ABSTRACT
‘The Criminal’ was first published in November 1907 in the first of four issues of the author’s short-lived magazine, the Neolith. While conceived as a children’s periodical, the Neolith was in actuality a coterie publication whose primary appeal was to a specialized circle of adults; Julia Briggs calls it ‘a high-class scrapbook of discrete contributions from particular – and rather limited – literary and artistic circles’. In the context of the self-consciously artistic setting, ‘The Criminal’ may strike the reader not as lachrymose but as a psychological study of the viewpoints both of the child and of the self-flagellating mother. For Nesbit’s unnamed but ‘criminal’ mother, there is no succour to be found either from Christ or from the child’s father; just as ‘they had not set any term to [the child’s] imprisonment’, grief appears to have no endpoint.
