"This book charts the development of the Romantic ideal of childhood, starting with Rousseau's Emile, and attends to its visual, social and psychological transformations during the historical period from which Freud's psychoanalytic theories eventually emerged. Foremost scholars such as Anne Higonnet, Carol Mavor, Susan Casteras and Linda Pollock uncover the means by which children became an important conduit for prevailing social anxieties and demonstrate that the apparently 'timeless' images of them that proliferated at the time should be understood as complex cultural documents. "--BOOK JACKET.