The hesperian dragon, p.1
British Children's Literature of the 19th Century, page 1
British Children’s Literature of the 19th Century
McFarland Companions to 19th Century Literature
Alfred Tennyson: A Companion by Laurence W. Mazzeno (2020)
Anthony Trollope: A Companion by Nicholas Birns and John F. Wirenius (2021)
Herman Melville: A Companion by Corey Evan Thompson (2021)
Jane Austen: A Companion by Laura Dabundo (2021)
Thomas Hardy: A Companion to the Novels by Ronald D. Morrison (2021)
Emily Dickinson: A Companion by Ann Beebe (2022)
Ralph Waldo Emerson: A Companion by Prentiss Clark (2022)
Victorian Nonfiction Prose: A Companion by Kathy Rees (2022)
Walt Whitman: A Companion by John E. Schwiebert (2022)
James Fenimore Cooper: A Companion by Signe O. Wegener (2023)
Victorian Nonfiction Prose: A Companion by Kathy Rees (2023)
British Children’s Literature of the 19th Century
A Companion
Patrick C. Fleming
McFarland Companions to 19th Century Literature
Series Editor Ronald D. Morrison
Associate Editor Matthew D. Sutton
McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Jefferson, North Carolina
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Fleming, Patrick C., author.
Title: British children’s literature of the 19th century : a companion / Patrick C. Fleming.
Description: Jefferson, North Carolina : McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2024. | Series: McFarland companions to 19th century literature | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2024028615 | ISBN 9781476677989 (paperback : acid free paper) ♾ ISBN 9781476652504 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Children’s literature, English—History and criticism. | English fiction—19th century—History and criticism. | LCGFT: Literary criticism.
Classification: LCC PR990 .F56 2024 | DDC 820.9/9282—dc23/eng/20240624
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024028615
ISBN (print) 978-1-4766-7798-9
ISBN (ebook) 978-1-4766-5250-4
© 2025 Patrick C. Fleming. All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Front cover image: Mr. Bumble from Oliver Twist (postcard illustration by Kyd OldBookArt.com).
Printed in the United States of America
McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Box 611, Jefferson, North Carolina 28640
www.mcfarlandpub.com
McFarland Companions to 19th Century Literature
As envisioned by the founding series editor, Laurence W. Mazzeno, McFarland Companions to 19th Century Literature is a series of scholarly monographs designed as guides to the work of important British, American, and Continental writers whose work appeared during the long nineteenth century. Written to aid students and teachers, each volume is prepared by an experienced scholar-teacher and typically focuses on one writer’s most frequently read fiction, poetry, or nonfiction. Volumes devoted to a single author contain a brief biography, an introduction explaining the importance of the writer or genre, a list of major publications, an alphabetical listing of entries that discuss the writer’s works and provide information on people, places, events, and issues that affected the author’s literary career or the development of the genre, and a selected bibliography of recent criticism. The present volume adapts the format to cover multiple authors within a genre.
Table of Contents
McFarland Companions to 19th Century Literature
Acknowledgments
Preface
Introduction
Chronological List of Major Texts and Events
The Companion
Works Cited
Index of Terms
Acknowledgments
I agreed to write this volume when I was an assistant professor at Fisk University. A year later I left that role to become a program officer at the National Endowment for the Humanities. And so I find myself in the odd position of completing a book whose main audience is teachers and students while I’m no longer teaching. Nonetheless, the book owes much to my students and colleagues at Fisk and, prior to that, at Rollins College and at the University of Virginia. At each place, I taught both nineteenth-century British literature and children’s literature, and I had the chance to think deeply about their overlaps.
Conversations with colleagues, more than anything, undergird the form and content of the entries in this book. When I began writing I was active in the Victorians Institute, and when I told Albert Pionke, a fellow board member, about the project, he asked, “So based on your own peculiar interests, who do you think will be over-represented in the companion?” I thought about that question a lot. I’ll withhold an answer, though readers might have their own opinions.
The Children’s Literature Association (ChLA) has been invaluable in writing this book. I suspect its origins can be traced to a ChLA conference, when I mentioned to Jen Cadwallader an assignment I was using in a course on Victorian modernity. That led to an essay in Teaching Victorian Literature, which Jen was editing with Larry Mazzeno, and indirectly to this volume (Larry was the series editor who first approached me about writing it). Through ChLA I also met Sonya Sawyer Fritz, whose input was invaluable at a middle stage, as I made hard decisions about who and what to include. I’ll take any blame for bad choices, but they’re better for having been discussed with Sonya. And many of the entries benefited from feedback from friends and colleagues, most of whom I also met through ChLA. Jen and Sonya were kind enough to read drafts of entries, as were Alexandra Valint, Victoria Ford Smith, Melissa Jenkins, Jill Coste, Amanda Chapman, Claudia Nelson, Jenny Geer, Donelle Ruwe, Lissa Paul, Hannah Field, and Liz Hoiem. I am grateful that these scholars could share their expertise.
No longer being a faculty member made it more challenging to access some of the scholarship on which these entries are based. I am grateful for archive.org and for Google Book previews and also for friends who sent me PDFs of articles or books when asked. Not being faculty also meant that writing this book was outside my official job. I couldn’t have completed this project without a 2022–2023 Individual Study, Research, and Development (ISRD) award. ISRD awards allow NEH employees to devote a set number of working hours to research projects, helping them to maintain professional competencies and active scholarly lives. This book represents my own views and not the views of the NEH or the federal government.
Preface
Like the other works in the McFarland Companions to 19th Century Literature series, this book is intended for students, instructors, scholars, and lay readers. The individual entries provide details about major authors, texts, and topics, often with a short list of relevant criticism. Any companion must necessarily justify its entries, and nineteenth-century British children’s literature is a particularly capacious category. So perhaps some explanation is in order.
Firstly, as the title indicates, this book focuses on nineteenth-century British children’s literature. The phrase encompasses Irish writers such as Maria Edgeworth and Scottish writers such as Robert Louis Stevenson, though the publishing contexts in those nations differ in important ways. It also includes both Romantic and Victorian literature. I include an entry on Romanticism and the Romantic child and use the phrase “Romantic Period” to refer to the first third of the century but otherwise do not distinguish a distinct Romantic literary movement. I recognize that Romanticism and Victorian studies have different disciplinary histories and in certain specialized circles still deploy quite different vocabularies and theoretical approaches. But they are increasingly conflated into a long nineteenth century, and I accept the conflation.
Besides an entry on transatlanticism and passing references to individual authors or texts, I say little about American literature. For most of the century the world of American children’s literature was separate from the British market. The publishers and the publishing contexts that Leonard S. Marcus discusses in his study of American juvenile literature, Minders of Make-Believe (2008), differ from those discussed in this book, even if they frequently reprinted British books (rarely with permission of the author, as American law did not protect foreign copyright until 1891). The two markets converged as the nineteenth century came to a close. Americans such as Mark Twain published in London, and British writers such as Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling lived in America. One might make a good case that Frances Hodgson Burnett is American, not British. But for most of the century the two traditions were quite different, and this companion focuses on British children’s books.
The choice reflects—and, admittedly, contributes to—an institutional divide between British and American literature. Graduate students with interest in the nineteenth century are typically trained in either British or American literature, but not both, and scholars typically don’t publish in the same journals or attend the same conferences. My impression is that scholars of nineteenth-century British literature ar
e more likely to include children’s texts on their syllabi than scholars of American literature. Wiley’s Companion to the Victorian Novel (2008) and Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture (2014), Louis James’s The Victorian Novel (2008), The Cambridge Companion to Fiction in the Romantic Period (2009), and The Cambridge History of Victorian Literature (2012) each includes entries on children’s books.* By contrast, Wiley’s three-volume Companion to American Literature and Culture (2020) does not include an essay on children’s literature, nor do any of the Cambridge companions to American literature.† Authors such as Mark Twain and Louisa May Alcott are, of course, central to American literature, but they are not typically seen as children’s authors.
Children’s literature scholars are less geographically divided. The major journals—for example, The Lion and the Unicorn, Children’s Literature, and the Children’s Literature Association Quarterly—do not discriminate between British and American literature. Nor do The Cambridge Companion to Children’s Literature (2009), The Oxford Handbook to Children’s Literature (2011), The Routledge Companion to Children’s Literature (2012), The Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature (2017), or Wiley’s A Companion to Children’s Literature (2022). The Routledge Companion to International Children’s Literature (2021) focuses on children’s books from Asia, South America, and Africa, while the forthcoming Routledge Companion to Children’s Literature and Culture looks at Anglophone and European literature more generally. Each of these companions engages with literary history, but most privilege the twentieth century, though of course discussing major texts from earlier periods. The same could be said for single-author works including Peter Hunt’s Understanding Children’s Literature (2005), M.O. Grenby’s Edinburgh Critical Guide to Children’s Literature (2008), Seth Lerer’s Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History, from Aesop to Harry Potter (2009), Kimberly Reynolds’s Children’s Literature: A Very Short Introduction (2011), and Karen Coats’s The Bloomsbury Introduction to Children’s and Young Adult Literature (2017). These works contain essays organized by genre (Coats, Grenby), history (Lerer), theoretical approach (Reynolds, Hunt, and Rudd), or some combination of those principles. Though they often include nineteenth-century texts, the focus is on a longer historical trajectory. Individual scholars who focus on nineteenth-century children’s literature, including those who contribute entries to the aforementioned companions, also focus on either British or American literature (usually the former).‡ So while children’s literature as a field may be transatlantic, the divide persists for scholarship of nineteenth-century children’s literature.
Similarly, with the exceptions of Hans Christian Andersen and Jules Verne, this book focuses on authors who wrote in English and who lived in England (or Ireland or Scotland). The entry on imperialism discusses how British children’s books shaped the century’s ideology and an entry on translation explains how texts such as Johann David Wyss’s Swiss Family Robinson (1812) and Heinrich Hoffman’s Struwwelpeter (1845) affected the British market and how translation provided an important source of income for children’s authors, especially women writers, throughout the century. But I recognize this book’s own entanglement with contemporary ideologies. Nineteenth-century scholars are just beginning to discern the ways in which “race and racial difference subtend our most cherished objects of study, our most familiar historical and theoretical frameworks, our most engrained scholarly protocols, and the very demographics of our field” (Chatterjee et al., Introduction 369). A future version of this companion might look quite different, but for now I draw on the scholarship I’m aware of and welcome suggestions for what I’ve missed.
Most of the entries in this book refer to authors rather than texts. There are a few exceptions, for particularly important texts such as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) or Treasure Island (1887), or for works that are the only children’s book by an author known for other genres, such as Catherine Sinclair’s Holiday House (1839). But in general I include entries on Anna Letitia Barbauld and Jean Ingelow, for example, rather than Lessons for Children (1778–79) and Mopsa the Fairy (1869). The choice is a practical one. A single entry on Barbauld can also cover her other works such as Hymns in Prose for Children (1781) and Evenings at Home (1792–96), and a focus on authors keeps the list of entries to a manageable number. This factor became especially important because many of the writers in this book were so prolific. L.T. Meade not only edited the important periodical Atalanta but also wrote more than 200 novels. In a few cases I include family members together, including a mother and her daughter (Mary Wright and Anna Sewell), a married couple (William and Mary Jane Godwin), two sets of siblings (Charles and Mary Lamb and Ann and Jane Taylor), and one set of sisters-in-law (Dorothy and Mary Ann Kilner).
Other writers are major figures of nineteenth-century letters but made minor or tangential contributions to children’s literature. Harriet Martineau, for example, wrote thousands of newspaper articles and dozens of books about a range of subjects but only a handful of novels for children, and John Ruskin would have been just as important a writer had he never written his fairy tale The King of the Golden River (1841). Lastly, focusing on authors slightly pushes the boundaries of “the nineteenth century.” I include entries for two writers (Thomas Day and Mary Wollstonecraft) who died before 1800 and for several (such as Barbauld, Ellenor Fenn, and Dorothy and Mary Ann Kilner) who published most of their work before that date. But their works were frequently reprinted and helped establish the nineteenth-century children’s book market. At the other end of the century, Edith Nesbit, Burnett, Beatrix Potter, J.M. Barrie, and Kenneth Grahame might be said to belong to the Edwardian period, rather than the Victorian. Nevertheless, their writings were shaped by the nineteenth-century tradition, and each did publish before the turn of the century. Their best-known works were published in the twentieth century, but to keep the emphasis on their place in the nineteenth-century tradition I include entries for these authors rather than for major texts such as Peter Pan or The Wind in the Willows.
I also admit a bias for genre over mode: domestic fiction rather than domesticity. I realize that a given work might include different modes. Peter Pan, to take the most obvious example, combines elements of adventure fiction, fairy tales, and domestic fiction. But new works were increasingly advertised as distinct genres, especially in juvenile periodicals, which by convention would include an expected set of texts: for example, a military story, an adventure story, and a school story (Vuohelainen 109). Subgenres are often subsumed into broader categories (nonsense into the entry on poetry for children and the Robinsonade into adventure fiction), even though a case could be made to separate them. Similarly, illustrations were a crucial component of children’s books from the beginning of the century, and many illustrators were famous in their own right. With the exception of Kate Greenaway, however, I discuss illustrators and illustration as a separate entry, which subsumes even major figures such as Arthur Hughes, Walter Crane, and Randolph Caldecott.
I apologize in advance to scholars whose favorite writer does not appear in this companion. The most notable omission is Oscar Wilde. Wilde is certainly a major nineteenth-century figure, and his fairy tale collections, The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888) and A House of Pomegranates (1890), are important works of children’s literature. But scholarship about Wilde, and even about these books, doesn’t typically situate him as a children’s writer, and ultimately I decided against a separate entry. Similarly, William Thackeray’s The Rose and the Ring seemed too minor a work to justify inclusion. I also started, and discarded, entries about Mary de Morgan, Dinah Craik, Andrew Lang, Mary Howitt, Frederick W. Farrar, Talbot Baines Reed, Robert Hope Moncrieff, and several others. The paucity of recent scholarship about these writers didn’t seem sufficient to justify their inclusion, though I refer to their works within other entries. Late Victorian surveys such as Edward Salmon’s Juvenile Literature also list many men and women§ who were well known to their contemporaries and whom perhaps future authors will rediscover but who seemed too forgotten to include here.
