Children's Literature

The Romantic era witnessed an unprecedented rise in the number of works written for and about children and adolescents. The increasing literacy rates among the lower classes, a nationalist focus on the education of young children, the availability of cheap paper, and the improvements in the quality of illustrations combined with the expansion of publishing companies in the major cities of London, Edinburgh, and Dublin fuelled this growth in the writing and selling of children's literature. Earlier in the century, predominantly with the work of John Newbery in the 1740s, children's literature started to foreground the secular and quotidian experiences of its young readers, encouraging them to use their imagination and to aspire to transcend their hereditary origins with hard work, virtue, luck, and the education provided by these children's books. From 1740–85, Newbery and his colleagues transformed children's literature into a commercially viable trade, producing a new generation of juvenile readers. Raised on the self‐consciously literary and market‐driven books with the Newbery imprint, William Blake, William Wordsworth, and other Romantics revisited Newbery's literary and commercial strategies, inaugurating what Katie Trumpener calls a ‘second revolution in children's literature’ (2009: 555). As more women writers entered the literary market and both a newly literate working‐class and female readership emerged, there were fervent debates about ‘the child’. With her immensely popular books for young children that influenced Blake and Wordsworth, Anna Letitia Barbauld became one of the preeminent educators of children. Instead of regarding the young reader as an eager and acquiescent consumer who desires entertainment in the Newbery mode or requires suitable instruction as Barbauld believed, Wordsworth's poetry celebrated the child's heavenly glory and imagined him to be man's divine seer, while Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794) depicted the child as a natural visionary who embodied the transcendent possibilities of the imagination. Both poets viewed social institutions, such as the church, state, schools and, implicitly, the new commercial children's book trade, as corrupting the child reader. At the same time, many other Romantic writers actively participated in these debates about ‘the child’ by producing and distributing original or heavily revised (bowdlerized) books for the child and adolescent market.