Childhood as scholars often recognize it—innocent, vulnerable, and above all, precious—is anchored in the cultural imagination of the early nineteenth-century United States, when an attitude of child worship drove sentimental politics and literature. But, not all childhoods were defined by love, education, and nurture. Singled out by nineteenth-century legal and medical establishments, children already marginalized by slavery, ethnicity, and poverty were increasingly branded as incorrigible, delinquent, and antisocial.

Vicious Infants offers a counterhistory of literary childhood as both perceived social threat and site of resistance, revealing that many children were not only cut off from family and society, they were also preemptively excluded from the rewards of citizenship and adulthood. Turning to prison documents, medical journals, overlooked periodical fiction, and literary works from William Apess, Harriet Wilson, Herman Melville, Susan Paul, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, Laura Soderberg recovers alternate narratives of childhood and provides an important window into the cultural links between race, reproduction, and childhood in the antebellum period.

LAURA SODERBERG is assistant professor of English at University of Southern Indiana.

"Soderberg's work is especially important because it utilizes an innovative archive to radically shift the reading of children from the private to the public sphere and demonstrates how the study of childhood can open up new ways of thinking about population."—Allison Giffen, coeditor of Saving the World: Girlhood and Evangelicalism in Nineteenth-Century Literature

"Vicious Infants makes a significant contribution to the study of childhood, non-idealized childhoods, and the child as understood in relation to paradigms of race and class."—Melanie Dawson, author of Laboring to Play: Home Entertainment and the Spectacle of Middle-Class Cultural Life, 1850–1920

"[A] significant scholarly contribution to childhood studies, as well as, of course, nineteenth-century American literature and culture . . . Soderberg reinforces the discursive nature of childhood through her impressive, important research."—Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth

“Soderberg’s contribution lies in locating the viciousness, not of children, but of the adults who had guardianship or authority over them . . . [S]he draws attention to the complex ways in which children became embedded in discourses about belonging and progress. In this respect, her work usefully adds to accounts of early American literature and discourses of national belonging and citizenship.”—American Literary History