“One must have a heart of stone,” Oscar Wilde allegedly quipped, “to read the death of Little Nell without laughing.” It's odd that so many of us know this bon mot, since it comes to us not from Wilde himself, but from a second-hand recollection of a conversation with him reported thirty years after he died.Footnote ¹ Perhaps we've embraced this epigram not just because it's funny, but also because we like to think of Wilde as a witty iconoclast who anticipates our own skepticism about how the Victorians doubled down on an idealized vision of childhood innocence inherited from the Romantics.

Yet Wilde was not alone in turning a jaundiced eye on his culture's habit of conceiving of children as the epitome of goodness and attractiveness. Even at the very beginning of Victoria's reign, a motley crew of comic writers, artists, and dramatists had already begun producing hilarious send-ups of popular artworks that sacralized and often eroticized children. Studying these forgotten parodies can help us to expand our archive of cultural artifacts that perpetuated the phenomenon Victorian commentators dubbed “babyolatry,” “child-worship,” and “the cult of the child.”Footnote ² It can also assist us in figuring out which of our critical hunches about this cult hold water.

Consider, for example, humorist Thomas Hood's “A Parental Ode to My Son, Aged Three Years and Five Months” (1836).Footnote ³ Hood's title invites us to smirk at fond parents and poets who presume that the public cares to know the precise age of child subjects such as Hartley Coleridge, the “faery voyager” who floats through William Wordsworth's “To H. C., Six Years Old” (1807) as well as Coleridge Senior's “Frost at Midnight” (1798).Footnote ⁴ Whereas his predecessors sing the praises of blissful babes who embody peace and joy and evoke a similar serenity in others, Hood's efforts to apostrophize his son in such terms are repeatedly interrupted and undermined by the child's own actions:

This “Ode” parodies the archaic language Wordsworth and company use, as well as the solipsism whereby they reify the child as a symbol of their past selves or present status as advocates of nature, imagination, and sensibility in an increasingly industrialized society. The latter tendency manifests itself strongly in “Frost at Midnight,” in which the quiescent baby is such an absent presence that the father-narrator describes himself as enjoying “that solitude, which suits / Abstruser musings” over the course of a remarkably “calm” and “silent” night.Footnote ⁶

Hood, by contrast, reminds us that writing about and taking care of children are often antithetical activities. His father-narrator's efforts to glorify a depersonalized “cherub” keep getting derailed by the necessity of comforting, cleaning, and corralling little John, who snuffles, pukes, grabs a knife off the family table, and so on.Footnote ⁷ Moreover, “A Parental Ode” first appeared alongside Hood's hilarious “Serenade,” which anticipates the recent bestseller Go the Fuck to Sleep (2011) by rhyming the soothing refrain “Lullaby, oh, lullaby” with desperate lines like “The brat will never shut an eye,” “Mary, you must come and try!” and “Two such nights, and I shall die!”Footnote ⁸ Confirming Judith Plotz's point that Romantic poets who celebrate the Child of Nature “practice a kind of forcible repatriation … that wrests children away from the female sphere” of home and family,Footnote ⁹ Hood goes the other way in these “Domestic Poems” by highlighting how motherly labor behind the scenes enables the productivity of male artists.Footnote ¹⁰ After the newly mobile John invades his father's territory—“Thou idol of thy parents—(Drat the boy! / There goes my ink!)”—the frazzled father-narrator of Hood's “Ode” concludes he “cannot write” unless his cherished wife Jane whisks the troublesome tot upstairs.Footnote ¹¹

Digging up forgotten parodies of child-centered art can sometimes help scholars to resolve critical debates about the cult of the child. Recall, for example, the recent kerfuffle in Victorian Studies over John Everett Millais's Cherry Ripe, which was painted in 1879 and reproduced by the London newspaper the Graphic as part of their 1880 Christmas Annual. After Laurel Bradley attributed the popularity of this image of a pretty little girl to its evocation of “timeless purity,” Pamela Tamarkin Reis objected that Bradley's account ignores the “pronounced pedophilic appeal” of this picture, whereupon Robert M. Polhemus accused Reis of engaging in a form of presentism that “ascribe[s] to others what she sees herself.”Footnote ¹²

Yet Reis's position gains credence when we discover how a contemporary cartoonist made fun of Cherry Ripe. On January 8, 1881, the jokers at Punch presented the public with “a Graphic Companion Picture to Mr. Millais’ charming Cherry Ripe”: Cherry Un-Ripe, which went unsigned when it first appeared, but was later attributed to one Mr. T. G. Stowers (see fig. 1).

Figure 1.

“Cherry Un-Ripe,” Punch (January 8, 1881), 9. Unsigned, but later attributed to Mr. T. G. Stowers when reprinted in An Evening with “Punch,” Being a Selection, from the “First Fifty Years of ‘Punch’” (London: Bradbury, Agnew & Co, 1900), 125. Reproduced with permission of Punch Ltd., www.punch.co.uk.

Title, caption, and image work together here to subvert the coy eroticism of the source text. Victorian porn described men who were sexually interested in children as having a taste for “unripe fruit.”Footnote ¹³ So the descriptor “graphic” in the caption might have been functioning as a triple pun that alludes to the periodical in which Cherry Ripe appeared, the adjective meaning “drawn with a pencil or pen,” and the one that indicates explicit or unexpurgated content. If so, then title and caption together lay bare the pedophilic subtext of Millais's print, as does the cartoonist's decision to alter the very aspects of Millais's image that Reis flags as problematic. Cherry Un-Ripe transforms a little girl who is easy on the eyes into one who is about to lose her lunch: the come-hither gaze of Millais's little charmer has been replaced by a grimace of gastric distress, even as the dark gloves that originally drew our attention to her crotch now clutch her stomach.

Like Hood, Stowers reminds us that children have minds (and desires) of their own. Whereas Millais likens his little girl to fruit—she's a sweet, tempting morsel offered up for adult consumption—Stowers has his little girl consume the fruit. The fact that the cherries make her ill implies that being erotically objectified by adults like Millais is not conducive to the health and happiness of children. But young people, the cartoon's caption hints, need not passively accept such treatment. Instead, like the schoolchild whom the caption credits for drafting Cherry Un-Ripe during his Christmas break, they can pick up a pen and represent themselves in order to counter romanticized adult depictions of children.

Was Stowers really underage? Probably not.Footnote ¹⁴ But one thing's for sure: the Victorians were not as green as they were cabbage-looking. Scholars tend to underestimate how much pushback there was against the middle-class ideology of childhood innocence during the nineteenth century because we generally pay more attention to canonical novels and poetry than to comic verse, cartoons, puppet shows, pantomimes, and other art aimed at mass, mixed-age audiences. We can wise up by close-reading more silly stuff.