ABSTRACT
The fashion for sentimental child-worship was acknowledged and lamented by Max Beerbohm in 1900.1 In 1905, in a review of Peter Pan, he regretted that the ‘cult for children’ was an ongoing development whereby they had become ‘specimens to be carefully preserved, and dotingly dilated on.’2 In fact Beerbohm had himself been an adoring participant in the craze for the child-star Minnie Terry, just like Ernest Dowson who had participated in the fashionable cult-of-little-girls as an undergraduate at Oxford. Since the 1850s, when Lewis Carroll began entertaining the little daughters of dons to tea in his rooms, girl children had become mascots to Oxford men. Men like Carroll and his contemporary John Ruskin expressed a yearning for the purity of the child they could not find in women: ‘if woman’s grown body soiled the passive purity of her childlike mind, it was better to seek all the positive qualities, all the passive, compliant qualities of woman, in the child itself.’ The very purity of the child seemed to preclude the threat of a sexual challenge.3 Edgar Jepson, whose Oxford career overlapped with Dowson’s, wrote of the continuing cultivation of little girls in the 1880s: ‘men used to have them to tea and take them on the river and write verses to them.’4 These men furthered ‘a form of courtly love: a perfect adoring love with the object of one’s affections being unable and not required to reciprocate.’5 An aesthetic ideal of female purity was discovered in the unthreatening and unresisting features of the child; beyond her hovered puberty, after which Dowson bemoaned (as would Burke’s Quong Lee) that ‘little girls grow up and become those objectionable animals, women.’6
