Educational Anxiety and Childhood in Victorian Literature: A Systematic Review of Pedagogical Dread, Institutional Power, and the Traumatised Child in the Nineteenth-Century Imagination

Abstract

Childhood, education, and anxiety form one of the most fruitful, and the most morally freighted, fields of Victorian literary imagination. The child in the schoolroom, as object of interrogation of the most profound contradictions of its own epoch, of the evolutionary ideology of disciplinary formation, of the Benthamite belief in systematic teaching, of the Romantic legacy of child innocence, of the new psychological understanding of enduring developmental mutilation, reappear in the writings of Charles Dickens, of Thomas Hardy, again and again. The systematic review of the scholarly literature in the field of educational anxiety and childhood in Victorian literature described in this paper was carried out in line with the PRISMA 2020 guidelines and included 138 sources related to peer-reviewed literature, studies of historical education, psychological and psychoanalytic criticism, and research on digital humanities published between the years 1990 and 2024. The review defines five thematic nodes in which the representation of educational anxiety in Victorian literature works: the architecture of institutional fear; the body as location of pedagogical violence; the gendered difference of educational aspiration and anxiety; the figure of the autodidact as anxious alternative; the afterlife of childhood educational trauma in adult character formation. Close reading of canonical texts including

David Copperfield (1850) and Hard Times (1854) by Dickens, Jane Eyre (1847) by Charlotte Bronte, Tom Brown School Days (1857) by Thomas Hughes, The Mill on the Floss (1860) by George Eliot and Jude the Obscure (1895) by Hardy, as well as a larger collection of less studied schoolroom narratives, provide evidence in support of the main line of argument: that Victorian literature was not simply a reflection of educational anxiety but rather the major cultural technology by which Victorian society worked out, negotiated, and in some measure produced its own anxieties about how the modern subject came to be made in institutionalized instruction. The paper concludes by mapping the contemporary relevance of this Victorian literary-pedagogical archive for twenty-first-century debates about educational trauma, curriculum ideology, and the politics of childhood.