Behind the innocent face of Victorian fairy tales lurks the spectre of a 19th-century debate about the very nature of childhood. This study offers re-readings of Victorian classics, probing deeply into relations between adults, children, and the beloved authors of children's books. The author attempts to show how male and female constructions of childhood in these fairy tales differed radically. Male writers - John Ruskin, William Makepeace Thackeray, George MacDonald, and Lewis Carroll - often displayed an uneasy relation to adult gender roles. By privileging a special girl reader, they attempted to blur sexual differences and sentimentalize an arrested childhood. Female authors, on the other hand - Jean Ingelow, Christina Rossetti and Juliana Ewing - tried to wrest fairy tales away from the male authors who had appropriated the genre. These women's tales relate fables of growth that are more grounded in actuality than men's, and that often allow their girl characters to mature.