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Moving nimbly between literary and historical texts, Monica Flegel provides a much-needed interpretive framework for understanding the specific formulation of child cruelty popularized by the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) in the late nineteenth century. Flegel considers a wide range of well-known and more obscure texts from the mid-eighteenth century to the early twentieth, including philosophical writings by Locke and Rousseau, poetry by Coleridge, Blake, and Caroline Norton, works by journalists and reformers like Henry Mayhew and Mary Carpenter, and novels by Frances Trollope, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Arthur Morrison. Taking up crucial topics such as the linking of children with animals, the figure of the child performer, the relationship between commerce and child endangerment, and the problem of juvenile delinquency, Flegel examines the emergence of child abuse as a subject of legal and social concern in England, and its connection to earlier, primarily literary representations of endangered children. With the emergence of the NSPCC and the new crime of cruelty to children, new professions and genres, such as child protection and social casework, supplanted literary works as the authoritative voices in the definition of social ills and their cure. Flegel argues that this development had material effects on the lives of children, as well as profound implications for the role of class in representations of suffering and abused children. Combining nuanced close readings of individual texts with persuasive interpretations of their influences and limitations, Flegel's book makes a significant contribution to the history of childhood, social welfare, the family, and Victorian philanthropy.

All the World's a Stage: Theorizing and Producing Blended Identities in a Cybercultural World explores the extent to which cyber and real selves increasingly overlap, intersect, and entwine. As the quotation from Shakespeare indicates, the question of the roles we play in society and their relation to our self is not new; however, the rise of cyberculture has further complicated the relationship between our sense of self and our social roles, because it provides more opportunities to adopt new or changed identities. Some contributors to this volume welcome the complexities of the self that cyberculture has engendered, and explore changes in morality, community, and identity. Others acknowledge the negative effects of such performative identities, questioning what we lose by constructing ourselves so constantly in response to a virtual audience. Nevertheless, cyberculture is now real culture, and coming to terms with who we are online increasingly determines who we are altogether.

This volume explores \"blended identities\" of cyber and \"real world\" selves. Focusing on the theorization, production, and application of blended lives in a cyber world, the essays cover diverse social, cultural, and international contexts.

[...]what also becomes obscured in texts in which the animal is clearly a stand-in for the working classes, as in Pussy's Road to Ruin and \"The Adventures of a Cat through Her Nine Lives,\" is, of course, the animal herself; the details of the protagonist's marriage and the abuse that she suffers from Thomas take the text out of the realm of cruelty to animals and into that of human relationships.

There is a central contradiction in human relationships with animals: as Erica Fudge notes, “We live with animals, we recognize them, we even name some of them, but at the same time we use them as if they were inanimate, as if they were objects” (8). Such a contradiction is also, of course, present in human interactions, in which power relations allow for the objectification of one human being by another. In an analysis of images and texts produced by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) in the nineteenth-century, I want to examine the overlap in representations of animals and humans as subject to objectification and control. One common way of critiquing human treatment of animals within the RSPCA's journals, Animal World and Band of Mercy, was to have humans trade places with animals: having boys fantastically shrunk to the size of the animals they tortured, for example, or imagining the horrors of vivisection when experienced by humans. Such imaginative exercises were meant to defamiliarize animal usage by implying a shared experience of suffering: what was wrong for a human was clearly just as wrong for an animal. However, I argue that some of the images employed by the society suggest the opposite; instead of constructing animal cruelty in a new light, these images instead work to underline the shared proximity of particular humans with animals. In texts that focus specifically upon humans wearing animal bonds – reins, collars, and muzzles – the RSPCA's anti-cruelty discourse both critiqued the tools of bondage and, I suggest, invited the audience to see deep connections between animals and the humans taking their place. Such connections ultimately weaken the force of the animal/human reversal as an animal rights strategy, suggesting as they do that humans themselves often have use value in economies of labor, affect, and are subject to the same power relations that produce an animal as “animal.”

Is childhood a classless construct? In an analysis of selected Victorian texts, this paper argues that the reconceptualization of “the child” in Victorian England allowed for representations of children as malleable social subjects, capable of class transvestism that both challenged and affirmed the fixity of social boundaries.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: 87 “Facts andTheir Meaning”: Child Protection, Intervention, and the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children in Late Nineteenth-Century England Mon ica Flegel • In The Queen’s Reign for Children (1897),William Clarke Hall writes that prior to the passage of the“Children’s Charter” in 1889,“there was no such offence known to English law as the mere ill-treatment, no such offence as the mere neglect of a child.The Society resolved to create these offences” (159–60). Hall refers here to the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC).1 Founded in 1884, this organization succeeded in “creating” such an offence through the publication of “facts”—details elicited by the NSPCC inspectors’ casework and then disclosed to the public through pamphlets and the Society’s monthly publication, The Child’s Guardian. Such dissemination was necessary, the NSPCC argued, because“The public know next to nothing about the nature and extent of cruelty to children” (Waugh, “Notes” [April 1887]: 30). The English public did, of course, know a great deal about child suffering in the nineteenth century, that subject being central to innumerable novels, social tracts, and charitable organizations throughout the period. By constructing child abuse as a hidden evil, however, one that only the NSPCC’s own inspectors could detect and address, the Society succeeded in simultaneously “creating” an offence and promoting the means of its amelioration: a trained, professionalized inspectorate. The NSPCC’s earliest narratives did not, however, construct child abuse as unknown and unseen; instead, the opening editorial of The Child’s Guardian in January 1887 claimed that its purpose was to reach “such persons as are already interested in the condition of little victims of cruel treatment, wrongful neglect, and improper employment” (Waugh, Untitled 1) and instruct them as to “what they can and cannot do about these evils” (1). But by the end of the century, the role of the NSPCC in relation to the public, at least in terms of the Society’s own discourse, had seemingly changed: what was required of the reader of The Child’s Guardian was not “interest” but support; not a desire to be given authority but to respect that of the Society. I would argue that this shift in the representation of social problems and their resolution, in which the role of the public changes from being involved, invested, and, with the proper victorian review • Volume 33 Number 1 88 knowledge, empowered to one of simply supporting those with the proper expertise, speaks to an important consequence of the emergence of professional disciplines such as child protection. In examining the ways in which the NSPCC understood“facts and their meaning” (“Inspector’s Directory” 32), I will argue that professionalized casework must be understood not solely as a disciplined form of intervention but, perhaps more interestingly, as giving rise to a highly constructed form of representing intervention, one that safeguards the singular expertise of the trained professional. R epr esen ting So cia l Ills The dilemma of how to represent social ills so as to provide an accurate depiction of a particular problem and of its solution plagued social reformers, writers, and the English government throughout the nineteenth century. In States of Inquiry: Social Investigations and Print Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain and the United States, Oz Frankel notes,“The social enters public consciousness in times of crisis: war, riot, major accident, epidemic, or natural disaster” (6). InVictorian England, the“two nations” debate constituted just such a crisis; the perception that “distinct social blocks lived completely ignorant of each other” and that “the social sphere, spatially conceived, had grown thoroughly divided between segments that were known and familiar and those that were designated hidden” (6) inspired numerous discursive mediations, from the literary to the socialscientific . Organizations such as the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science and key documents such as James Phillips Kay’s The Moral and Physical Conditions of the Labouring Classes (1832) and Edwin Chadwick’s Report on the Sanitary Conditions in England (1842) drew upon statistics as a means of providing what was felt to be a comprehensive depiction of social problems in England. Such...