Rudyard Kipling · Robert Louis Stevenson · John Meade Falkner · George MacDonald · Carlo Collodi · Beatrix Potter · Anna Sewell
THE GREAT FILLIP THAT THE FIRST BOOKS OF THE Golden Age gave to children’s writing was consolidated in the second half of that century. We were to see genres being explored and established – adventure stories, school stories, fantasy, anthropomorphic animal stories. But there was not, yet, much in the way of precedent to follow. These writers were, most of them, making it up as they went along and that is what gives the era so much of its vivacity and messiness.
Markets were opening up, and audiences widening. As the literary historian Peter Hunt notes, “there was a rapid expansion of both the middle-class ‘respectable’ market […]and the penny dreadfuls.”* Changing technology – from the ascendancy of the rotary printing press to cardboard book covers and photomechanical reproduction of pictures taking the place of engravings – made books cheaper and more accessible to a wide market. By 1875, one publisher’s catalog alone contained 1,000 children’s books.
The periodicals market, too, was booming. Many of the classics we still read were originally published in serial form in magazines. The Boy’s Own Paper, which started in 1879, by the end of the 1880s was selling a quarter of a million copies a week; the Girls’ Own Paper, founded in the same year, was thought to have had the highest circulation of any illustrated magazine. These publications sought to win converts (sometimes literally: Boy’s Own was started by the Religious Tract Society) from the exciting but morally disreputable “gallows” pamphlets in which the poor delighted and which middleclass children read on the sly. In 1890 the conservative press baron Alfred Harmsworth launched a weekly comic, Comic Cuts. A.A. Milne remarked that he “killed the penny dreadful: by the simple process of producing a ha’penny dreadfuller.”*
The late victorian period was also a time in which children’s lives transformed: they were coming down the proverbial chimney, scrubbing up and going to school. It had not been until the beginning of the nineteenth century that the English state started to take a serious legislative interest in child labor. The follow-up was that education, rather than work, was on its way to being the defining space of childhood. England made its first public subvention of funds for elementary schooling in 1833, and in the second half of the century universal education was starting to look like more than just an aspiration.
Church schools, Sunday schools, and modestly priced private schools were already becoming the norm – and by the 1870s, according to the social historian Hugh Cunningham, a “huge majority” of English children were receiving some sort of education.† The 1870 Education Act mandated a school in every local area, and in 1880 attendance became compulsory for children between the ages of five and ten. As Cunningham puts it, “the way was opened to a major transformation in both the experience and conceptualization of childhood, the shift from a situation where children were thought of as members of the labor force to one where they were schoolchildren.”
In England and Wales, the proportion of children between the ages of five and fourteen who were in school doubled between and 1880. By 1900, it was nearly three-quarters of that demographic. The 1918 act was to raise the school leaving age from twelve to fourteen; by 1920 or so, it was accepted as entirely natural and proper that every child should be in school until adolescence. Compulsory schooling was seen not only as a means of bettering the population but of extending the hand of the state into their lives and shaping their characters. Periodic moral panics about child delinquency, truancy, and what we now call “feral children” were assuaged by the idea that universal education would help to create a cohesive national identity.
If the British state, like Whitney Houston, believed that children were the future, that future was to be courteous, obedient, and trained for its proper role in life – whether that be needlework and cookery for girls or colonial administration for boys. You can see that dynamic variously endorsed and challenged in school stories over the years. Widening education meant widening literacy. It not only supplied new situations and possibilities for the literature of childhood; it supplied new readers.
What of the country in which those readers were growing up? This was the era in which Britannia ruled the waves and a good bit of the dry land too (Queen Victoria formally became Empress of India in 1876, and the “scramble for Africa” got going in the 1880s). The pageantry of church, monarchy, and empire continued in all its pomp. But Britain’s worldview was not as secure as its secular power might suggest. Urbanization, and the squalor of the urban poor, were changing the idea of what the nation looked like. Darwin’s discoveries, as they percolated into the mainstream, were quietly abrading the secure foundations of its God. The anxieties that shaded the works of the early writers of the Golden Age were only deepening. The “melancholy long withdrawing roar” of Matthew Arnold’s 1867 poem “Dover Beach” rumbled in the background.
* Hunt, op. cit., [p].
* A.A. Milne, “Blood and Thunder,” The Sunday Times, 10 October 1948.
† Cunningham, op. cit., [p].