Revolutions at Home: The Origin of Modern Childhood and the German Middle Class by Emily C. Bruce (review)

Book Reviews sentimental fiction and Thomas Malthus’s ideas about population and reproduction. Most literary discussions of Malthus focus on British literature, so this chapter fills a gap in scholarship by considering Malthus’s American influence. Reading Dred through a Malthusian perspective reveals how Stowe does not imagine children as solving societal problems; rather, white children call attention to anxieties about overpopulation and reinforce settler colonialist ideologies. For example, some characters marry but don’t have children, while impoverished white children threaten the survival of their whole family. The book’s conclusion addresses how the various types of “antisocial” childhoods continue past the antebellum period, as evident in Zitkala-Ša’s writings and Pauline Hopkins’s Winona: A Tale of Negro Life in the South and Southwest. Soderberg also raises interesting points about contemporary classifications such as “crack baby” that still exclude children of color from more idealized definitions of childhood. Indeed, the book’s discussion on viewing children as threats to the future of the United States is particularly relevant today, especially after the murders of Black youth like Trayvon Martin and Tamir Rice. Although the book pays careful attention to race and age categories, Soderberg acknowledges the project’s limits: it risks reinforcing harmful narratives about marginalized children, especially Black children, and it centers on adult constructions of childhood rather than children’s perspectives. While reading, I wondered whether antebellum children saw themselves as vicious—or as anything other than innocent, vulnerable, and sentimental. Furthermore, if a child steals from a store or burns down a building, are they participants in constructing childhood as incorrigible? Future studies considering child-authored texts or Marah Gubar’s kinship model could be particularly useful to further map out alternative antebellum childhoods. Overall, Vicious Infants would be useful for scholars interested in antebellum US literature, medical or legal histories of US childhood, and how race impacted nineteenth-century US childhoods. This book shows the value of reconsidering the categories scholars use to understand childhood. Thinking further about which children belong to these categories and which are excluded from them can produce a better understanding of how the antebellum United States envisioned their society.