by M. O. Grenby
1726
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels
1729
Histories, or Tales of Past Times, translated by Robert Samber from Charles Perrault’s Histoires, ou contes du temps passé of 1697, retellings of traditional French fairy tales
1730
Thomas Boreman, Description of Three Hundred Animals
1740–3
Thomas Boreman publishes by subscription the Gigantick Histories, a series of miniature guidebooks to London bound in ‘Dutch gilt paper’
1742
The Child’s New Play-Thing, a speller with a fold-out plate of decorative alphabet cards, published by Thomas Cooper
1744
Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song Book, the first collection of nursery rhymes, published by Mary Cooper and printed throughout in intaglio; A Little Pretty Pocket-Book published by John Newbery
1746
Royal Battledore, a folded-card alphabet intended as an alternative to the hornbook, published by Benjamin Collins
1749
Sarah Fielding, The Governess; or, the Little Female Academy, the first book-length fiction for children
1751–2
The Lilliputian Magazine, the first children’s periodical, published in numbers by Thomas Carnan, John Newbery’s step-son
1753
Wove paper is introduced in England
1762
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile, or On Education
1765
The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes, published by John Newbery
1767
James Greenwood, The London Vocabulary, issued in ‘school canvas’ binding; Adam & Eve, the first in a series of harlequinades (a type of ‘movable book’), published by Robert Sayer in plain and hand-coloured versions
1778–9
Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Lessons for Children, an early use of different sizes of type for readers of different ages
1780
Mother Goose’s Melody; or, Sonnets from the Cradle, a collection of nursery rhymes with illustrations by Thomas Bewick
1782
The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes issued by Thomas Carnan in pictorial boards
1783
Noah Webster, A Grammatical Institute of the English Language
1783–9
Thomas Day, The History of Sandford and Merton
1789
William Blake, Songs of Innocence, with text and ‘illuminations’ both relief etched throughout, and issued in a very limited print-run
1790
Thomas Bewick, General History of Quadrupeds, the first major book illustrated with wood engravings
1796
Maria Edgeworth, The Parent’s Assistant; or, Stories for Children
1798
Alois Senefelder invents lithography; first paper-making machine invented
1799
John Marshall begins publishing his miniature libraries in ornamental boxes; founding of the Religious Tract Society, one of the biggest nineteenth-century publishers of children’s books
1800
Development of stereotyping begins; introduction of the Stanhope iron press
1802–6
Sarah Trimmer, The Guardian of Education, the first review journal of children’s books
1804–5
Ann and Jane Taylor (and others), Original Poems for Infant Minds
1805
Sarah Catherine Martin, The Comic Adventures of Old Mother Hubbard and her Dog, an early example of a hand-coloured nursery rhyme picture book that became a bestseller
1807
Charles and Mary Lamb, Tales from Shakespeare for the Use of Young Persons, the earliest English children’s book to have remained in print to the present time
1810
The History of Little Fanny, the first in a series of paper-doll books with aquatint illustrations and wallet bindings, published by S. and J. Fuller; introduction of steam-powered rotary printing press
1818–42
Mary Martha Sherwood, The History of the Fairchild Family
1820
Hugh Blair’s Precepts, illustrated with steel engravings
1822
Introduction of mechanical typesetting
1823
The Brothers Grimm, German Popular Stories, translated by Edgar Taylor, illustrated by George Cruikshank
1824
Mary Sewell, Walks with Mamma, an early example of a book bound in cloth by publisher
1828
Thomas Crofton Croker publishes the first annual produced for children, The Christmas Box
1833
Introduction of the printed book jacket
1834
Baxter’s ‘Polychromatic’ printing process introduced in Robert Mudie, The Feathered Tribes of the British Islands
1836–57
William Holmes McGuffey, McGuffey’s Eclectic Readers 1–6
1838
Development of rail delivery services begins to affect book distribution
1839
Catherine Sinclair, Holiday House
1840
Dalziel Bros. founded: the firm would establish wood-engraved illustrations as standard commercial practice
1844
Fox Talbot’s photographic innovations utilised in book publishing: development of photolithography
1846
Hans Christian Andersen, Wonderful Stories for Children, translated by Mary Howitt; Edward Lear, Book of Nonsense
1847
Frederick Marryat, Children of the New Forest, the earliest work of children’s fiction to remain continually in print to the present time
1848
Heinrich Hoffman, Struwwelpeter
1854
Introduction of chemical wood pulp and esparto in paper-making; introduction of photography on wood
1857
Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown’s Schooldays
1858
R. M. Ballantyne, The Coral Island
1863
Charles Kingsley, The Water-Babies
1865
Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; Mary Mapes Dodge, Hans Brinker, or the Silver Skates
1865–73
Our Young Folks
1867
Hesba Stretton, Jessica’s First Prayer
1868
Louisa May Alcott, Little Women; Walter Crane’s first toy book, Sing a Song of Sixpence, with wood engravings printed in full colour by Edmund Evans
1870
Universal, subsidised schooling introduced in Britain by the Elementary Education Act
1871
Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass; G. A. Henty, Out on the Pampas
1872
Christina Rossetti, Sing-song
1873–1943
St Nicholas Magazine
1876
Mark Twain, Adventures of Tom Sawyer
1877
Anna Sewell, Black Beauty
1878
Lothar Meggendorfer, Living Pictures, his first mechanical book incorporating complex, simultaneous multiple movements within a single scene, activated by a single ‘tab’
1879–1967
The Boy’s Own Paper
1880
Randolph Caldecott, Sing a Song for Sixpence; Joel Chandler Harris, Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings
1880–1908
The Girl’s Own Paper
1881
Half-tone illustration process introduced
1883
Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island
1885
Robert Louis Stevenson, A Child’s Garden of Verses
1886
Frances Hodgson Burnett, Little Lord Fauntleroy
1889–1910
Andrew Lang, ‘Colour Fairy Books’ series
c. 1890
Ernest Nister, Nister’s Panorama Pictures, introduction of ‘automatic’ pop-up books employing die-cut figures raised by paper guides activated as the
reader turns each page
1891
E. M. Field, The Child and His Book, the first serious attempt at a history of children’s literature
1894–5
Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Books
1898
Emma Griffith Lumm, The Twentieth Century Speaker, an early use of colour half-tone illustrations in a children’s book
1899
Helen Bannerman, The Story of Little Black Sambo; E. Nesbit, The Treasure Seekers
1900
L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz; founding of American Library Association section on Library Work with Children
1901
Beatrix Potter, The Tale of Peter Rabbit, using three-colour half-tones; Net Book Agreement enacted
1904
First performance of J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up
1905
Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle, illustrated by Arthur Rackham, one of the first so-called ‘gift-books’; Stratemeyer Syndicate founded, a book packager specialising in series fiction such as Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys
1906
Introduction of offset lithography; Hodder and Stoughton and Oxford University Press establish the Joint Venture, the first children’s book department headed by its own appointed editor
1908
Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows; Peter Newell, The Hole Book, an early novelty book; L. M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
1916
Bertha Mahony opens the Bookshop for Boys & Girls in Boston, Massachusetts
1918
Norman Lindsay, The Magic Pudding, the first classic Australian children’s title
1919
Macmillan, New York, establishes a children’s department with Louise Seaman Bechtel as editor
1922
Margery Williams, The Velveteen Rabbit; first award of the annual Newbery Medal for the most distinguished contribution to American children’s literature
1924
A. A. Milne, When We Were Very Young; Bertha Mahony launches Horn Book Magazine
1927
Macmillan launches Happy Hour Books, with illustrations printed by Charles Stringer’s new four-colour process at Jersey City Printing Company, allowing for a greater range of tones
1930
Arthur Ransome, Swallows and Amazons; Dick and Jane readers introduced
1931
Jean de Brunhoff, The Story of Babar, an outstanding early example of offset colour lithography
1932–43
Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little House series
1934
P. L. Travers, Mary Poppins
1935
Mickey Mouse Magazine, the first Disney comic book; Penguin begins publishing mass-market paperbacks
1936
First award of the Carnegie Medal, for the year’s most outstanding British children’s book
1937
J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit
1938
First award of the annual Caldecott Medal for best American picture book; Action Comics launched, including earliest appearance of Superman, the first costumed ‘superhero’
1940
Dorothy Kunhardt, Pat the Bunny: A Touch-and-Feel Book
1941
Penguin begins publishing the Puffin Picture Books children’s line
1942
Little Golden Books, a series of high-quality 25-cent picture books, launched by Simon & Schuster
1947
Margaret Wise Brown and Clement Hurd, Goodnight, Moon
1950–6
C. S. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia
1952
The Diary of Anne Frank; E. B. White, Charlotte’s Web; A Child’s Book of Horses, the first book to be entirely film-set
1952–82
Mary Norton, The Borrowers quintet
1955
First award of the annual Kate Greenaway Medal for illustration in a British children’s book
1956
Dodie Smith, The Hundred and One Dalmatians
1957
Dr Seuss, The Cat in the Hat
1958
Philippa Pearce, Tom’s Midnight Garden
1959
John Knowles, A Separate Peace
1963
Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are
1964
Roald Dahl, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory; Randall Jarrell, The Bat-Poet
1967
Russell Hoban, The Mouse and His Child
1967–72
Ursula Le Guin, first Earthsea trilogy
1970
John Burningham, Mr Gumpy’s Outing; Maurice Sendak, In the Night Kitchen
1972
Richard Adams, Watership Down
1973
Rosa Guy, The Friends
1974
Robert Cormier, The Chocolate War
1975
Judy Blume, Forever
1979
Raymond Briggs, The Snowman, a wordless picture book
1986
Allan and Janet Ahlberg, The Jolly Postman: or Other People’s Letters; Michael Palin, The Mirrorstone, first use of a hologram in a book
1986–91
Art Spiegelman, Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, a graphic novel with cross-generational appeal
1989
Picture Me Books launches interactive board books produced using proprietary computer programs to personalise text for individual customers
1990
Ursula Le Guin, Tehanu; Salman Rushdie, Haroun and the Sea of Stories
1992
Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith, The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales
1994
Robert Sabuda, The Christmas Alphabet, an elaborate pop-up book
1995–2000
Philip Pullman, His Dark Materials trilogy
1997
Romain Victor Pujebet, Lulu’s Enchanted Book, an early interactive multi-media children’s book published only on CD-ROM
1997–2007
J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter novels
2001
Melvin Burgess, Lady: My Life as a Bitch
Part I Contexts and Genres
1 The origins of children’s literature
M. O. Grenby
Many of the most celebrated children’s books have a famous origin story attached to them. Lewis Carroll made up ‘the interminable fairy-tale of Alice’s Adventures’ (as he called it in his diary) while he was on a boat-trip with Alice, Lorina and Edith Liddell in 1862; Peter Pan grew out of J. M. Barrie’s intense friendship with the five Llewelyn Davies boys; Salman Rushdie, following the Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1989 fatwa, wrote Haroun and the Sea of Stories for his son, Zafir, for Zafir, like Haroun, had helped his father recover the ability to tell stories.1 The veracity of these stories, and many others like them, is open to question. But their prevalence and endurance is nevertheless important. We seem to demand such originary myths for our children’s classics. What we want, it appears, is the assurance that published children’s books have emerged from particular, known circumstances, and, more specifically, from the story told by an individual adult to individual children. C. S. Lewis listed this as one of his ‘good ways’ of writing for children: ‘The printed story grows out of a story told to a particular child with the living voice and perhaps ex tempore.’ Such a creative method is an antidote to what Lewis thought the very worst way to write for children, striving to ‘find out what they want and give them that, however little you like it yourself’.2 But if we investigate the historical origins of children’s books it is clear that Lewis’ ‘bad way’ is precisely how children’s literature did begin: adults invented a new commodity, deliberately designed to give a newly identified audience what they thought it wanted, or, rather, needed. There are three different kinds of origin to consider in this chapter then, and, on the surface, they can seem incongruent. First, there is the historical genesis of children’s literature
as a commercial product. Second, there is the idea that children’s literature has naturally developed from a culture of adult-to-child storytelling. And third, the biographical accounts surrounding the conception of individual books. What this chapter will argue is that, far from being contradictory, as C. S. Lewis’ strictures suggest, all three kinds of origin are importantly interrelated.
Historical origins
Most cultural historians agree that children’s literature, as we recognise it today, began in the mid eighteenth century and took hold first in Britain. With its mixture of pictures, rhymes, riddles, stories, alphabets and lessons on moral conduct – its commitment, as its full title puts it, to ‘Instruction and Amusement’ – A Little Pretty Pocket-Book, published by John Newbery in 1744, is often regarded as the most important single point of origin. Newbery’s role has been exaggerated, perhaps because of his ostentatious insistence that he was providing education and entertainment fused together – a strategy influentially advocated by John Locke in Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693). Other London author-publishers pre-dated and competed with him, notably Thomas Boreman, whose Description of Three Hundred Animals appeared ‘for the Entertainment of Children’ in 1730, and Mary and Thomas Cooper, under whose names some children’s books (such as The Child’s New Play-Thing, a school book enlivened with alphabets, riddles, dialogues, stories and songs) appeared from 1742. But only Newbery’s enterprise endured, the children’s publishing dynasty he founded lasting until the nineteenth century. He was the first successfully to commercialise books for children, and he used a simple but durable formula: the encasement of the instructive material that adults thought their children would need within an entertaining format that children might be supposed to want.
What Newbery and his contemporaries did not do was suddenly invent children’s literature ex nihilo. Instructional books, both secular and religious, had been marketed directly at children for centuries. Among the first British printed books were William Caxton’s Book of Curtesye (1477) and his translation of The Book of the Knight of the Tower (1484), providing boys and girls respectively with instruction on how to behave in a noble household. Francis Seager’s verse Schoole of Vertue, and Booke of Good Nourture for Chyldren, and Youth to Learn Theyr Dutie By (1557) was one amongst many Renaissance children’s courtesy books. By the early eighteenth century a wider audience was being served. George Fisher’s The Instructor; or, the Young Man’s Best Companion (1727) was a frequently reprinted compendium of reading, writing and arithmetic lessons and advice on such things as how to write legal documents, to take accurate measurements, to garden, pickle and dye. Meanwhile, John Foxe had been directly addressing children in his infamous Book of Martyrs (1563), and John Bunyan’s A Book for Boys and Girls (1686, later known as Divine Emblems), Thomas Gills’ Instructions for Children (1707) and Isaac Watts’ Divine Songs (1715), among many other works, had put religious and moral lessons into verse. James Janeway’s A Token for Children being an Exact Account of the Conversion, Holy and Exemplary Lives, and Joyful Deaths, of several young Children (1672) is just the best-known of the many children’s books produced by and for Puritans in the late seventeenth century, designed to warn children against worldly temptations and point out the hard path towards salvation. These instructive texts were not suddenly eclipsed in the 1740s. However severe Janeway’s accounts of the deaths of pious children might seem in contrast with the milder children’s books that subsequently appeared, they remained in print well into the nineteenth century.