VSAO Conference 2026
The 58th Annual VSAO Conference will take place on Saturday 25 April 2026, at Glendon College, York University. The topic for this year’s conference is: “Victorian Children and Childhoods.” The full Call for Papers is listed below. Please consider submitting a proposal!
“Victorian Children and Childhoods”
“Victoria’s England was a child-dominated society,” Marah Gubar declares. The discourses that circulated about young people, however, were often in conflict. How can one reconcile the sentimentalized images of children associated with Kate Greenaway and the high infant and child mortality rates, inadequate schooling, and child labour so typical of the nineteenth century? Nevertheless, as the century progressed, the Victorian age was marked by a new interest in the child’s perspective and experience. A Victorian “cult of the child” was the result, as the inner workings of young people became an object of interest and even study across the cultural and disciplinary spectrum, from novels and autobiographies to educational reform documents and psychiatric case studies. Gradually, the development of children’s literature as a golden site for fantasy and adventure treated childhood less as a period of preparation for adult life than as a time wonderfully separate from it. Virginia Woolf’s lovely phrase that characterizes childhood as “that great Cathedral space” is loaded with awe and beauty but also with ironic iconoclasm. All of the magical places of children’s literature (Wonderland, Neverland, the Secret Garden, even Treasure Island) understand childhood as a distant someplace else.
For Sally Shuttleworth, “The figure of the child… lies at the heart of nineteenth-century discourses of gender, race, and selfhood: a figure who is by turns animal, savage, or female, but who is located not in the distant colonies, nor in the mists of evolutionary time, but at the very centre of English domestic life” (4). She suggests that it might be time to add age (or, more specifically, childhood) to the triumvirate of class, gender, and race in explorations of the Victorian era. As such, this one-day conference proposes to examine the many ways in which the Victorians opened children and childhoods up to literary, scientific, legal, and medical scrutiny.
Papers might consider topics including, but are not limited to:
- Victorian attitudes to childhood;
- Social, educational, and scientific debates about childhood and youth;
- Children and youth in Victorian literature;
- Romantic ideas of childhood innocence vs. Evangelical-fuelled notions of the child as inherently sinful;
- Children in art; children’s book illustration; painting books; illustrated gift books;
- Children and Empire;
- Children at play; children’s games and sources of entertainment;
- Theatricals / pantomimes / ballets / circus acts and the involvement of child actors;
- Legislation addressing childhood; child welfare; “protected childhood” (prohibitions on labour; the extension of the age of compulsory schooling; the age of sexual consent, etc.);
- Victorian children’s literature; Golden Age of children’s literature; chapbooks; juvenile periodicals, ephemera, etc.;
- Nineteenth-century constructions of the child mind;
- The commodification of childhood;
- Child development in literature, science, and medicine
The one-day conference will be held on Saturday 25 April 2026, at Glendon College, York University.
Please send a 300-word proposal and 50-word bio (as MS Word documents) by 26 January 2026, to Alison Halsall, ahalsall@yorku.ca.