During the nineteenth-century “Golden Age” of children’s literature, many British writers conceptualized childhood through the lens of restorative nostalgia, writing books that attempted to re-create an idealized version of childhood that never actually existed. This has led critics of children’s literature from this era to characterize many Victorian authors’ depictions of childhood as a fictionalized adult product that serves to colonize child readers, interpellating them into adult narratives and ideologies. Edith Nesbit was well aware of this tendency, and in The Story of the Treasure Seekers (1899), she attempts to subvert it with her child narrator, Oswald Bastable. With Oswald, Nesbit works to create a version of childhood that crosses what she calls the “great gulf” separating adult writers and child readers by activating “contraband memory.” Contraband memory is, for Nesbit, memory lacking the cloying nostalgia that makes other authors’ versions of childhood falsely idealized. Oswald begins the novel seeking to mimic the idealized memories he finds in children’s books, stealing them and reshaping them to fit his everyday life. But he soon discovers that many of these stolen memories do not play out in real life as they do in books, and Oswald ends the novel with an archive of unidealized memories that offer readers a model of resistance to the literary colonization common in children’s literature. By archiving his childhood memories before they have time to be distorted by adult nostalgia, Oswald creates the kind of contraband memory that Nesbit feels will lead to something new: the representation of more realistic versions of childhood.

This thesis is a cultural history of the early Fabian Society, focusing on the decades between 1884, the Society’s inaugural year, and 1914. The canonical view is that ‘Fabianism,’ which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as the ‘doctrine and principles of the Fabian Society,’ is synonymous with State socialism and bureaucratic ‘efficiency.’ By bringing the methods of cultural history to bear on the Society’s founding members and decades, this thesis reveals that ‘Fabianism’ was in fact used as a dynamic metonymy, not a fixed doctrine, which signified a range of cultural, and even literary, meanings for British commentators in the 1890s and 1900s (Part 1). Further, by expanding the scope of traditional histories of the Fabian Society, which conventionally operate within political and economic sub-fields and focus on the Society’s ‘official’ literature, to include a close examination of the broader discursive context in which ‘Fabianism’ came into being, this thesis sets out to recover the symbolic aspects of the Fabians’ efforts to negotiate what ‘Fabianism’ meant to the English reading public. The Fabians’ conspicuous leadership in the modern education debates and the liberal fight for a ‘free stage,’ and their solidarity with the international political émigrés living in London at the turn of the twentieth century all contribute to this revised perspective on who the founding Fabians were, what they saw themselves as trying to achieve, and where the Fabian Society belonged—and was perceived to belong—in relation to British politics, culture, and society (Part 2). The original contribution of this thesis is the argument that the Fabians explicitly and implicitly evoked Matthew Arnold as a precursor in their efforts to articulate a kind of Fabian—latterly social-democratic—liberalism and a public vocation that balanced English liberties and the duty of the State to provide the ‘best’ for its citizens in education and in culture, as in politics.