well of Loneliness and even Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, showcase major questions about human epistemology through their child characters. From Lewis Carroll’s Alice and her looking-glass to Richard Wright’s Bigger Thomas and the murder of Mary Dalton, to the chaotic Neverland, a literary tradition of child consciousness has emerged as an experimental site for the unstable concepts of evolution, civilisation, and development.

By situating literature about children within concurrent psychological discourses, Blackford demonstrates how the modern novel contributed to the world’s understanding of the boundless wonders and discernible limits of child consciousness.