A World Without a Child

A World Without a Child is a novel by Coulson Kernahan, the English writer who lived from 1858 to 1943 and who produced popular fiction, religious writing, and social commentary across a long working career that ran from the 1880s into the 1930s.

Kernahan worked in several different popular literary modes across his career. He produced religious and devotional fiction that found a wide audience in late Victorian and Edwardian middle class Christian households. He wrote thrillers and adventure stories for the substantial market in popular fiction that the new mass circulation magazines and cheap book series created during the period. He produced biographical sketches and literary reminiscence drawn from his personal acquaintance with various major figures of late Victorian literary life. He was for a time the literary editor at Ward Lock, the major London publishing house, where he was involved in the publication of work by writers including Marie Corelli.

A World Without a Child belongs to Kernahan’s more imaginative speculative fiction. The premise suggested by the title would have allowed him to develop the kind of allegorical or fantastic narrative that several of his other novels worked in. The handling of such a premise in the hands of an early twentieth century English popular novelist typically combined moral and religious reflection with the dramatic possibilities of the imagined situation.

Kernahan’s particular position in the late Victorian and Edwardian publishing world gave him access to the substantial popular Christian audience that supported much of his work. He wrote from a broadly Anglican religious position that was conservative without being narrowly sectarian, and his religious novels and meditations were widely used as Sunday reading in households where the more rigorous theological writers would not have been considered suitable.

The novel is mostly of interest now to readers of late Victorian and Edwardian English popular fiction and to historians of the substantial commercial market for moral and religious novels during the period. Kernahan was not a major writer by serious literary standards but he was a competent practitioner of the various commercial fiction genres he worked in. The book pairs naturally with his other novels and with the broader popular fiction tradition of the period.