ABSTRACT
I have recently finished writing a history of subjectivity—one aspect of the history of subjectivity—attempting to describe the way in which, between the end of the eighteenth century and the early part of the twentieth, childhood (the cluster of ideas and beliefs connected to childhood: the ‘idea of childhood’) became representative, or emblematic, of adult interiority. ‘Interiority’ is a term quite widely used in modern literary and cultural history, to describe an interiorised subjectivity, a sense of the self within—a quite richly detailed self (Miles 1993:124–42). I have tried to show that from about the end of the eighteenth century, what was felt and known about the self and its individual history was most easily articulated around the idea of the child, most obviously because so much information about growth, development and change was expounded in relationship to children as objects of scientific inquiry.
