Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield abounds with fatherless and motherless children, whose development into adolescence and adulthood is strongly affected by the parenting skills of the remaining parent. This essay studies different parenting and educational practices in the novel to see their impact on the behaviour and personality of the children. In Victorian England, two opposing views of childhood flourished: the Puritan one believing in childhood depravity, and the Romantic view based on childhood innocence. In addition, there were gender differences in upbringing stemming from the middle-class cult of domesticity as well as differences based on class distinctions. While Dickens seems to accept moral firmness, the Victorian ideal of manhood and womanhood, as the main goal of upbringing, he appears to disagree with Victorian child management practices. This essay shows the deficiencies and negative outcomes of the parenting styles based on the two opposing moral views, depicted in Mr. Murdstone’s Puritan discipline and Mrs. Steerforth’s parenting, which reflects the Romantic view of the child.  On the basis of the negative consequences of these two extremes, Dickens stresses the importance of a sound view of the child exemplified by Aunt Betsey’s loving discipline accompanied by guidance and responsibility, as well as by the educational practices in Doctor Strong’s school. Furthermore, this Victorian Bildungsroman emphasises the importance of a confidential loving relationship between the guardian and the child as well as proper education and social conditioning.

The Prelude and David Copperfield reveal strikingly similar patterns of their heroes' development from boyhood to manhood; the idiosyncrasy of their growth can be found in its retrogressive rather than progressive aspect.

This diploma thesis deals with the portrayal of child heroes in English and American literature, in works of Charles Dickens and Mark Twain. The chosen novels are Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. These novels are analysed in the themes of child labour and poverty, racism, religion, the view of the world by children in contrast to the adult perspective, upbringing and education. The last chapter deals with the humour of both novelists. Thus the emphasis is put on the social aspect of the literary output of Dickens and Twain. The main aim of the thesis is to depict these child heroes and their acting in the literature of the 19th century, and to reflect the life experience of both authors.

This PhD comprises a work of fiction and a dissertation, both of which explore childhood, children and parenthood. The Imagined Child, the novel, closely examines the nature of parenthood, the expectations inherent in the parent-child relationship, and the responsibilities that society imposes on parents. It explores the strains of guilt and blame that surround all primary relationships: every child is damaged in some way – through nature and nurture. How they deal with that damage determines the kinds of adults – and ultimately the kinds of parents – they become. The dissertation approaches childhood as a literary device. It explores the ways in which four novelists from different historical periods have characterised and thematised childhood. It presents ‘childhood’ as a social construct and considers the ways in which childhood and parenting have changed in recent, Western history. It then focuses on the research into and literary representations of children in Africa to explore the versions of childhood inherited by African, and particularly South African, children and how this differs from American or European models. Textual analysis was employed to examine the representation of childhood in four texts: Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield (1850), L.P. Hartley’s The Go-Between (1953), Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), and Michiel Heyns’s The Children’s Day (2002). An examination of research and literature shows a very different trajectory for childhood in Africa than in Europe, and reveals that childhood on the continent has never been consistent, in life or literature. There is, in other words, no universal “African childhood”. The literary children of South Africa are examined not only to show how differently childhood is experienced in diverse segments of society, but also to measure the temperature of the times. The differing versions of literary childhood, and their varying treatments, provide a gauge for the zeitgeist in South African society from the 1990s. The dissertation argues that an examination of literary children provides insight into the development of a new democracy. The dissertation and the novel, taken together, suggest that through the real and imagined children of literature can be gained a sense of ourselves.