Toy Stories: Analyzing the Child in Nineteenth-Century Literature by Vanessa Smith (review)

Reviewed by: Toy Stories: Analyzing the Child in Nineteenth-Century Literature by Vanessa Smith Yuanyuan Zhang and Haifeng Hui Toy Stories: Analyzing the Child in Nineteenth-Century Literature. By Vanessa Smith. New York: Fordham University Press. 2023. xiii+240 pp. 105 (ebk 29. 99). ISBN 978–1–531503–57–4 (ebk 978–1–531503–59–8). That Victorian literature exalted the innocent and blissful child is a critical consensus. But in her new monograph, Vanessa Smith examines figures of the anxious and aggressive child in what she terms 'toy stories', in which child characters engage in destructive behaviours towards objects. Furthermore, Smith suggests that these narratives showcase proto-psychoanalytical intuitions and provide preparatory contexts for modern child analysis as subsequently advanced by theorists such as Melanie Klein and Anna Freud. The monograph is comprised of a Preface, an Introduction, four chapters, and a Conclusion. In the Preface, the author highlights the presence of toy-breaking stories in Victorian literature by referencing excerpts from Maria Edgeworth and George Eliot, among other authors, and effectively brings up the book's central tenet that nineteenth-century fiction 'adumbrated' (p. x) modern psychoanalysis. End Page 245 The Introduction offers an overview of Klein's life and her major contributions to child psychology. These include object relations theory—which emphasizes the importance of childhood experiences with things—and play therapy, a technique of gaining access to children's unconscious, whereby children are enabled to project intense emotions by being offered selected toys to play with. This chapter also discusses the commonalities and disagreements between Klein and her contemporary Anna Freud. This sets the stage for subsequent chapters to delve into how Victorian toy stories anticipated the insights of psychoanalysts. Each of the subsequent four chapters is devoted to a specific genre or author. Chapter 1 focuses on educational treatises, particularly Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Émile and Maria Edgeworth and her father Richard Lovell Edgeworth's Practical Education. These educationists' keen investigation of children's violent inclinations towards things can be seen as an early acknowledgement of the relevance of objects in understanding children—an insight that would eventually find its articulations in twentieth-century object relations theory and therapeutic interventions. Chapter 2 turns to Charles Dickens and proposes that, by placing his child protagonists, such as Little Nell, alongside unharmable toy-like minor figures, Dickens manifested an intuitive recognition of the therapeutic potential of toys with robust materiality, a gesture looking forward to Klein's incorporation of sturdy toys in her play sessions. Chapter 3 examines the juvenilia of the Brontës, a series of minute manuscripts inspired by the siblings' childhood toys and depicting imaginary happenings in fantasy realms. Smith views these early writings as toy stories and points out their lasting impact on the Brontës' mature works, in which the sisters' childhood fantasies persist as an 'undisciplined underside' (p. 103) despite the dominant theme of pedagogy and domestic realism. This competition of genres foreshadows disagreements beetween Klein and Anna Freud over the purpose of child analysis. The fourth chapter explores the Bildungsroman, including Villette by Charlotte Brontë and The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot. It suggests that Brontë's first-person narrator, Lucy Snowe, resolved her 'blocked' (p. 117) development through learning to play and relating affectively to objects, a process pre-enacting what Klein sought to revive in her unplayful patients through the use of toys. Meanwhile, Eliot's heroine Maggie Tulliver's childhood self-soothing via punishing playthings is clearly a rehearsal of the Kleinian technique. The concluding chapter reinforces the value of studying Victorian toy stories as a means to better trace the complexity of childhood. Smith's approach, described by her as 'anachronism' (p. xiii), distinguishes itself from the historicist paradigm. The latter tends to consider literary texts in relation to their contemporary or earlier contexts. Such a perspective, however, runs the risk of reducing literature to being merely responsive to social conditions. Instead, this monograph asserts the prescience of literature. By emphasizing the fact that Victorian novels already started contemplating pre-Freudian concepts through toy stories, it testifies that literature exhibited a certain foresight in unravelling the intricacies of the human psyche, thereby. . .