'The Child is Father of the Man'discusses the field of nineteenth-century Juvenilia. Specifically, the development of the child writer into the adult author, arguing for increased critical attention toward the early works of now famous writers.
The introductory chapter reviews the role of juvenilia in the writing progression of famous authors and provides a discussion of current academic scholarship in the field of juvenilia. The book then focuses on the individual literary progressions of the nineteenth-century British writers William Harrison Ainsworth, Emily Brontë, and George Eliot, and the Anglo-Irish writer, Maria Edgeworth. The analysis in each chapter has been contextualised within the historical, regional, gothic and lyric modes, and includes an interdisciplinary study in the fields of history, biography, and languages and linguistics. Each chapter is provided as an individual case study espousing the importance of the juvenilia on the development of the later, more publicised, authorship. The concluding chapter discusses the future of the genre with reference to the discoveries outlined in the text, and juxtaposes these findings with the perceived neglect juvenilia has received from the academic community.