The History of Children’s Books, No.3: Eminent Victorians

From the mid-nineteenth century onward, children’s literature threw out branches in all directions to create what his become known as a golden age. There were adventure books for boys and domestic stories for girls, animal stories and picture books. John Rowe Townsend explains.

Growing populations, increasing prosperity and literacy, and the development of the publishing trade all helped children’s literature to thrive. And views on childhood were changing again. The endangered soul, steeped in original sin, had given way in the eighteenth century to the blank page waiting to be written on. Neither of these concepts had been totally abandoned. But there was a new view, to which Wordsworth gave early expression when he wrote of children coming into the world trailing clouds of glory, only to find the shades of the prison-house closing around them.

The romantic clouds-of-glory picture led in the end to late-Victorian sentimentality. But a more moderate belief among enlightened adults that children were human beings with their own needs and interests, and that childhood should be a time of enjoyment, was gaining ground at the time of the Alice books. Older, sterner ideas were still around, and unquestioning obedience to adult authority was still demanded. Nonetheless, Alice can be seen as a celebration of childhood, and children’s books tried increasingly to offer a child’s perspective rather than that of a parent or instructor.

The Waifs of City Streets

At the same time, concerned adults of the middle and middle-to-upper classes felt increasingly that better-off children should be made aware of the lives of those less fortunate. Charles Kingsley and George MacDonald had incorporated this concern into fantasy, but there were also many realistic stories, which have been described as `waif novels’, about ragged and underfed children on city streets.

These stories were of their day, and did not have the vitality to survive. They were not revolutionary. They advocated sympathy and charity towards the poor rather than change. A constant theme was that poor children had souls to be saved, and indeed, as in the once-famous Jessica’s First Prayer, by ‘Hesba Stretton’ (Sarah Smith) in 1867, a poor child might set an example of goodness and piety to its betters. It is all summed up in the words of one writer of the day: such children `may be street arabs, but they have immortal souls, and they are our brothers and sisters, though we may not own them.’

For the poor themselves, if they were literate, there were tracts and rewards produced by well-meaning organisations with their spiritual benefit at heart. There was also less edifying reading-matter. Until well into the century, catchpenny publishers continued to churn out chapbooks. These were succeeded by sensational serials, penny dreadfuls and comics.

Books for Boys and Books for Girls

Hard-cover fiction for the more fortunate young people increased greatly in quantity, and a division opened up between boys’ and girls’ books. Stories for younger children did not take much account of gender, since a young child was not supposed to be a sexual creature. But further up the age range boys were expected to be manly and girls to be womanly. Boys’ books featured adventure on land and sea, for which an expanding empire gave plenty of scope. For girls’ books the domestic scene was horizon enough. Of girls’ literature, a commentator wrote in 1888 that `while it advances beyond the nursery it stops short of the full blaze of the drawing-room.’ Not surprisingly, girls of spirit and imagination preferred boys’ books.

The main ancestors of the boys’ adventure story were Robinson Crusoe and the novels of Sir Walter Scott. Captain Marryat, who had published the well known sea story Mr Midshipman Easy as a book for adults in 1836, crossed over to young people’s literature with Masterman Ready in 1841 and The Children of the New Forest in 1847. Of the many adventure-story writers who followed, R M Ballantyne is still remembered for The Coral Island (1858) and G A Henty for a long succession of action-packed if long-winded stories now recalled, if at all, by great-grandparents. The writer of genius in this field was Robert Louis Stevenson and the great masterpiece was Treasure Island (1883), whose high colour, narrative force and memorable characters have kept it as fresh as when written. Interestingly, Treasure Island shows no trace of imperialism and precious little of morality.

There were many American adventure stories of the same kind as the British; but the only ones now remembered are Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), which were totally unlike the British model and made it clear that adventure could happen to ordinary youngsters as well as to stiff upper-lipped heroes, and could take place on home ground as well as on a foreign field.

The school story, invariably set in a boys’ boarding school, had got under way with Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857) and the feverishly moral Eric, or Little by Little, by F W Farrar (1858). The boarding school had the advantage, for fictional purposes, of being a world of its own, in which boys were themselves the citizens and might lead or follow, behave well or badly, assume responsibilities, grapple with moral problems, form personal relationships, and of course win or lose sports matches. The outstanding practitioner was Talbot Baines Reed, author of The Fifth Form at St Dominic’s (1887) and other school stories. This genre prospered for the rest of the century, and in a reduced way well into the twentieth, but was fatally undermined by the cynicism of Rudyard Kipling’s Stalky & Co (1899).

The girls’ novel shades off into the family story, since both were set in the home rather than on some distant frontier. The most notable Victorian exponents, as it happens, were American. The Wide, Wide World, by Elizabeth Wetherell (Susan Warner) in 1850 and The Lamplighter, by Maria Cummings (1854) had huge success in England; and the greatest of them all, Little Women, in 1868, was by an American, Louisa M Alcott. The principal British writer of girls’ novels was Charlotte M Yonge, whose best book, The Daisy Chain (1856), may be seen as a forerunner of Little Women. Other writers of domestic stories, well known and regarded in their day but now almost forgotten, were Juliana Horatia Ewing and Louisa Molesworth. But E Nesbit’s family stories, beginning with The Story of the Treasure Seekers, featuring the Bastable children, in 1899 and including The Railway Children in 1906, have stayed the course until the present day.

Frances Hodgson Burnett is another writer whose work has lasted. A Little Princess (1905) has remained popular, and The Secret Garden (1911) is a major classic. Mrs Hodgson Burnett also wrote Little Lord Fauntleroy (1885), about a likeable small boy in a back street of New York who unexpectedly finds himself heir to an earldom. Fauntleroy has been derided – unfairly, in my view – as the acme of namby-pamby books. That honour surely belongs to Eric.

Humanised Animal Stories

Children feel a natural affinity with animals, and stories about animals run all through children’s literature, but the long-term survivors have generally featured humanised animals -‘ourselves in fur’ – rather than animals in their actual nature. True, Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty (1877) is the life story of a supposedly actual horse, but it is told as if by the horse itself, which obviously implies a high degree of humanisation. The reader identifies with the horse. In Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Books (1894-5) the animals have their distinctive characteristics but observe, in the Law of the Jungle and their general behaviour, a code of ethics which is clearly human and masculine. Here the reader’s identification is not with an animal but with the boy, Mowgli, who is acknowledged by the animals as their leader. And in Kenneth Grahame’s much-loved The Wind in the Willows (1908), Mole, Rat, Toad and Badger are obviously people. They are people of `our’ class, though Toad does rather let the side down. The stoats, ferrets and weasels are the potentially dangerous lower orders of the Grahame world.

Poetry and Verse

Nineteenth-century verse for children did not rise to great heights. William Blake’s Songs of Innocence, probably the first poems of genius to be written with children in mind, had appeared back in 1789, but barely got into the new century’s ratings in comparison with the works of Ann and Jane Taylor, authors (among much other verse) of My Mother and Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. The most lasting Victorian achievements were Robert Browning’s The Pied Piper of Hamelin in 1842, the poems of Christina Rossetti in the mid-century, the comic verses of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses in 1885.

The Birth of the Picture Book

The last third of the nineteenth century saw the birth of the picture-book as we know it. It was largely the creation of a master printer, Edmund Evans, who developed the art of fine colour-printing and commissioned three great illustrators to exploit its possibilities. These were the decorative Walter Crane, the vigorous and humorous Randolph Caldecott, and the sentimental and appealing Kate Greenaway. And early in the new century came Beatrix Potter, whose small books for small hands combined the attractions of the humanised-animal tale and the picture-book into small classics.

The half-century between Alice‘s Adventures in Wonderland and the outbreak of World War I has been called the golden age of children’s literature. Many years were to pass before its achievements were rivalled; and that was in a different world.

John Rowe:Townsend has been writing for children andyoung people for many years. Three of his books – Gumble’s Yard, The Intruder and Noah’s Castle – have been serialised on television. His history of English-language children’s literature, Written for Children, published by The Bodley Head at £9.99, is in its sixth and, he says, final edition.

In the next article in this series, John Rowe Townsend looks at children’s literature between the wars.