Catherine Robson published a book titled Men in Wonderland: The Lost Girlhood of the Victorian Gentleman in 2001 under Princeton University Press. She is an assistant professor of English at the University of California, Davis, where she specialized in nineteenth-century British literature and culture. In this book, she explores the fascination with little girls in Victorian culture through 19th-century literature by British male authors. In doing so, she reveals the link between idealization of little girls and a wide-spread fantasy of male development. Robson’s argument is that the concept of ‘little girls’ during this era offered an adult male the best opportunity to reconnect with his own lost self.
The individuals work explored in her book include Wordsworth, De Quincey, Dickens, Ruskin, and Carrol. Along with these works of literature, she compares them cultural artifacts during this era, including conduct books, government reports, fine art, and popular journalism.
Along with Robson’s close-reading of literature, there can include a text-analysis on these works to reveal certain patterns and findings that coincide with Robson’s analysis of such works. Such distant-readings of childhood and masculinity in the Victorian Era could contribute to our own contemporary Western understanding of masculinity and femininity in pop-culture.