ABSTRACT
Recent decades have seen a proliferation of works of historical fiction which engage self-consciously with the nineteenth century and its socio-political, cultural, and ideological legacies. In The Future of Nostalgia, Svetlana Boym differentiates between "restorative" and "reflective" nostalgia. Neo-Victorian fictions of nineteenth-century child sex abuse do not manifest desire for an earlier age of fantasized sexual ignorance/innocence so much as desire for the knowledge/experience of sexual horrors, real and imagined. Maud Lilly's childhood reading material and further 'education', as well as what may justifiably be called her child 'sex work', is exclusively of the pornographic variety. Maud's complicity in sexual violence moderates reader sympathy for her as child victim, further complicated by the first-person point of view. Boym even accords nostalgia a "utopian dimension", enabling the exploration of "the unrealised dreams of the past and visions of the future", since rendered obsolete by an unfulfilling present.
