| This is a study of the relationship between the history of children's literature and the social history of childhood. It takes as its focus the centrality of changes in the conception and material conditions of childhood to larger changes in Britain's political, class and gender structures in the years between 1870 and 1914. In this context of historical change, children's literature became a vehicle for expressing upper class adults' desires and beliefs, and children's reading practices became the focus of anxiety about Britain's political, social and cultural future. Children's books, and the reading process itself, were being used to maintain class and gender boundaries at a time when these boundaries were under siege.;Bringing together the histories of family, class, gender, education, literacy and literature, this study grounds them in the social, political and cultural context of industrial, urban Britain. Chapter one is about the role that critics played in remaking children's literature and its readers. It focuses on the tensions between attempts to forge an image of a universally innocent and pure childhood and the realities of childhoods divided by race, class and gender. Chapter two compares how editors of two children's magazines constructed their audiences and reader participation during a time of increasing commercialization of children's literature. Chapter three examines how three middle-class authors, Andrew Lang, Frances Hodgson Burnett and E. Nesbit used children's literature to forge an image of childhood as a time of imagination and pleasure. Their work reflected a common nostalgia and cultural pessimism, and they found in children's literature a common vocabulary for expressing their desires and social visions.;Chapters four and five examine how middle-class educators and politicians attempted to shape working-class children's lives and reading practices through public education. Chapter six examines middle and working-class autobiographers' use of their memories of childhood reading to talk about family, class, gender, politics, and the construction of identity. Like authors of children's literature, these autobiographers used childhood to talk about their adult understandings of the world, and their places in it. |
