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The Victorian Cult of the Little Girl
Nabokov was certainly not the first to immortalise the prepubescent to
adolescent girl. Most significantly a raft of well-known Victorian artists and
writers felt compelled to celebrate and depict the beguiling beauty and
innocence of the Girl/Child.
According to Jacqueline Banerjee, although the worship of children,
and with it the “notion of childhood innocence, goes back at least to Greek
ideas on human perfectibility”, making appearances at various key moments
throughout history, “the so-called ‘Cult of the Child’ [truly] flourished in
England when William Blake and the Romantics embodied it in their
poetry”. 182 Says Jackie Wullschlager, from that time onwards a “fascination
with childhood” appeared “everywhere in nineteenth-century society and
art”. 183 Artists and writers, particularly, ranging from William Wordsworth,
Charles Dickens, Edward Burne-Jones, Edward Lear, George Eliot, John
Everett Millais, Frances Hodgson Burnett, George Macdonald, Dante
Gabriel Rossetti, Julia Margaret Cameron, J. M. Barrie and A. A. Milne,
amongst many others, “took the Victorian romance with childhood to an
extreme”. 184 In art, Thomas Cooper Gotch immortalised the Girl/Child as
Icon in two of his most famous works, My Crown and Sceptre (1891) and The
Child Enthroned (1894) (Figs 76 & 77).
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