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British Children’s Literature: A Historical
Overview
John Rowe Townsend
The modern history of children’s books in Britain is commonly regarded as beginning in
the 1740s, when John Newbery opened a shop in London and began to publish and sell
books for ‘little masters and misses’. The first serious historian of the subject, Harvey
Darton, wrote in Children’s Books in England of ‘Newbery the Conqueror’, and (with
tongue firmly in cheek) described the year 1744, in which Newbery published his first
title, A Little Pretty Pocket-Book, as ‘a date comparable to the 1066 of the older histories’.
Darton admitted that the assigning of a specific date to a development that took place
over a number of years was merely a convenience, and that Newbery was not alone in
the field; but there is no doubt that the mid-eighteenth century was the time at which
children’s books as a serious branch of the book trade got under way. Stable political
conditions, the spread of literacy, the rise of the respectable middle class and the
growing domesticity of its life, were combining with a new view of childhood to make the
production of books for children an economic and psychological possibility.
However, if one accepts the age of Newbery as, conventionally, the beginning of
children’s-book history, one must acknowledge and briefly glance at a sizeable
prehistory. This may be said to have two branches, which were, broadly, story material
handed down over the centuries but not meant specially for children, and material that
was meant specially for children but was not story. The former branch is the larger. It
includes legend and romance (tales of King Arthur, Robin Hood, Guy of Warwick, Bevis
of Hampton, the Seven Champions of Christendom and many others), fable (Aesop,
Reynard the Fox) and folk-tale: a great mass of stuff, of varied nature and quality. Much
of it was put into print by the early printers of the late fifteenth and the sixteenth
centuries; much was passed on by word of mouth, circulating in the population at large.
The audience for story was seen as universal. Sir Philip Sidney wrote in his Defence of
Poesie (posthumously published in 1595) of the poet as story-teller: ‘With a tale forsooth
he cometh unto you, with a tale which holdeth children from play and old men from the
chimney-corner’ A tale was for young and old alike. But with the advance of the
Renaissance, educated people were already turning to the classics, and the old tales
were increasingly looked down on by the literate. They were also condemned on moral
grounds, especially by the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Puritans. In his Book of
Nurture (1554), Hugh Rhodes alleged that ‘feigned fables, vain fantasies and wanton
stories and songs of love’ brought much mischief to youth—a complaint which in one
form or another has been echoed at many times and in many places.