Fairy Tale, Fantasy and AdventureIn the early nineteenth century, the output of books for children continued to grow, but
emphasis was still largely on the didactic and instructional. Fiction stood at a discount
to fact and was represented largely by a flow of wishy-washy moral stories which
presumably children found acceptable in the absence of anything more stimulating.
Catherine Sinclair, in a preface to Holiday House (1839), complained that ‘imagination is
now carefully discouraged, and books written for young persons are generally a mere dry
record of facts, unenlivened by any appeal to the heart, or any excitement to the fancy’.
She wished to write about ‘that species of noisy, frolicsome, mischievous children’ which
was (she alleged) ‘now almost extinct’; and Holiday House, though now forgotten, is in
fact a refreshing contrast to its more leaden contemporaries.
The most interesting development of the early nineteenth century was the gradual
rehabilitation of the folk-tales. They had been under a series of clouds: regarded by the
Tudor and Stuart literati as peasant absurdities, by the Puritans as dangerous and
immoral nonsense, and by the eighteenth century as contrary to reason. But they were
still at large in the population. Their emergence into respectable print is probably
associated with the rise of Romanticism, the greater esteem for imagination that had
followed the Age of Reason, and the replacement to some extent of classical influences
by Nordic ones. In the early years of the century, Benjamin Tabart, owner of a children’s
bookshop, produced several collections of ‘popular fairy tales’; and from this time
onward the old tales gradually gained acceptance, the greatest stimulus coming from
translation of the Grimm brothers’ German Popular Stories in 1823–1826.
By the mid-nineteenth century, imagination was in favour among the more forward-
looking writers. John Ruskin put his stamp of approval on fairy tales by publishing his
well-known and popular King of the Golden River in 1851. Conditions were now favourable
to the production of children’s books. The population was growing rapidly, literacy was
increasing, publishing was becoming a profession. A great deal of the material published
remained didactic: the work of third- and fourth-rate writers turning out what the
market demanded. The Victorian ideal of childhood, in brief, was that children should be
good and do as they were told. Piety, often to an unrealistic degree, was approved of; the
activity of tract societies and the growing trade in Sunday School ‘rewards’ resulted in a
torrent of ‘goody-goody’ books. To look at the Victorian children’s books still familiar
today is in one way misleading but in another way illuminating: the survivors are far
from representative of the entire output and come almost invariably from the minority
that ignored, bent or broke the rules.
In the 1860s—a key decade—two major fantasies appeared: Charles Kingsley’s
powerful and urgent, but muddled, The Water Babies (1863), and the book which many
would call the greatest English children’s book of all: Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures
in Wonderland (1865), to be followed in 1871 by Through the Looking-Glass. The Alice
books, though not always successful with children themselves, have endless fascination
for commentators and have been analysed from a variety of standpoints. Arguably
however, the most imaginative of mid-Victorian fantasy writers was George Macdonald,
author of At the Back of the North Wind (1871) and The Princess and the Goblin (1872).
But fantasy was not the only or the numerically dominant genre of that era. The
adventure story, from its base in adult fiction with Robinson Crusoe and the novels of
672 BRITISH CHILDREN’S LITERATURE: A HISTORICAL OVERVIEW