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Or did children’s literature really take off later in the seventeenth century, with James Janeway’s A Token for Children and Henry Jessey and Abraham Chear’s A Looking-Glass for Children (both of which appeared in 1672)? Some might prefer to point to Bunyan’s much-loved Pilgrim’s Progress (1678): the preface to Part II (1684), in which Christian’s wife Christiana and their four sons set out to follow in Christian’s footsteps, suggests that Bunyan had child readers in mind by now. Or did children’s literature start, in the same century, with the publication of the old romance, Sir Bevis of Hampton, which Bunyan loved as a child? A version of Sir Bevis of Hampton was published for children in 1846 Richard Jefferies’ young hero in the children’s classic Wood Magic (1881) and its sequel Bevis: The Story of a Boy (1882), is nicknamed “Sir Bevis" as a small child ( Wood Magic, Ch. These cheap popular tales were precursors of the Penny Dreadfuls.
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When can this amorphous body of literature be said to have begun? In the later medieval period, perhaps, with hornbooks (which carried The Lord’s Prayer or sometimes a religious verse), or conduct books for young courtiers? Or in the sixteenth century, with chapbooks, however bawdy and probably forbidden? Chapbooks were still circulating into the nineteenth century, by which time some were being specifically put out for children, an interesting proof that children could drive the book market even then. The parameters of children’s literature are blurred in another way. An example here is Rossetti’s Goblin Market (1862), which was quickly perceived to have two levels of meaning for the two distinct audiences (see Knoepflmacher, Ch. (6)īooks that addressed such a fundamental psychological dilemma inevitably appealed to adult readers as well as children. By turning to such child readers, these writers tried, as had Ruskin, to confront their own self-division between adult and child selves. The double perspective of child and adult he had implanted in his 1841 text would be perfected in their more complicated fantasies for young readers of both sexes. Knoepflmacher feels that Thackeray, George MacDonald, Lewis Carroll, Jean Ingelow, Christina Rossetti and Mrs Ewing all owed much to Ruskin, explaining that: Perhaps most importantly, some of the greatest children’s books of the mid-nineteenth-century onwards seem to have been written, at least subconsciously, to satisfy the needs of adults. Thackeray is talking mainly of Sir Walter Scott here, but he also refers to “Frank" in Maria Edgeworth’s Moral Tales for Young Children (1801). Hence the kindly tie is established between writer and reader, and lasts pretty nearly for life" (“De Juventute"). Thackeray explains, “The boy-critic loves the story: grown up, he loves the author who wrote the story. Then, books that enthralled in childhood stayed with their readers into adulthood. Children’s writers have always been very much aware of the adults reading over children’s shoulders. Having been selected by the publisher or his reader, books were then selected by parents and teachers for individual children (certainly until the later decades of the century), and often read aloud to the youngest of those children. Just as “adult" books like Redgauntlet, say, or Oliver Twist were appropriated by children, books written for children reached an adult audience too, and not only through the business side of things, either. So far from the works of Scott and Dickens being looked upon as impositions, they were read eagerly by many juveniles, though some of their elders were doubtful about Mr Dickens, who wrote about quite vulgar folk - even pickpockets! (90) Some of the works I shall mention were not primarily written for children at all. Talking of childhood reading in Victorian times, Roe continues:
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It is not, it seems, simply a book written for children. “To begin with, what is a children’s book?" asks F. Defining children’s literature is unexpectedly tricky.