1786), Mary Wollstonecraft (Original Stories from Real Life; with Conversations, Calculated to Regulate the Affections, and Form the Mind to Truth and Goodness, 1788), and Maria Edgeworth (The Parent’s Assistant; or, Stories for Children, 1796) is principally interested in forming children’s characters for life in this world. In contrast, from Janeway in the seventeenth century to Mary Martha Sherwood in the nineteenth, the so-called Puritan moralists prioritized fitting the child for heaven. The urgency of this effort sometimes resulted in grim scenes; Sherwood’s The History of the Fairchild Family (3 vols, 1818–1847) is best known today for the scene in which the little Fairchilds are taken to see the gibbeted corpse of a fratricide in order to learn to repress anger.
The inherent drama of such moments, highlighted by the vividness with which Sherwood constructs her account, offer pleasures for the reader; the novel remained in print well into the twentieth century. Rational moralist fiction, too, entertained readers, as did tales (such as Barbara Hofland’s 1816 Matilda, or, The Barbadoes Girl, whose protagonist learns to put aside the unbridled temper and arrogance instilled by her early upbringing as a slaveholder in the West Indies) that blended rational moralism with religion. Indeed, Patrick Fleming (2016) has identified the moral tale as an important influence upon Victorian novels for adults by such authors as Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, and George Eliot, whose reworkings of these tales’ innovations testify to the form’s hold upon their imaginations. Nevertheless, the belief that children needed to be instructed more than they needed to be delighted drove the production of much children’s fiction through the early nineteenth century. But as the proportion of delight to instruction within the typical story increased, so did the amount of children’s fiction produced.
International Markets
By 1800, British publishers were producing some fifty children’s books annually. The same era saw the development of another phenomenon important to Anglophone children’s fiction: its international circulation. Initially, the import–export trade went in only one direction, from England outward. Much as sixteenth- or seventeenth-century chapbooks often retold medieval texts, eighteenth-century colonial publishers did not demand freshness in their fare for the young; they might, however, do some adapting to enhance appeal for a new audience. Thus, for instance, an edition of A Token for Children printed in Boston in 1781 provides Janeway’s original but also adds “A Token for the Children of New-England, or, Some Examples of Children, in Whom the Fear of God Was Remarkably Budding Before They Died; in Several Parts of New-England.” The emendation assures readers that the children of the new nation can match their British predecessors in godliness, and Janeway’s continued American influence can be traced in such texts as Susan Paul’s Memoir of James Jackson: The Attentive and Obedient Scholar, who Died in Boston, October 31, 1833, Aged Six Years and Eleven Months, a hagiographic biography of a free Black child by a pioneering African American writer. Similarly, in introducing an 1881 facsimile edition of Goody Two-Shoes, Charles Welsh remarks on the tale’s enduring popularity across national lines, but also on the practice of altering it: “The number of editions that have been published both in England and America is legion, and it has appeared in mutilated versions under the auspices of numerous publishing houses in London and the provinces” (1881, p. viii).
But by the mid-eighteenth century, colonial children’s fiction (as opposed to primers and catechisms, the first texts produced for the young in the New World) was emerging. Gillian Avery (1994) tentatively identifies as America’s oldest surviving work of children’s fiction an anonymous chapbook printed in Boston around 1750–1756, titled A New Gift for Children: Delightful and Entertaining Stories for Little Masters and Misses; its 15 tales, on such subjects as “The Dutiful Child,” “The Generosity of Confessing a Fault,” and “The Meanly Proud Girl,” show the rewards of virtue and the bad outcomes of vice. From these beginnings, the US children’s literature industry grew substantially in the early nineteenth century. Prolific authors such as “Peter Parley” (Samuel Griswold Goodrich) provided fodder to the presses of the young republic, and children’s magazines featuring local writers flourished in both North and South.
Canada formed a convenient export market for US fiction, but it gradually produced homegrown works as well, in addition to sending some of its native-born authors (such as Amelia Johnson; see Genres: Domestic Fiction below) to the larger literary marketplace south of the border. The first Canadian novel for children, Catharine Parr Traill’s The Young Emigrants, Or, Pictures of Canada, Calculated to Amuse and Instruct the Minds of Youth, appeared in 1826, when it was published both in Canada and in London. As its subtitle indicates, it wears its didacticism proudly; the narrator informs us that “it is my chief object to offer pages of information to my young readers” (p. 54), and while the information is inserted into a family story, the narrative’s travelogue aspects dominate. Traill’s domestic story ends with the reunion of the emigrant family as the last sibling to remain in England comes to Canada, cementing the colonists’ presence in North America. The volume nonetheless continues for several additional pages with a description of Niagara Falls, implicitly prioritizing fact over fiction.
Elsewhere, British colonial children’s literature emerged more slowly. The first Australian example is Charlotte Barton’s A Mother’s Offering to Her Children (1841), a series of dialogues on topics including natural history and the customs of Indigenous Australians. Smaller markets lagged still further behind, as the international circulation of successful children’s books and magazines had the contradictory effect of establishing these forms in new countries while setting a standard that made local competition difficult. The first South African novel for children, Mary Ann Carey-Hobson’s The Farm in the Karoo, or, What Charley Vyvyan and His Friends Saw in South Africa (1883), was published not in South Africa but in London, by an author who identifies herself on the title page as someone “for many years resident in the Cape Colony” rather than as a true South African. New Zealand imported all its children’s fiction until 1891, when Edward Tregear published Fairy Tales and Folk-Lore of New Zealand and the South Seas; its children’s book industry did not mature until authors such as Edith Howe and Isabel Peacocke emerged in the 1910s. Nonetheless, children in Cape Town or Wellington at the turn of the twentieth century were not starved of good reading, as the internationalism of the letters columns of major children’s magazines of the period (such as the American St. Nicholas) illustrates.
Nineteenth-century British children’s publishing enjoyed multiple advantages ensuring that the exporting of children’s literature from London would continue. Favorable conditions in the motherland included a large supply of publishers, some sponsored by religious bodies that could not only afford to subsidize suitable fare for the young but also had a built-in clientele of adults ready to buy a trustworthy product. For instance, the first long-lived British children’s periodical was the Sunday School Union’s Youth’s Magazine, which survived over sixty years after its 1805 founding by a teenager; later, the Religious Tract Society founded a successful children’s publishing stable that embraced both free-standing fiction and magazines such as the popular Boy’s Own Paper (1879–1967) and Girl’s Own Paper (1880–1956). Diana Dixon (1986) lists five children’s magazines circulating in England in 1824; by 1900, there were 160, in a rich mixture of secular, sacred, and special-interest titles. Fiction formed the backbone of most late nineteenth-century magazines. Editors’ insatiable demand for new stories enabled unknown authors to make their debuts, and the refinement of copyright laws protecting their work (and those of illustrators) against piracy made the work more profitable. Meanwhile, British publishers’ increasing technological and artistic sophistication enabled them to lead the field visually. In the 1850s and 1860s, the innovative children’s publisher Edmund Evans capitalized on the new possibilities for making children’s fiction both attractive and inexpensive, after which the children’s Christmas gift book, notable for its beautiful illustrations and high production values, became a regular feature of the British publishing world.
All these developments made that world welcoming for new talent, particularly where fiction was concerned. The period from about 1850 through World
