novel of the century: "Don't cry, papa. I am not afraid to go. Jesus is coming for me." But it was Marie Corelli, in The Mighty Atom (1896), who most fully revealed its significance when she asked "whether for many a child it would not have been happiest never to have grown up at all." She advised her readers not to "grieve for the fair legions of beloved children who have passed away in their childhood," since "we know, even without the aid of Gospel comfort, that it is 'far better' with them so." The idea that children are better off dead casts an unexpectedly lurid light on the nineteenth-century cult of childhood, which held children up to adoration but denied them any compellingly imagined possibility of development, in which early experience would continue to inform adult perceptions. An impoverished view of adulthood, this ostensibly sympathetic view of childhood also falsified the very thing it purported to celebrate, attributing to children Peter Pan's wish "always to be a boy and have fun," a wish that only jaded, embittered adults could have conceived.

Jeremy Bentham, that indefatigable advocate of improvement, noted with approval that in his day the "wisdom of our ancestors" had become a "sarcastic jibe of hatred and insult," the world having learned the folly of idolizing the "wisdom of untaught inexperienced generations." A writer in Household Words, a magazine edited for a time by Charles Dickens, made the same point in the course of a diatribe against the worship of the past. "The older the world grows the more experience it acquires," and the "genuine good old times" were nineteenth-century times, not the days of yore. But these writers missed the point: a belief that the world had grown wiser did not prevent the modern world from looking back on less enlightened ages with fond regret. Idealization of the past had come to rest not on respect for ancestral wisdom but on the assimilation of the past to images of childlike innocence. The more emphatically the modern age insisted on its own wisdom, experience, and maturity, the more appealing allegedly simple, unsophisticated times appeared in retrospect. Progress implied nostalgia as its mirror image.

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