First Steps

Abstract

To understand the concept ‘gothic child’, the notion ‘child’ itself has to be cleared of its present-day meanings. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, it is a necessary step that needs to be taken in order to avoid confusion and amalgamation by taking into account the changing face of childhood today and transposing it into a period which may have had a different conception of childhood, especially as concerns the age, rights and responsibilities of the child. Secondly, the rediscovery of this concept, as it is reflected in the gothic writings of the period 1764–1824, is hardly possible without taking into consideration the reality of the times. For instance, today’s readers may be shocked if an author refers to the child with the pronoun ‘it’. But it was not unusual in the eighteenth century and there are numerous reasons for the practice. The Convention on the Rights of the Child is a recent development and it is important to remember that in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century worldview, it is the adult (parent or guardian) who decided on these rights. What is more, what we call ‘rights’ today was then referred to as ‘obligations’ or ‘duties’ and these were integrated into a broader, religiously inflected outlook on the child’s role.