The Mind of the Child charts the complex interplay between the literary and medical domains as nineteenth-century writers sought to explore the psychology of childhood. Focusing on questions of childhood mental development, it looks at changing representations of imagination, violence, nervous disorders and sexuality, and the child's relations to primitive cultures and animal forms of life. By opening up the neglected fields of early child developmentstudies and psychiatry, and setting both canonical and non-canonical literary works in a new context, it offers a range of fresh literary readings. It also offers the first historical overview of both child psychology and psychiatry in Britain from the 1830s through to the crucial decade of the 1890s, whenhistories customarily begin.