International Companion Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature

twopenny chapbooks as makeweights. Vernor and Hood, Joseph Johnson, John Nourse
who specialised in French books for school and home, and John Marshall, were some of
the other firms engaged in the London trade. Children’s books were also being produced
in provincial publishing centres: Newcastle was one of the earliest chapbook centres to
specialise in children’s works, but there were also small provincial presses across the
country, from Wrexham to York and from Alnwick to Wellington.
The quality and variety of production had also improved immeasurably. Much of the
credit for this is due to the development of illustration techniques, through the work of
John and Thomas Bewick who perfected the art of wood engraving, and the increasing use
of copper engravings in the more expensively priced children’s books (Whalley and
Chester, 1988:27–28). William Blake was a major illustrator, but his own children’s
book, Songs of Innocence (1789) was only widely known much later.
By 1800, the children’s book trade was well established and children had a
wideranging literature at their disposal. Not all of it was just for entertainment, but
increasingly it was being written with their developmental needs in mind. From their
origins in the formal writing of the early schoolbooks, Puritan texts, popular literature
and fables, children’s books had emerged as a class of literature. The book trade was
poised to develop this even further and to exploit the technical innovations of the next
century.

References

Axtell, J.L. (1968) The Educational Writings of John Locke, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Cressy, D. (1980) Literacy and the Social Order, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Darton, F.J.H. (1982) Children’s Books in England: Five Centuries of Social Life, 3rd edn, ed.
B.Alderson, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Opie, I. and Opie P. (1951/1980) The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Pickering, S.F. (1981) John Locke and Children’s Books in Eighteenth Century England, Knoxville,
TN: University of Tennessee Press.
Roscoe, S. (1973) John Newbery and his Successors 1740–1814: A Bibliography, Wormley: Five Owls
Press.
Spufford, M. (1981) Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and its Readership in
Seventeenth Century England, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Whalley, J.I. and Chester, T.R. (1988) A History of Children’s Book Illustration, London: John
Murray/The Victoria and Albert Museum.

Further Reading

Jackson, M.V. (1989) Engines of Instruction, Mischief and Magic: Children’s Literature in England
from its Beginnings to 1839, Aldershot: Scolar Press.
Opie, I. and Opie P. (1974) The Classic Fairy Tales, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Plumb, J.H. (1975) ‘The new world of children in eighteenth century England’, Past and Present
67:64–95.

146 TYPES AND GENRES