The child’s bookshelf changed after the mid-nineteenth century, as fiction came to further dominate what children read and adults recommended. Fantasy, the ultimate detachment from the troubles of the world, became the narrative type associated with childhood innocence and the worldly ignorance it demanded. In this new reading climate, some of the more popular nonfiction works survived, especially The New England Primer, the Life of Washington, and the “joyful death” biography, all of which remained standard reading material for generations of young audiences. Others, like “Against Idleness and Mischief” in Watts’s Divine Songs, came under attack; Alice famously muddles the words to this poem at the beginning of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, mocking the work’s earnest warnings against idleness and play. Yet, though the prominence of nonfiction waned in late nineteenth century, it remains instructive and revealing to examine the nonfiction that preceded the Golden Age. In these works, we not only see children’s books became more established in the marketplace, but we see the way this early stage of the industry sought largely to widen children’s horizons, rather than contain them, and to prepare young people’s attention to the larger political, cultural, and economic issues of the day. Because these texts were more common and more trusted, they are the central battlegrounds where the era’s ideological battles to further acknowledge and esteem childhood were fought and won.
REFERENCES
1 Avery, G. (1994). Behold the Child: American Children and Their Books, 1621–1922. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
2 Child, L.M. (1972). The Mother’s Book. New York: Arno Press and New York Times (originally published 1831).
3 Clapp-Itnyre, A. (2016). British Hymn Books for Children, 1800–1900: Re-Tuning the History of Childhood. New York: Ashgate.
4 Comenius, J.A. (1728). Orbis Sensualium Pictus. London: John and Benjamin Sprint. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/28299/28299-h/28299-h.htm (accessed December 14, 2021)
5 Crain, P. (2000). The Story of A: The Alphabetization of America from the New England Primer to the Scarlet Letter. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
6 Defoe, D. (1985). Robinson Crusoe. New York: Penguin (originally published 1719).
7 Hochman, B. (2011). Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Reading Revolution: Race, Literacy, Childhood, and Fiction, 1851–1911. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press.
8 Jackson, M.V. (1989). Engines of Instruction, Mischief, and Magic: Children’s Literature in England from Its Beginnings to 1839. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.
9 Janeway, J. (1709). A Token for Children: Being an Exact Account of the Conversion, Holy and Exemplary Lives, and Joyful Deaths of Several Young Children. London: T. Norris (originally published 1671/2).
10 Marcus, L.S. (2008). Minders of Make-Believe: Idealists, Entrepreneurs, and the Shaping of American Children’s Literature. New York: Houghton Mifflin.
11 Monaghan, E.J. (2005). Learning to Read and Write in Colonial America. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press.
12 Paul, L. (2011). The Children’s Book Business: Lessons from the Long Eighteenth Century. New York: Routledge.
13 Raven, J. (2007). The importation of books in the eighteenth century. In The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World (ed. H. Amory and D.D. Hall), vol. 1 of The History of the Book in America, 183–198. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
14 Watt, I. (1957). Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. Los Angeles: University of California Press.
15 Weikle-Mills, C. (2013). Imaginary Citizens: Child Readers and the Limits of American Independence: 1640–1868. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
2 The Beginnings of Fiction for Children
Claudia Nelson
English-language fiction enjoyed by children long predates “children’s fiction.” Consider the chapbook, an 8- to 24-page pamphlet often made from one folded sheet and sold, originally, by a traveling “chapman.” This format, which in Britain emerged soon after the printing press arrived there in 1476, was used for multiple prose and verse genres, including narrative fiction from fairy tales and fables to simplified retellings of medieval chivalric romance. In their heyday (the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries), chapbooks did not exclusively or even primarily address children, any more than they were consumed exclusively by the literate poor. As Matthew Grenby (2007) notes, however, ample evidence exists that children bought and enjoyed chapbook fiction produced well before chapbooks targeting the young (now marketed by booksellers rather than peddlers) began to appear in the mid-eighteenth century.
Similarly, one might classify as multigenerational “fiction” John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), a Christian allegory dramatizing a soul’s journey to heaven via conflicts with demons (vices) and other hazards (negative states of mind, distractions from God). Though Bunyan’s work addressed and found an adult audience, children read it worldwide, and it helped to shape not only Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868), which cites it directly, but also L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), among other juvenile texts. The skeptical reader might also claim as fiction another internationally successful work, James Janeway’s A Token for Children, Being an Exact Account of the Conversion, Holy and Exemplary Lives, and Joyful Deaths of Several Young Children (1671 and 1672), presented as nonfiction but featuring young Puritan saints who may today seem literally too good to be true. The line between fact and fiction, like that between adult and child reader, is readily crossed.
That seventeenth-century texts consumed by children embraced didacticism is no accident. As early as the sixteenth century, when child literacy was the exception rather than the rule, some commentators on chapbook culture decried fiction’s potential to corrupt the juvenile consumer. Indeed, this perception – a perennial response to new mass-market forms associated with a youthful audience – helped drive the development of a separate English-language literature for children. Other important factors included the emergence of influential theories of developmental psychology, the increased size and clout of the middle classes (who sought new ways to transmit their values to the young), and a boom in print culture that made audience segmentation profitable.
Accordingly, whereas chapbooks had initially depended on the use of simple prose that would not overtax the reading skills of the semiliterate, the founders of a separate children’s literature in England emphasized the need for moral guidance, even while they also sought to please readers. Thus The Renowned History of Little Goody Two-Shoes (1755), the first children’s novel published (though perhaps not written) by John Newbery, who has been termed the father of Anglophone children’s literature, recounts young Margery’s rise from penniless orphan to teacher to titled lady. Her success results from her industry, learning, and virtue, which readers are invited to emulate; simultaneously, the narrator adopts a chatty but improving tone in remarks such as “Well, I never saw so grand a Funeral in all my Life; but the Money they squandered away, would have been better laid out in little Books for Children, or in Meat, Drink, and Cloaths for the Poor” (1881, p. 46).
To be sure, children’s writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did not always agree on which morality to encourage. The “rational moralism” associated with authors such as Sarah Fielding (The Governess, or The Little Female Academy, 1749), Thomas Day (The History
