sin in the human heart, and the how and why of the entrance of every vice can be traced’
(Rousseau 1762/1974:56). Rousseau believed that books contributed to the corruption
of children, which is one of the reasons why he argued that children should not be
taught to read until they reached the age of ten. He also felt that severe limits should be
imposed on children’s reading materials, a point he elaborated on in Emile:
I hate books; they only teach us to talk about things we know nothing about ...
Since we must have books, there is one book which, to my thinking, supplies the
best treatise on an education according to nature. This is the first book Emile will
read; for a long time it will form his whole library... What is this wonderful book? Is
it Aristotle?...No; it is Robinson Crusoe.
Rousseau 1762/1974:147By the beginning of the nineteenth century, Rousseau’s notion of childhood innocence
had gained a considerable following in both Britain and the USA. Not all of these people
agreed with some of Rousseau’s more extreme positions, but most supported his
argument that children should be sheltered from books that could, in their view, have a
corrupting influence. This development led to a tradition of self-censorship among
children’s authors. From the early nineteenth century until well into the twentieth
century, most children’s authors tried to make sure that their books contained nothing
that could be considered corruptive. These authors automatically assumed that they
could not refer to sexuality, mention certain bodily functions, graphically describe violent
acts, portray adults in a negative light, use swear words, criticise authority figures or
address controversial social issues.
Since most children’s authors practised self-censorship, the publishers of conventional
children’s books seldom saw any need to censor the manuscripts that were submitted to
them. Sometimes, however, publishers decided to reprint children’s books that pre-
dated the era of childhood innocence, and these books often included material that
publishers found objectionable. Many nineteenth-century publishers, for example,
decided that some of the bawdy passages from Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels were
inappropriate for children and excised them from juvenile editions of the book. The most
frequently censored passage, according to a survey conducted by Sarah Smedman, was
the one in which Gulliver extinguishes a fire in the Lilliputians’ palace by urinating on
it. This incident was deleted or rewritten in nearly every children’s edition published
during the second half of the nineteenth century (Smedman 1990:84–85).
Although few children’s authors deliberately violated taboos, occasionally authors
included scenes or passages that gave their publishers pause. Beatrix Potter’s
publisher, for example, twice pressured Potter to delete material from her books. When
Potter sent her publishers the original manuscript version of The Tailor of Gloucester, it
contained a picture of rats having a party in the mayor’s cellar. The publisher insisted
that this picture be cut because it showed a rat drinking out of a suspicious-looking
black bottle. Potter thought that this objection was silly, but she reluctantly went along
with the change in part because she was a beginning author and felt slightly
intimidated. The book, minus the picture of the rats’ party, came out in 1903 (Linder
1987:117). A few years later, however, Potter took a more defiant approach when her
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