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The dominant genre at the beginning of this Golden Age was the story of family life. Because of their emphasis on child development and socialization, domestic tales were well suited to the religious and moral content considered vital to much mid nineteenth-century children’s literature. Their focus on character and on the kinds of difficulties that children might realistically encounter opened up possibilities for humor and/or pathos, initially used for didactic purposes but rapidly becoming ends in themselves.

It is appropriate, then, that the children’s novel sometimes considered the first to weight entertainment as heavily as didacticism, Catherine Sinclair’s Holiday House (1839), is a domestic tale. Described by Harvey Darton as “certainly the best original children’s book written up to that time, and one of the jolliest and most hilarious of any period” (2011, p. 225), Holiday House tells of naughty Harry and Laura and their admirable older brother, whose inspirational death is the story’s moral focus and sobers the younger siblings into maturity. Yet Harry and Laura’s antics, their tussles with their strict nanny Mrs. Crabtree, and their uncle David’s delight in nonsense solicit at least as much of the reader’s attention. Sinclair’s novel, then, did much to establish amusement as a worthy goal for juvenile fiction and stands as an early example of what later Victorians called the “pickle” book, an account of naughtiness on the part of affluent small children that is presented humorously rather than as a warning about the consequences of bad behavior. In the United States, domestic humorists also poked fun at adults, as in Lucretia Hale’s distinctly undidactic The Peterkin Papers (1880), which chronicles the misadventures of a family devoid of common sense. By 1901, E. Nesbit’s Bastable children christen themselves the “Wouldbegoods,” an aspiration that never makes it out of the conditional voice, and readers are expected to like the children because of, not despite, their inability to behave properly.

The extent to which the child might be judged culpable – a question that before the Victorian era animated both rational moralist and Puritan texts – remains important throughout the nineteenth-century domestic tale, which describes behavior ranging from saintly to rebellious. The title characters of Amelia Johnson’s Clarence and Corinne (1890), sometimes identified as the first children’s novel by an African American (in this case, originally African Canadian) author, are the offspring of a drunken father and defeated mother, and after they are orphaned and separated, they must initially make their own way in the world. Yet they endure mistreatment and injustice with little complaint, sustained by their developing Christian faith and eventually being rewarded with loving adoptive parents, professional success for Clarence (who becomes a physician), and happy marriages. In contrast, Annie Keary’s The Rival Kings (1858), like Alcott’s Little Women, depicts children as capable of murderous rage. Much as Alcott’s Jo, furious at Amy for burning her book manuscript, deliberately fails to warn her sister about thin ice while they are skating, “rival kings” Maurice Lloyd and Roger Fletcher vie in hazardous ways to gain the upper hand. Here again, matters escalate to a near-fatal denouement, after which Maurice spends hours trying to lighten Roger’s convalescence. As critic Robert Lee Wolff observes, “adults are virtually helpless” (1975, p. 312) in coping with the real hatred that these children feel, which only experience can temper. Even so, unlike some of their eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century predecessors, both Roger and Amy survive without permanent damage.

Other children in domestic novels primarily endanger themselves, not their peers. In Susan Coolidge’s What Katy Did (1872), the inaugural volume of a series of American domestic tales, fun-loving Katy develops responsibility after her heedless ways cause her serious injury. While Coolidge allows Katy to recover fully by the end of the first installment, and the novel never loses sight of the light-hearted side of family life, we still learn that childish faults may have serious consequences. Yet children in domestic novels may also be victims of adult carelessness or mismanagement, as in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden (1911), in which Mary and Colin, simultaneously overprivileged and emotionally starved, must cure themselves with the aid of Nature and working-class Dickon. The animal story, a genre adjacent to the domestic novel, often picks up on this trope of adult (or human) irresponsibility toward the vulnerable, showing figures such as the title character of Ouida’s A Dog of Flanders (1872) and Anna Sewell’s equine narrator Black Beauty (1877) as powerless to shape their own fates.

But following in the Janeway tradition, some domestic writers described children (many of them orphans) capable not just of surviving but also of perfecting themselves, whether in a religious or a secular sense, without the adult help that is eventually vouchsafed to Johnson’s Clarence and Corinne or to Dinah Mulock’s Eurasian Cinderella Zillah Le Poer in her 1851 novella for adolescent and adult readers The Half-Caste. In the latter work, the teenaged title character is abused and degraded by her British guardians until the narrator joins the family as a governess and uncovers the secret of Zillah’s legitimate birth and sizable inheritance, which her uncle has sought to appropriate; even before his machinations are exposed, the governess is able to bring out Zillah’s hidden intelligence and beauty by treating her with kindness. Such tributes to adults’ ability to guide children notwithstanding, Rebecca in Kate Douglas Wiggin’s Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1903) and Anne in L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables (1908) are reared by initially unsympathetic figures who know little about children. Even so, both are gifted intellectually, creatively, and (especially) emotionally, capable of forming an ideal domesticity rather than needing to be formed by it. Although Wiggin and Montgomery were not writing overtly religious fiction, their protagonists nonetheless owe something to the tradition of Protestant child saints.

Perhaps the most famous Evangelical domestic novel is an American example, Martha Finley’s Elsie Dinsmore (1867), the first installment of a 28-volume saga ending with Elsie and Her Namesakes in 1905. Elsie Dinsmore chronicles its virtuous heroine’s difficulties in balancing her duty to her overbearing father against her duty to God, a conflict only resolvable by the father’s belated recognition of his religious responsibilities. Somewhat similarly, a bestselling British waif tale published the same year under the auspices of the Religious Tract Society by “Hesba Stretton” (Sarah Smith), Jessica’s First Prayer, shows its title character discovering God without the aid of her drunken mother or the class-conscious church official who befriends her. It is she who awakens him religiously rather than the other way around, after which both are rewarded by being allowed to form a new family together. What LuElla D’Amico writes of Clarence and Corinne applies to Jessica’s First Prayer (and many other nineteenth-century Christian fictions) as well: the tale “encourages children to perceive themselves as powerful, and it suggests that adults in power can – and should – be subverted when religious or personal freedom is threatened” (2017, p. 182). Significantly, the nineteenth-century emphasis on child agency in fiction extends beyond the fictional world. Marah Gubar (2009) has argued that Golden Age children’s literature offers the child reader a blueprint for negotiating authority with adults, while Victoria Ford Smith (2017) traces the achievements of Victorian children as literary collaborators, critics, and active listeners.

Child agency was often presented not as a steady gaining of power but as a matter of ebbs and flows, sometimes allied to physical health. Jessica is one of many Victorian child protagonists to suffer a near-fatal illness. Similarly, some works by England’s premier domestic novelist for the young, Charlotte Yonge, feature characters whose protracted illnesses culminate in edifying ends. An aim here was to educate audience sensibility by compelling tears – a stock feature also in sentimental novels for somewhat older readers, including Yonge’s The Heir of Redclyffe (1853), Mulock’s John Halifax, Gentleman (1856), Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World (1850), and Maria Susanna Cummins’s The Lamplighter (1854), that may be found among the British and American best sellers of the mid nineteenth century. In such works for younger children as The Stokesley Secret (1861), however, Yonge scales down the problems that the fictional family confronts, illustrating not deathbeds but honesty, consideration, good humor, and the proper response to schoolwork. (In a characteristic passage, the narrator explains that “there is one thing that is to be expected of any good child – not to enjoy lessons; not to surpass others; not to do anything surprising; only to make a conscience of doing what is required as well as possible” [p. 226].) Yonge’s sympathetic treatment of figures such as the brother who considers himself the family dunce and the sister whose comparatively refined tastes distance her from her siblings displays the keen awareness of psychology that animates many nineteenth-century domestic novels.

Yonge’s American fans included Alcott, who shows us Jo March “eating apples and crying over the ‘Heir of Redclyffe’” as chapter three of Little Women commences (p. 63). This moment is one of a number in Alcott’s works to illustrate appropriate responses to fiction, which Alcott, Yonge, and many other domestic novelists saw as a moral and emotional teaching tool. But if Alcott – who, like Jo, began her career writing sensational fiction for the penny press – learned some of her craft from Yonge, other writers learned from Alcott herself. Among the most notable of Alcott’s disciples was Ethel Turner, whose Seven Little Australians (1894) features a central character who starts the novel as a Jo figure and ends it as Beth. Turner’s admiration for Alcott suggests the importance of the transpacific as well as the transatlantic children’s market in the late nineteenth century, a period in which Australian children’s magazines reprinted material indiscriminately (and often uncredited) from both British and US sources.