book’ drew its inspiration from elsewhere (from sentimental and domestic fiction) and
offered emotional stories occurring in the Great Indoors.
For an example of the ‘girl’s book’ we can turn to Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide
World (1851) where Ellen Montgomery, a poor girl harmed by uncaring adults and an
indifferent world, nearly drowns in a sea of tears but is buoyed up by her Christianity.
Maria Susanna Cummins’s The Lamplighter (1854) provides another example; this is a
Dickensian tale of young Gerty adrift in the streets of Boston. These were works of a
group of authors that scholars would later refer to as the ‘lachrymose ladies’—an
injudicious sobriquet. In truth, their work is akin to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle
Tom’s Cabin (1852), a novel with which they shared best seller status and which also
became a favourite among the young.
As for Mrs Stowe, it is said that at their first meeting President Abraham Lincoln
greeted her with: ‘So, this is the little lady who wrote the big book’—the implication
being that Stowe’s touching anti-slavery novel had kindled America’s Civil War. That
may be too grand a claim, but beginning in 1861 America’s two great regions (the North
and the South) were locked in bloody internecine warfare until a peace accord could be
signed at Appomattox in 1865, the year Tolstoy’s War and Peace was published.
Elsewhere, that same year, juvenile literature was taking different turns: to the East
(across the Atlantic) Lewis Carroll published Alice in Wonderland, and in the West (in
California) an author by the name of Mark Twain wrote hilariously about Jumping Frog
contests.
The Golden Age (1865–1914)The Golden Age of American Children’s Books occurred between the conclusion of
America’s Civil War and the start of the First World War. It was a remarkable time that
saw the publication of many of America’s most famous children’s novels: Little Women,
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Tarzan of the Apes, The
Secret Garden, and others. Major authors (Mark Twain, Louisa May Alcott and others)
wrote for minors. And, extraordinarily, children’s books headed the best seller lists
because adults, too, were eagerly turning to these stories.
The epoch was, as some historians have said, the Era of the Child. Some of this
attention was fuelled by nostalgia; following the horrors of the Civil War, many authors
were eager to recall the agrarian bliss of their pre-war childhoods and turned to the
Child as a symbol of the Always Vernal Past. Other authors seized on the figure of the
Child as a symbol of a Promising Future in a post-war America illuminated by the
incandescent light bulb, taking wing with the flights of the Wright Brothers, hastening
along on railroads and steamships, and engaged in angelic communications via
transcontinental and oceanic telegraph cables.
Legions of reformers, however, were not interested in the Child as Symbol. Instead,
they saw the Child as Class. These argued that children, per se, had their own unique
needs. So, ministers, politicians, and reformers of all kinds ministered to these special
needs by creating orphanages, kindergartens, playgrounds, child labour laws, and
mandatory schooling. By way of example, we might note that Pediatrics became in the
1880s a recognised medical speciality and a field taught at Harvard.
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