The other branch of children’s-literature prehistory is instructional: school books,
courtesy books (which told children how to behave in a seemly manner) and didactic
and religious books which aimed to instil virtue and devotion. The notorious ‘godly
books’ of seventeenth-century Puritans ranged from the relatively mild such as James
Janeway’s A Token for Children (1671), telling of the ‘holy and exemplary lives and joyful
deaths of several young children’, to grim and lurid threats of hellfire for the impious.
A Clean SlateThe writers who, with the best of intentions, warned their readers that they were ‘not too
little to go to hell’ believed that children were steeped in original sin. But around the
start of the eighteenth century a new view was becoming widely held. It was associated
with the Enlightenment and especially, in England, with the philosopher John Locke. This
saw the child as being born in a state of innocence, and the young mind as a tabula rasa
—a clean slate, waiting to be written on.
Locke perceived the possibility of combining pleasure with instruction. In his Thoughts
Concerning Education (1693) he suggested that children could be ‘cozened into a
knowledge of their letters’ and could ‘play themselves into what others are whipped for’.
A child who had learned to read could be given ‘some easy, pleasant book’ which would
reward his pains in reading yet not ‘fill his head with perfectly useless trumpery, or lay
the principles of vice and folly’. Locke’s prescription, in his own view, ruled out the old
tales and romances, and he could find nothing to recommend, outside the Scriptures,
but Aesop and Reynard the Fox.
This was an invitation to producers of books to fill a gap. Newbery—a great admirer of
Locke—was not the first or the only one to respond, but he was the most successful and
the most important. His many titles brought together the pleasurable and the
instructive, frequently between the same covers. The two aims —to teach and to please—
have remained twined together ever since, and publishers today tend to bring out both
recreational and instructional books. A clear distinction is drawn between them on the
publishers’ lists; but the urge to instruct the young is deeply built into human nature,
and at all times there have been supposedly recreational books which have had,
consciously or unconsciously, a didactic element. This remains true today.
The present essay will concern itself with books that have been specially written and
published for children and are designed, at least in part, to give them pleasure:
essentially fiction, poetry and picture books. It will not examine schoolbooks or
information books. Also outside the scope of this study is the continuation of the old
unregenerate line of popular fiction which can be traced, in a rough and ready way,
through the chapbooks that used to be hawked from door to door by pedlars, the penny
dreadfuls and Victorian horror sheets and the modern comic.
Landmarks of FictionDuring or just after John Locke’s lifetime, three major works of fiction were published,
none of which was written specially for children but all of which were adopted, or
adapted, as children’s books. They were John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), Daniel
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