ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that children lose their agency in their interaction with things, and become overwhelmed by the things' tendency to develop agency of their own. It argues that Edith Nesbit is far more interested in the 'improper' use of objects that were never intended to be played with, especially humble domestic items such as forks and spoons, flannel petticoats, glass bottles, bath towels, brown paper, panamas, and umbrellas. The chapter examines the troublesome nature of things as children interact with them in the novels of Nesbit and Frances Hodgson Burnett. Dolls in children's literature have their own long and well-documented history, as 'real' toys carrying associations with female bonding, rivalry, and preparation for adult female roles. Laurie Langbauer, writing about the early nineteenth-century child writer Marjory Fleming, argues that despite 'an explosion of scholarship in nineteenth-century studies devoted to the figure of the child'.
