JONKERS RARE BOOKS
Victorian Children’s Books The success of the fairy stories of Anderson and Grimm had shown how favour- ably children responded to imaginative flights of fancy. However such tales of wonder largely came from overseas; children’s literature from within Britain still sought to instruct and was mainly given over to moralistic tales highlighting the virtues of compliant behaviour and hard work. The rapid industrialisation of Britain throughout the nineteenth century saw an increase in working children, and children at work had little opportunity to learn and so to read. Charles Dickens was one who was concerned by the possibility of a burgeoning class of uneducated masses and used his writing to bring the issue to a wider audience. His A Christmas Carol was written as a cautionary tale, a secular, if spiritual, parable, but the simple message and central role played by a child made it immediately appealing to a younger audience and within a genera- tion it had established itself as a children’s staple. However, the dramatic cultural shift in children’s literature happened a few years later when an Oxford mathematician was convinced to publish the whimsical tale he had told to young friends on the banks of the Thames. Lewis Carrol’s Alice in Wonderland was a book expressly for children, which had no moral message, was of full length and was fantastical for the sole purpose of enthralling and amusing its readers. Although structured like a novel, it was illustrated throughout: after all as Alice says, “What is the point of a book without pictures of conversations?”. It was the work Victorian children had been waiting for and was an instant and tremendous success. It was reprinted repeatedly and continues to inspire gener- ations of illustrators to this day. It was also, with one languid swipe, a hammer blow to the moralistic children’s book. Now characters could be adventurous, dangerous, magical, whimsical or badly behaved and other authors, emboldened by Alice’s success, began to write for children
in a whole new way. The floodgates had been opened to a gold- en age of children’s books.
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