The Child Reader: Children’s Literary Culture in the Nineteenth Century

In this chapter, we turn our attention to the nineteenth-century child reader, whose widespread capacity to read only became possible after improvements in literacy resulting from mandatory education, but whose reading practices throughout the century nonetheless represent similar anxieties and concerns as those raised about women readers. The figure of the child reader is vested in complex and contradictory ideas about childhood, age, gender, and class. Not all children are encouraged to read in the same ways and with the same objectives. Indeed, as reading materials became more affordable and literacy rates improved, concerned adults attempted to control the quality of books and magazines available to children and to restrict access to certain texts based on either the moral value of the text or its potential to adversely impact the reader. The didactic potential of the written word is dependent on reading the right books for the right reasons, both of which might vary depending on who is reading and why. The valences of this debate can be found in a range of children’s books that feature child readers including Johann David Wyss’ The Swiss Family Robinson (1812), Thomas Hughes’ Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857), George MacDonald’s At the Back of the North Wind (1871), Juliana Ewing’s Six to Sixteen (1872) and L.T. Meade’s The Sweet Girl Graduate (1891). We argue that the child readers in many children’s books not only value reading for its ability to develop religious faith and morality, but also because the child reader is positioned through reading for their future place in the world as morally upstanding, hard-working, adults who understand their responsibilities to their families, the nation, and themselves.