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Claudia Nelson

English-language fiction enjoyed by children long predates “children’s fiction.” Consider the chapbook, an 8- to 24-page pamphlet often made from one folded sheet and sold, originally, by a traveling “chapman.” This format, which in Britain emerged soon after the printing press arrived there in 1476, was used for multiple prose and verse genres, including narrative fiction from fairy tales and fables to simplified retellings of medieval chivalric romance. In their heyday (the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries), chapbooks did not exclusively or even primarily address children, any more than they were consumed exclusively by the literate poor. As Matthew Grenby (2007) notes, however, ample evidence exists that children bought and enjoyed chapbook fiction produced well before chapbooks targeting the young (now marketed by booksellers rather than peddlers) began to appear in the mid-eighteenth century.

Similarly, one might classify as multigenerational “fiction” John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), a Christian allegory dramatizing a soul’s journey to heaven via conflicts with demons (vices) and other hazards (negative states of mind, distractions from God). Though Bunyan’s work addressed and found an adult audience, children read it worldwide, and it helped to shape not only Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868), which cites it directly, but also L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), among other juvenile texts. The skeptical reader might also claim as fiction another internationally successful work, James Janeway’s A Token for Children, Being an Exact Account of the Conversion, Holy and Exemplary Lives, and Joyful Deaths of Several Young Children (1671 and 1672), presented as nonfiction but featuring young Puritan saints who may today seem literally too good to be true. The line between fact and fiction, like that between adult and child reader, is readily crossed.

That seventeenth-century texts consumed by children embraced didacticism is no accident. As early as the sixteenth century, when child literacy was the exception rather than the rule, some commentators on chapbook culture decried fiction’s potential to corrupt the juvenile consumer. Indeed, this perception – a perennial response to new mass-market forms associated with a youthful audience – helped drive the development of a separate English-language literature for children. Other important factors included the emergence of influential theories of developmental psychology, the increased size and clout of the middle classes (who sought new ways to transmit their values to the young), and a boom in print culture that made audience segmentation profitable.

Accordingly, whereas chapbooks had initially depended on the use of simple prose that would not overtax the reading skills of the semiliterate, the founders of a separate children’s literature in England emphasized the need for moral guidance, even while they also sought to please readers. Thus The Renowned History of Little Goody Two-Shoes (1755), the first children’s novel published (though perhaps not written) by John Newbery, who has been termed the father of Anglophone children’s literature, recounts young Margery’s rise from penniless orphan to teacher to titled lady. Her success results from her industry, learning, and virtue, which readers are invited to emulate; simultaneously, the narrator adopts a chatty but improving tone in remarks such as “Well, I never saw so grand a Funeral in all my Life; but the Money they squandered away, would have been better laid out in little Books for Children, or in Meat, Drink, and Cloaths for the Poor” (1881, p. 46).

To be sure, children’s writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did not always agree on which morality to encourage. The “rational moralism” associated with authors such as Sarah Fielding (The Governess, or The Little Female Academy, 1749), Thomas Day (The History of Sandford and Merton, 1783–1789), Sarah Trimmer (Fabulous Histories, Designed for the Amusement & Instruction of Young Persons, 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.