200 Years of Children in Literature: On their Visibility, Value, and Agency

Across modern literary history, children have served as powerful symbolic figures through which societies negotiate core social values. Yet despite their prominence in canonical criticism, we lack a systematic account of how often children appear in novels, how they are valued, and what kinds of agency they are afforded over time. To address this gap, I conduct a large-scale computational analysis of 9,544 English-language novels published between 1800 and 2000. This study provides the first large-scale extraction of child characters from the modern novel, combining classical natural language processing with large language models to measure their visibility, emotional valuation, narrative agency, and independence from kinship structures. Contrary to dominant histories of childhood, children and adolescents become progressively less visible in the novel over time, a decline driven by the erosion of the adolescent girl in particular. Children maintain a more positive emotional valence than adults even as their agency lags behind adult peers, suggesting a broader portrait of children as sentimentally valued, yet structurally constrained social actors.