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Children’s Book Publishing in Britain
Margaret Clark
The publishing of books is—and always has been—a matter of buying and selling: the
publisher buys from authors and artists the right to reproduce their work in printed
form (and, increasingly, towards the end of the twentieth century, in other ways—audio,
visual, electronic). The publisher then sells, through many channels, as many copies of
that work as customers can be persuaded to acquire. Where publishing differs from
other commercial enterprises is in the nature of what is bought and sold. No book is
exactly the same as another; nor is a book indispensable to survival, nor (some would
claim) a necessary ingredient of a happy life. For some centuries possession of books
was the privilege of a minority and in England it was only in 1870 that Forster’s
Education Act offered to everyone the opportunity of learning to read. Most publishers,
therefore, have been motivated by desires other than that of making money, and this is
especially true of the publishers of children’s books.
For while Allen Lane, the creator of Penguin Books in the 1930s, could claim a
missionary zeal in making available to the reader in search of self-education scholarly
works at Woolworth prices (Flower 1959:5–6), the publisher of children’s books is
inspired by two equally strong motives—a passionate belief in the pleasure to be gained
by reading fiction (whether a picture-book story, a fairy tale or a teenage novel) and a
constant aspiration to teach, to inform, to influence young minds. As the esteemed
historian of children’s books, F.J.Harvey Darton (himself a member of a publishing
family), put it, ‘children’s books were always the scene of a battle between instruction
and amusement, between restraint and freedom, between hesitant morality and
spontaneous happiness’ (1932/1982: vii).
The distinction between books published for adults and those published for children is
not always acknowledged by their readers, and it could be said that William Caxton was
the first publisher of a children’s book in England, since he printed an edition of Aesop’s
Fables in 1484. In the following centuries alphabet books were published in the form of
primers and horn-books, but one of the first people to publish books with the declared
intention of entertaining, while instructing, young readers was John Newbery (1713–
1767), who personally designed, and very often wrote, the books that he published and
sold from his shop at 65 St Paul’s Churchyard in London. A Little Pretty Pocket Book, a
miscellany of ‘instruction and amusement’, was published in about 1744. No copy of the
first edition has survived—a common feature of children’s books is that favourites wear
out with constant handling. The book was followed by nearly thirty other publications,
although this represented only a small proportion of Newbery’s total output. Publishers