ABSTRACT
With the birth of children's literature in the nineteenth century, representations of various states of desire and fear became associated with childhood in imaginative literature written for and about childhood. The two imaginative uses of the child, in Blake's lyrics and in Wordsworth's Prelude and "Immortality Ode", suggest early representations of two paradigms, later reconfigured by two of the great nineteenth-century writers of fiction for children, Lewis Carroll and Kenneth Grahame. Blake's ironic use of the child's voice in his lyrics is echoed in Carroll's satiric mode. And Grahame was highly influenced by Wordsworth's association of childhood with the pastoral imagery of nature and as the source of inspiration for creativity. Grahame's idyll contains significant passages and narrative elements that echo Carroll's sense of the darkness and pain of the child's journey through the adult world, of the socialization process through which we all pass.
