Children’s Literature: From Medieval Times to the Golden Age
The 18th Century: A Social Construct
Children’s literature is not a natural phenomenon but a social construct, born of the European Enlightenment of the 18th century.
Before 1800
In the Middle Ages, children’s literature was simply the literature of the entire culture. Caxton printed a version of Aesop’s fables in 1484, while his successor Wynkyn de Worde produced the Geste of Robin Hood around 1510. These were texts shared by, rather than produced for, children. Legends and folk tales such as Robin Hood met with the Church’s disapproval. The greatest contrast between contemporary and early views of childhood can be seen in the Puritan texts that dominated the century. The evangelistic attitude dominated children’s books until the end of the 18th century and influenced, directly or in reaction, attitudes almost to the end of the 19th century.
John Locke, with his Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), is commonly credited with influencing children’s educational and religious publishing towards entertainment as a means to an end, although to the modern ear, such influence seems rather subtle. Isaac Watts was a little more persuasive in his Divine Songs Attempted in Easy Language for the Use of the Children (1715) than some of his contemporaries. Watts thought that there is great delight in the very learning of truths and duties and something so amusing and entertaining in rhythms and meter that will incline children to make this part of their business a diversion.
Newbery’s A Little Pretty Pocket Book is most notable because it was a commercial, mixed-media text.
The 19th Century: A Shift in Focus
Maria Edgeworth, whose story The Purple Jar from Early Lessons has often been reprinted. During the isolationist period after the Napoleonic Wars, technology and the standards of book production improved. Fairy tales slowly re-established themselves. Collections of fairy stories began to be quite common as the century progressed, and the tradition of authored rather than collected stories begins with Hans Andersen, who had four collections published in 1846, including Wonderful Stories for Children.
Another influence on British children’s books increased, as well as the use of color printing. Books were now produced specifically for girls, using domestic and religious themes, and for boys, where schools, games, and Empire were linked. Paying attention to the themes introduced in children’s literature, school stories, sea stories, and desert island stories had a great appeal.
The scene was set for what has been called the “Golden Age” of the children’s book. From religious and educational beginnings, writers were responding to a redefined childhood, one that required a distinctive literature. In the following sixty years, that literature was to become firmly established.
Maturity: The Golden Age of Children’s Books
Conventionally, the period between the publication of Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1864) and the First World War has been regarded as the first “Golden Age” of children’s books. The books of this period are for a recognizable childhood and begin to use a tone that is increasingly single-addressed. The books become more complex, and any didactic intent is second to entertainment.
The period between 1860 and the outbreak of the First World War saw some dramatic social and political shifts:
- Families became smaller and more stable, and women’s position in society was changing subtly. Books became cheaper with the introduction of the Hoe cylinder press in the 1860s and inexpensive pulp paper in the 1880s. It was only in the “Golden Age” that individual illustrators rose to prominence.
- Foster’s Education Act of 1870, which legislated for free elementary education, had by 1880 created over one million new places at schools.
- Cheap popular papers and comic strips developed in this period. The simple need for some kind of ideal world in which fictitious persons play a part is deeper and older than the rules of good art.