ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses a set of ideas and presuppositions that feed the need, in the adult artist, ‘to believe in and endorse a certain mythology of childhood. Some mutually influential factors affecting how painters and writers interpreted the child and conveyed childhood experiences will recur. They concern ideology, artistic conventions and money. Visual representations of nineteenth-century childhood were, at best, ambivalent images. Robert Herrick’s poem suggests that the image of childhood, through its very vulnerability and fragility, provides a powerful vehicle through which to concentrate the tension between sensuality and delicacy, between the sinful and the pure. William Blake’s ‘contraries’, reflected in his images of childhood in the 1790s, suggest a framework with which to consider visual and literary representations of the child during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As will become apparent, the oppositions are all variations on the Blakean theme. Blake painted The Good and Evil Angels Struggling for Possession of a Child in about 1793/94.
