Drama also proffered religious and devotional messages. At the French court of Louis
XIV the pious Marquise de Maintenon encouraged girls to act in Bible dramas, a practice
that François Fénelon codified in his Traité de l’education des filles (1687) where he
discussed girls’ dramatising appropriate Bible stories. In the eighteenth century Mme de
la Fite’s Drames et contes moraux (1778 et seq.) were part of an English education as
were Maria Edgeworth’s Little Plays for Young People, Hannah More’s Sacred Dramas
(1782), the Comtesse de Genlis’s Théâtre a l’Usage des Jeunes Personnes (1785), and
Mark Anthony Meilan’s Holy Writ Familiarized to Juvenile Conceptions (1791).
Magazines and miscellanies also included religious and devotional material, and with
evangelical and Anglican support the religious component blossomed in the nineteenth
century.
Allegories, which followed the pattern set by The Pilgrim’s Progress and which were
written especially for children, were enacted in symbolic space by archetypal characters,
without linear plots; people’s actions were surely and simply eponymous, their names
predictive for their individual fates. Mrs Sherwood’s Infant’s Progress From the Valley of
Destruction to Everlasting Glory (1821) exemplifies this genre. Her histories were
structured by sequential events that impinged on their stories’ characters, shaped their
fates, and generated their attributes, for example, ‘chaste’ Joseph. Moral narrative
amalgamated the characteristics of allegories and histories by retaining allegorical
naming (Squire Allworthy, Peter Prudence, Betsey Goodchild, Anthony Greedyguts and
Marjory Meanwell) within an essentially historical narrative structure. Allegories,
histories and moral narratives shaded one into the other and shared a single aim—to
produce good Christian children.
Moral and Religious Writing
Kate MontagnonEvangelical writing for children 1800–1900In historical terms broad trends can be discerned in religious, devotional and moral
writing for children. In the seventeenth century, religious and spiritual development was
fostered by allegorical books; in the eighteenth century, educational progress led child
heroes and heroines to wealth and fame, although books were class-specific, with
appropriate messages—the rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate. In the
nineteenth century as a single-class religious prose began to emerge, evangelism became
a major influence in the development of children’s literature. Evangelical Christians,
who saw the written word as a potential path to salvation, were interested in souls not
stories, and thus a friendly critic praised Mrs O.F.Walton’s A Peep Behind the Scenes
(1877) for its godliness in clearly teaching ‘the three Rs—Ruin, Redemption and
Regeneration’. Evangelicals turned to publishing to serve a new literate class among the
poor—a class they had helped to create by founding Sunday Schools. Anxious that
literacy should not foment evil, they supplied pious tracts to supplant vulgar
chapbooks. Fiction, still regarded by some as sinful lying, might be acceptable if it
highlighted Biblical truths, and much of the early evangelical material for children was
in the form of eight-page tracts, which told stories that exhorted readers to repentance
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