Strange dislocations

Carolyn Steedman's work on the theme of childhood is amongst the most radically innovative in Britain today. In this brilliant new study she takes as her starting point the idea of childhood and its history which, she argues, has much less to do with actual children than with adult concepts of the self and the way they have developed since the end of the eighteenth century. Pursuing nineteenth-century street children, child actors and acrobats, she uses the perspectives of social and cultural history and the history of psychoanalysis and physiology, in order to write the uncanny story of a child who never actually existed - the strange, disturbed child Mignon, from Goethe's Wilhelm Meister. In this way, Carolyn Steedman discusses a search for the self, for a past that is lost and gone, and the ways in which, over the last hundred years, the lost object/essence/vision has come to assume the shape and form of a child.