In twenty-first-century psychology and self-help literature, the “inner child” refers to an original or true self that serves as a repository of wisdom for its adult counterpart. This chapter traces the modern inner child back to Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy and her protégée Emma Curtis Hopkins, the leading New Thought teacher of the 1880s and 1890s. Hopkins described an idealized “Man Child” within each adult woman who could lead her to spiritual serenity and worldly success. Frances Hodgson Burnett fictionalized different versions of this figure in her short story Sara Crewe (1888) and her blockbuster novel Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886), whose eponymous child hero helps his mother achieve undreamed-of wealth and status. Little Lord Fauntleroy also serves as his mother’s proxy outside of the domestic sphere, allowing her to reach personal goals without appearing inappropriately ambitious. The novel’s enormous popularity may have stemmed from this symbiotic relationship between mother and son. Then as now, the inner child helped women reconcile social pressures to be selfless and giving with career pursuits and self-indulgent behavior. The persistence of the inner child suggests that contemporary feminism still has work to do in enabling women to embrace opportunities without guilt.

Chapter two turns to Henry James’s supernatural classic, The Turn of the Screw (1898), to show the backlash of the literary intelligentsia against New Thought and the inner child. This chapter reads The Turn of the Screw as a critical response to Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy that mocks the book’s saccharine portrayal of innocent children and its New Thought overtones. While siblings Miles and Flora initially resemble Lord Fauntleroy in their youth, beauty, and apparent innocence, their subsequent actions could not be more different. Whereas Burnett’s protagonist heals his grieving mother and depressed grandfather and brings them spiritual peace, Miles and Flora lead their governess to the brink of madness by consorting with evil spirits. James, who wrote so perceptively about the inner life of a child a year earlier in What Maisie Knew (1897), deliberately portrayed Miles and Flora as opaque, unsympathetic, and allied with dark forces. In so doing, he skewered New Thought's relentless idealization of children as conduits to God. He also paved the way for more recent depictions of evil children in horror fiction and in films such as The Bad Seed (1956), The Omen (1976), or We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011).