'A glorious host': The appropriation of adult literature for children in the nineteenth century

To examine the formation of the canon of children's literature, this dissertation studies three books written for an adult audience that inspired books deliberately written for children: Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress (1684), Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719), and Scott's Ivanhoe (1819). Though the authors of these books did not consciously aim to inculcate values particularly for child readers, their books contained themes or used forms that other authors saw as useful vehicles for conveying to children national, patriotic, psychological, religious, and ethical values, in various combinations. Even more important, these stories also appealed to children because they showed protagonists successfully confronting the psychological crises children experience in the developmental stages elaborated by recent psychological theories. Thus the study of adult ideology combined with attention to children's developmental needs patterns this investigation of the appropriation of adult books by child readers.;Pilgrim's Progress and the ensuing tradition of evangelical literature for children attracted adults and children because its didacticism provided a clear moral framework that connected the story of a hero's pilgrimage from sin to salvation with the experience of growing up. Robinson Crusoe and the robinsonades it inspired provided an ideology of work that adults wished to inculcate in children, and that children enjoyed in the developmental stage of latency when they are preoccupied with work and autonomy. The themes of chivalry and fidelity in Ivanhoe and later chivalric historical novels satisfied the patriotic values of adults and appealed to the needs of adolescents who found the testing of personal fidelity implicit in the chivalric ideology attractive as a model for their own psychological development at puberty as they attempt to establish a clear sense of personal identity. This study, as a whole, thus analyzes the roots of three major genres which became basic to the canon of children's literature in the nineteenth century.