Although children's literature existed prior to the 18th century (for instance, the first picture book for children was Comenius's Orbis Pictus (ca. 1657) and Perrault's fairy tales were published in 1697), publishing for children only became economically viable in the 1740s, as enough of a leisured middle class had developed to provide a market. Even a century later, the primary audience for these books was middle class - poor children ended up reading religious tracts given out by well-meaning Sunday School societies. Children's literature in England thus emerged in last half of 18th century, when (as Rose notes) idea of childhood was primarily Lockean and Rousseauian. The influence of these Enlightenment thinkers has remained strong in framing "children's literature": "Children's fiction has never completely severed its links with a philosophy which sets up the child as a pure point of origin in relation to language, sexuality, and the state" (Rose 8). Furthermore, kidlit has always assumed the world is "knowable in a direct and umediated way" (Rose 9).

     The English philosopher John Locke argued that children's reading should entertain as it taught. The tension between literature as entertainment and literature as education remains strong today. Locke's thinking also contained the seeds of censorship. Locke argued that children should be isolated from superstition, which bred fear and other dangerous habits of thinking; instead, they should read only about that which was provably true. John Newbery, considered the first children's publisher and Locke's disciple, avoided heavy-handed didacticism but also eliminated material that would trouble young minds. Locke's injunction against teaching of false information was used to suppress chapbooks, inexpensive publications filled with fairy tales and adventure stories and sold by traveling peddlers.

     In the early 19th century, "Peter Parley" (New England's Samuel Griswold Goodrich) and his followers (including other writers who adopted the same pseudonym or variations of it) produced works for children that were strenuously devoted to teaching moral principles or useful knowledge. Struwwelpeter, by the German writer Heinrich Hoffmann, is an extreme example of morally didactic children's literature. In reaction against this approach, the books were criticized (notably by Felix Summerly in England, in the 1840s) for failing to appeal to children's sympathetic imaginations; about this time, Andersen's fairy tales began to appear in English translation, along with Edward Lear's Book of Nonsense.

     Green claims that few books written before mid-19th century have real reading interest today. About the only earlier things still read by children are fairy tales and, he says, Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare (this last is a dubious proposition). However, he discounts such works as Gulliver's Travels or Robinson Crusoe, which were not written for children but have always had a wide readership among young people. From the beginning, it has been true that adult books of a certain type have been adopted into the nursery, and this continues to happen today.

     Children's writing took off in the 1840s in Britain, chiefly as a result of evangelical influences. Children's stories often accurately depicted social miseries but, influenced by evangelical Christianity, suggested that they would be alleviated in the world to come. Notably, it was three clergymen who really got the ball rolling in a new direction in the 1860s - Kingsley, Dodgson, and MacDonald.

     The first glimmerings of a new kind of children's literature came in the genre of fantasy. Locke's view of education opposed fantasy for children as not contributing to development of logic; but by 1860, fantasy in kidlit was defended as promoting the development of the imagination (in an anonymous review) (Rose 81). In addition to fantasy, the 19th century saw several other types of children's fiction develop: the adventure story, chiefly aimed at boys (though read by both sexes) and designed to produce good servants of Empire; the domestic story, aimed chiefly at girls and designed to inculcate virtues of home and hearth; and school stories for both sexes. Development of these "realistic" modes also preceded the golden age, with the work of Charlotte Yonge (primarily writing historical novels for teenage girls) and Hughes's Tom Brown's Schooldays (1857). Many 19th-century works turn on children's deaths, which seems odd to today's reader primarily because of the sharp reduction in infant mortality. But in the world of readers of that time, child deaths were part of everyday life.

     Roger Lancelyn Green and other historians of the field place the beginning of the golden age with the publication of Alice in Wonderland in 1865, which "revolutionized writing for the young. . . captur[ing] the irresponsible fantasy in the minds of most children, and with it the unrealized urge towards rebellion against the imposed order and decorum of the world of the Olympians" (7). Green defines the "golden age" as a period during which numerous still-read "classics" of children's literature were created but perhaps more importantly as the period during which the conception of children's literature changed, from a primarily pedagogic and moral focus to a concern with the child's imaginative life. For instance, we can see this shift occurring from the beginning to the end of the period when we look at the more "realistic" works on the syllabus, beginning with Little Women which is heavily laced with observations about proper behavior and religion, to The Story of the Treasure Seekers, where the morals lies well beneath the surface and the story celebrates the exploits of very "normal" children. Similarly in fantasy, even Alice may be seen in some ways as moralistic.

     Carpenter reads in golden age texts the echoes of the Wordsworthian ideal that children are closer to heaven than adults (although it precedes Wordsworth). Children were no longer seen as miniature adults (although see Little Women) but were seen to some extent as superior to adults, so that "Growing up becomes synonymous with the loss of Paradise" (9) - hence his focus on the garden image. On the other hand, Coveney says the romantic view of the child has worked to establish a continuity of experience, relating childhood to adult consciousness (327). He suggests that later in the 19th century, a "cult of the child" emerged in which the separation Rose describes was in fact central. This cult "create[d] a barrier of nostalgia and regret between childhood and the potential responses of adult life" (327).

     Carpenter identifies a three=part prerequisite for the blooming of the golden age: 1. the acceptance of children's independent imaginative existence 2. a darker view of adult society, so there was more impetus to write for children 3. a decline in the birth rate so parents were more attentive to children Carpenter says it was also necessary for gifted writers to "feel themselves driven away from an adult audience towards a child readership" in part because of a bleaker worldview. Thus you find frequent motifs of a search for a better place in golden age authors - a place where childlike innocence can be regained. And most of the significant writers doubted or rejected traditional religion, so that the locus of this search was in the imagination.

     In the 20th century, children's literature seemed to fall away from the heights of the golden age, although many notable books still were produced. Much of the literature produced between the 1930s and 1960s was thematically unambitious and morally innocuous. That began to change in the ‘60s, however, which ushered in what some have called a second "golden age" in which morally complex and ambitious works were produced for children. Social change in that turbulent decade, however, led writers to break former taboos on the depiction of sexual, racial, and violent themes in mainstream children's books. In the late 1960's and 1970's, realistic children's fiction began to reflect larger social problems and the emerging realization among adults that older children, at least, were trying to work out the meaning of their newly emergent sexual impulses. Books such as Judy Blume's Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret (1970), which dealt with a sixth-grade girl's anxieties about menstruation and breast development, or Robert Cormier's The Chocolate War (1974), about peer pressure and intimidation in a boys' high school, presented a different image of childhood than previous children's literature had. To many adults, such books violated the social myth of childhood innocence, an active force in Western culture since the 18th century, and censorship attempts reflected a defense of this social idea. Defenders of the new realism in children's books argued that the books offered young readers a gritty realism that addressed their innermost fears and concerns. Opponents saw the books themselves as creating those fears and concerns.

Sources: Humphrey Carpenter, Secret Gardens: A Study of the Golden Age of Children's Literature (1985); Peter Coveney, ["Escape"] in Gray, Alice in Wonderland (Norton Critical Edition, 1992) 327-34; Elizabeth A. Cripps, "Alice and the Reviewers." Children's Literature 11 (1983) 32-48; Roger Lancelyn Green, "The Golden Age of Children's Books" in Egoff, et.al., Only Connect: Readings on Children's Literature (Second Edition, 1980) 1-16; Jacqueline Rose, The Case of Peter Pan; or The Impossibility of Children's Fiction (1993).

A. Waller Hastings
Professor of English
Northern State University
Aberdeen, SD  57401

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