Napoleon called the English a “nation of shopkeepers,” and in England art may owe much to trade. Children’s literature in England got its start from merchants such as Thomas Boreman, of whom little is known, and especially John Newbery, of whom a great deal more is known. Research has established that at least as early as 1730 Boreman began publishing for children (largely educational works) and that in 1742 he produced what sounds like a recreational story, Cajanus, the Swedish Giant. Beginnings of English children’s literature might be dated from the first decade of the 18th century, when a tiny 12-page, undated book called A Little Book for Little Children by “T.W.” appeared. It is instructional but, as the critic Percy Muir says, important as the earliest publication in English “to approach the problem from the point of view of the child rather than the adult.” In sum, without detracting from the significance of Newbery, it may be said that he was merely the first great success in a field that had already undergone a certain amount of exploitation.

The elevation of the publisher-bookseller-editor Newbery (who also sold patent medicines) to the position of patron saint is an excusable piece of sentiment. Perhaps it originated with one of his back writers who doubled as a man of genius. In Chapter XVIII of The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), Oliver Goldsmith lauds his employer as “the philanthropic bookseller of St. Paul’s Churchyard, who has written so many books for children, calling himself their friend, but who was the friend of all mankind.” There is no reason to believe that Newbery was anything but an alert businessman who discovered and shrewdly exploited a new market: middle class children, or rather their parents. Nevertheless this was a creative act. In 1744 he published A Little Pretty Pocket-Book. Its ragbag of contents—pictures of children’s games, jingles, fables, “an agreeable Letter to read from Jack the Giant Killer,” plus a bonus in the form of “a Ball and a Pincushion”—are of interest only because, addressing itself single-mindedly to a child audience, it aimed primarily at diversion. Thus children’s literature clearly emerged into the light of day.

The climate of Newbery’s era was nevertheless more suited to a literature of didacticism than to one of diversion. John Locke’s Some Thoughts concerning Education (1693) is often cited as an early Enlightenment emancipatory influence. But close inspection of this manual for the mental conditioning of gentlemen reveals a strong English stress on character building and practical learning. Locke thinks little of the natural youthful inclination to poetry: “It is seldom seen that anyone discovers mines of Gold or Silver in Parnassus.” He does endorse, as a daring idea, the notion that a child should read for pleasure, and he recommends Aesop. But the decisive influence was not Locke’s. It came from across the Channel with Rousseau’s best-seller Émile (1762). What is positive in Rousseau—his recognition that the child should not be too soon forced into the straitjacket of adulthood—was more or less ignored. Other of his doctrines had a greater effect on children’s literature. For all his talk of freedom, he provided his young Émile with an amiable tyrant for a teacher, severely restricting his reading to one book Robinson Crusoe. It was his didactic strain, exemplified in the moral French children’s literature of Arnaud Berquin and Madame de Genlis, that attracted the English.

They took more easily to Rousseau’s emphasis on virtuous conduct and instruction via “nature” than they did to his advocacy of the liberation of personality. Some writers, such as Thomas Day, with his long-lived Sandford and Merton, were avowedly Rousseauist. Others took from him what appealed to them. Sarah Kirby Trimmer, whose Fabulous Histories specialized in piety, opposed the presumably free-thinking Rousseau on religious grounds but was in other respects strongly influenced by him. The same is true of Anna Laetitia Barbauld, with her characteristically titled Lessons for Children. But Mary Martha Sherwood could hardly have sympathized with Rousseau’s notion of the natural innocence of children; the author of The History of the Fairchild Family (1818–47) based her family chronicle on the proposition (which she later softened) that “all children are by nature evil.” Of all the members of the flourishing Rousseauist or quasi-Rousseauist school of the moral tale, only one was a true writer. Maria Edgeworth may still be read.

Though the tone varies from Miss Edgeworth’s often sympathetic feeling for children to Mrs. Sherwood’s Savonarolan severities, one idea dominates: a special literature for the child must be manufactured in order to improve or reform him. The reigning mythology is that of reason, a mythology difficult to sell to the young.

Yet during the period from John Newbery’s Little Pretty Pocket-Book to Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, children’s literature also showed signs of antisolemnity. In verse there was first of all William Blake. His Songs of Innocence (1789) was not written for children, perhaps indeed not written for anyone. But its fresh, anti-restrictive sensibility, flowing from a deep love for the very young, decisively influenced all English verse for children. Yet the poetry the young really read or listened to at the opening of the 19th century was not Blake but Original Poems for Infant Minds (1804), by “Several Young Persons,” including Ann and Jane Taylor. The Taylor sisters, though adequately moral, struck a new note of sweetness, of humour, at any rate of nonpriggishness. Their “Twinkle, twinkle, little star,” included in Rhymes for the Nursery (1806), has not only been memorized but actually liked by many generations of small children. No longer read, but in its way similarly revolutionary, was The Butterfly’s Ball and the Grasshopper’s Feast (1807), by William Roscoe, a learned member of Parliament and writer on statistics. The gay and fanciful nonsense of this rhymed satiric social skit enjoyed, despite the seeming dominance of the moral Barbaulds and Trimmers, a roaring success. Great nonsense verse, however, had to await the coming of a genius, Edward Lear, whose Book of Nonsense (1846) was partly the product of an emergent and not easily explainable Victorian feeling for levity and partly the issue of a fruitfully neurotic personality, finding relief for its frustrations in the noncontingent world of the absurd and the free laughter of children.

In prose may be noted, toward the end of the period under discussion, the dawn of romantic historical fiction, with Frederick Marryat’s Children of the New Forest (1847), a story of the English Civil War; and of the manly open-air school novel, with Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s School Days (1857). A prominent milestone in the career of the “realistic” children’s family novel is Holiday House (1839), by Catherine Sinclair, in which at last there are children who are noisy, even naughty, yet not destined for purgatory. Though Miss Sinclair’s book does conclude with a standard deathbed scene, the overall atmosphere is one of gaiety. The victories in the field of children’s literature may seem small, but they can be decisive. It was a small, decisive victory to have introduced in Holiday House an Uncle David, whose parting admonition to his nieces and nephews is: “Now children! I have only one piece of serious, important advice to give you all, so attend to me!—Never crack nuts with your teeth!”

A similar note was struck by Henry (later Sir Henry) Cole with his Home Treasury series, featuring traditional fairy tales, ballads, and rhymes. The fairy tale then began to come into its own, perhaps as a natural reaction to the moral tale. John Ruskin’s King of the Golden River (1851) and William Makepeace Thackeray’s “fireside pantomime” The Rose and the Ring (1855) were signs of a changing climate, even though the Grimm-like directness of the first is partly neutralized by Ruskin’s moralistic bent and the gaiety of the second is spoiled by a laborious, parodic slyness. More important than these fairy tales, however, was the aid supplied by continental allies: the English publication in 1823–26 of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales; in 1846 of Andersen’s utterly personal fairy tales and folktales; in the ’40s and ’50s of other importations from the country of fancy, notably Sir George Dasent’s version of the stirring Popular Tales from the Norse (1859), collected by Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and J.E. Moe. Though the literature of improvement continued to maintain its vigour, England was readying itself for Lewis Carroll.

Coming of age (1865–1945)

In 1863 there appeared The Water-Babies by Charles Kingsley. In this fascinating, yet repulsive, “Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby,” an unctuous cleric and a fanciful poet, uneasily inhabiting one body, collaborated. The Water-Babies may stand as a rough symbol of the bumpy passage from the moral tale to a lighter, airier world. Only two years later that passage was achieved in a masterpiece by an Oxford mathematical don, the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll). Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland improved none, delighted all. It opened what from a limited perspective seems the Golden Age of English children’s literature, a literature in fair part created by Scotsmen: George Macdonald, Andrew Lang, Robert Louis Stevenson, Kenneth Grahame, James Barrie.

The age is characterized by a literary level decisively higher than that previously achieved; the creation of characters now permanent dwellers in the child’s imagination (from Alice herself to Mary Poppins, and including Long John Silver, Mowgli, intelligent Mr. Toad, and—if Hugh Lofting, despite his American residence, be accepted as English—Dr. Dolittle); the exaltation of the imagination in the work of Carroll, Macdonald, Stevenson, E. Nesbit, Grahame, Barrie, Hudson, Lofting, Travers, and the early Tolkien (The Hobbit [1938]); the establishment of the art fairy tale (Jean Ingelow with Mopsa the Fairy [1869]; Dinah Maria Mulock Craik with The Little Lame Prince [1875]; Mrs. Ewing with Old Fashioned Fairy Tales [1882]; Barrie’s Peter Pan [1904]; and the exquisite artifices of Oscar Wilde in The Happy Prince, and Other Tales [1888]); the transmutation and popularization, by Andrew Lang, Joseph Jacobs, and others, of traditional fairy tales from all sources; the development of a quasi-realistic school in the fiction of Charlotte M. Yonge (Countess Kate); Mrs. Ewing (Jan of the Windmill); and Mrs. Molesworth; and, furthering this trend, a growing literary population of real, or at least more real, children (by E. Nesbit and Ransome).

It is further characterized by the rapid evolution of a dozen now-basic genres, including the school story, the historical novel, the vacation story, the “group” or “gang” novel, the boy’s adventure tale, the girl’s domestic novel, the animal tale, the career novel (Noel Streatfeild’s Ballet Shoes, 1936), the work of pure whimsy (A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh, 1926); the solution, a brilliant one by Beatrix Potter and a charming one by L. Leslie Brooke, of the problem of creating literature for pre-readers and beginning readers; and the growth of an impressive body of children’s verse: the lyric delicacy of Christina Rossetti in Sing-Song (1872), the accurate reflection of the child’s world in Stevenson’s Child’s Garden of Verses, the satirical nonsense of Hilaire Belloc in his The Bad Child’s Book of Beasts (1896), the incantatory, other-worldly magic of Walter de la Mare with his Songs of Childhood (1902) and Peacock Pie (1913), the fertile gay invention of Eleanor Farjeon, and the irresistible charm of Milne in When We Were Very Young (1924).

Finally it is characterized by the dominance in children’s fiction of middle and upper middle class mores; the appearance, in the late 1930s, with Eve Garnett’s The Family from One End Street, of stories showing a sympathetic concern with the lives of slum children; the reflection, also in the 30s, of a serious interest, influenced by modern psychology, in the structure of the child’s vision of the world; the rise, efflorescence, and decline of the children’s magazine: Boy’s Own Magazine (1855–74), Good Words for the Young (1867–77), Aunt Judy’s Magazine (1866–85), and—famous for its outstanding contributors—The Boy’s Own Paper (1879–1912); the beginning, with F.J.H. Darton and other scholars, of an important critical-historical literature; institutionalization, commercialization, standardization—the popularity, for example, of the “series”; and the dominating influence of the better English work on the reading taste of American, Continental, and Oriental children.

During these 80 years a vast amount of trash and treacle was produced. What will be remembered is the work of a few dozen creative writers who applied to literature for children standards as high as those ordinarily applied to mainstream literature.