ABSTRACT
In Jean Webster's 1915 best-selling young adult novel, Dear Enemy, narrator Sallie McBride enthuses in her letter about the formation of eugenic protocols to, as she terms it, wipe out Americans deemed "feeble-minded". Fabian Society founder and activist Sidney Webb wrote many tracts on social patterns and conditions throughout his career, but in 1907 he turned his attention to the falling birth rate in England. This chapter argues that eugenics seeped into mainstream British and American children's literature. Fabian socialism never finds a concrete solution on how to reconcile childhood advocacy and eugenics where the former intersects with disability. Rather, writers like Nesbit and Webster attempt to navigate ways both fantastic and pragmatic to ultimately remove the disabled child from view, whether that is to the recesses of romantic history or the margins—both geographical and on the page—of society.
