This book views Romantic literature's discourses of childhood education and reproduction
through the eyes of four early nineteenth-century British authors who were uniquely implicated
in those discourses. Hartley and Sara Coleridge children of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Mary
Wollstonecraft Shelley and William Godwin Jr children of William Godwin shared the
predicament of being both 'real' and 'literary' children. All the children of authors who
helped shape culturally-definitive Romantic-period ideas about childhood they wrote back to
their fathers in order to understand and to resist the ways in which they were produced by
paternal texts which foreclose the possibility of the child's own regeneration. This study
proposes that through this predicament and their responses to it the literature of the period
between the Romantic and the Victorian periods comes into focus marked by an anxiety not of
influence but of reproduction. It suggests that one reason why this period has tended to
disappear from view lies in the sense of historical and aesthetic difference and productive
failure which this study uncovers.
