SOURCE: "The Balancing of Child and Adult: An Approach to Victorian Fantasies for Children," in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 37, No. 4, March, 1983, pp. 497-530.

In the essay below, Knoepflmacher proposes that the best authors of Victorian children's fantasy—especially Lewis Carroll and Rudyard Kipling—were able to successfully balance the friction between an adult's and a child's perception of events, and that this characteristic is what makes fantasy stories appealing to both audiences.

Much has been written on the socializing aspects of children's literature, on this or that classic's promotion of maturity and healthy growth. Yet children's books, especially works of fantasy, rely just as heavily on the artist's ability to tap a rich reservoir of regressive yearnings. Such works can be said to hover between the states of perception that William Blake had labeled innocence and experience. From the vantage point of experience, an adult imagination re-creates an earlier...