We can learn a lot about how a historical period has seen the capacities of her children by studying the literature of her children. Occupating a space somewhere between purely didactic and absurd books, most children for children published in the last hundreds of years have tried to find a line between the two poles, seeking a balance between entertainment and teaching. However, this line seems to be close to one pole or another according to the dominant cultural feelings of the time. And the very fact that children's books were hardly published at all before the beginning of the 18th century tell us a lot on the start and how modern ideas of childhood as a distinct category of existence began.
“At the end of the 18th century,” wrote the Professor of the University of Newcastle, Mo Grenby, “children's literature was a flourishing, separate and secure part of the publishing industry in Great Britain.” The trend has accelerated quickly and has never stopped –Books for children and young adults now stimulate sales in publication (with 80% of books Ya bought by adults for themselves).
Grenby notes that “the reasons for this sudden rise in children's literature” and its rapid expansion in a booming market in the early 1800s “were never fully explained”. We are free to speculate on social and educational winds that have pushed this historical change.
Or we could do it, at least, by examining the children's literature in the Victorian era, perhaps the most innovative and diverse period for children's literature so far according to the standards of the time. And we can do it the most in depth by questioning the thousands of titles in the middle at the end of the 19th century to Baldwin Library of Historic Children's Literature at the University of Florida. Their digitized collection Currently contains more than 10,000 free pounds to read online from coverage to coverage, allowing you to have an idea of what adults in Great Britain and the United States wanted children to know and believe.
Several genres prospered at the time: religious teaching, of course, but also books of language and spelling, fairy tales, conduct codes and, in particular, adventure stories – durable boys and Nancy have attracted examples of what we would call the fiction of young adults, these published mainly for boys. The adventure stories offered a (very colonialist) vision of the great world; in series like the published Boston Zig Zag and English books like Flood with NelsonBoth of the 1890s, facts got involved in fiction, natural history and science with battle and travel accounts. But there is another distinctive tension in the literature of children of the time, which for us – but not necessarily for victorians – would seem contrary to the imperialist novel for young adults.
For most of the victorian students and readers, poetry made a daily part of life daily, and it was a form of teaching and central narration in Children's Lit. THE Aloe biblical image book From 1871, above, present “stories from our Lord's life in verse”, written “simply for the Lord's lambs, rhymes more easily than prose attracting the attention of children and fixing themselves to their memories.” Children and adults have regularly memorized poetry after all. However, after the explosion of children's publishing, former readers have often received lower examples. The author of Biblical image book Admits as much, begging for the indulgence of older players in the preface to “defects in my work”, since “the verses were made for the images, not the images of the verses”.
He is not an author, nor perhaps a type of literature, one could suspect who strongly thinks of the aesthetic sensitivities of children. We find precisely the opposite as the case in the wonderful Rhyme at the Elfin From 1900, written by the mysterious “Norman” with “40 Moorepark cardboard drawings”. Anyone who “Norman” can be (or why his name a word appears in quotes), he gives his readers poems that could be confused at first glance for an unpublished glance Christina Rossetti verses; And the illustrations of Mr. Moorepark compete with the best illustrators of books of the time, claiming the high quality of Caldecott medal-The private books of subsequent decades. Rhyme at the Elfin It seems to be a rare oddity, probably published in a small impression; The care and attention of its layout and its design show a very high opinion on the imaginative capacities of its readers.
This title is representative of an emerging genre of the literature for superior victorians, who still tended to fall on the whole, as it currently does, to fall into the banal and the formula. Rhyme at the Elfin is in Califée Frank L. Baum Wizard of Oz series And JM Barrie Peter Pan. These, the Harry PotterS of their time, made millions of young readers passionate about modern fairy tales, representing a slide even further from the categories “without remorse without remorse … or deeply tracks” available in early writing for children, as Grenby points out.
Where the limits of children's literature had once been narrowly set by Latin grammar and grammarks and Progress of the PilgrimAt the end of the 19th century, the influence of science fiction as Jules VerneAnd popular supernatural tales and poems have prepared the field for comics, dystopias, magician fiction and dozens of kinds of literature from other children that we are now holding for granted, or – in large numbers – we buy for ourselves. Enter Baldwin Library of Historical Children's Literature hereWhere you can browse several categories, search for subjects, authors, titles, etc. 10,000+ pounds in the collection With comfortable readers views.
Note: This is an updated version of an article which originally appeared on our site in 2016.
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