Cheap print for children : expanding the history of children’s books in Britain, 1799-1890

Abstract

This thesis examines the development of cheap children’s print in Britain, offering an expanded history of children’s literature across the nineteenth century. In the process, it tests the claims made in existing histories of British children’s books, which are typically based on a small, often repeated sample of titles aimed primarily at middle- and upper-class readers. This thesis instead examines a corpus of 879 texts dating from 1799, when the Religious Tract Society was established, to 1890, by when the first comics were being published. Cheap children’s print – here defined as texts sold at under 1shilling, or made cheaply, and marketed to poorer readersis explored through key themes that feature prominently in these texts: religion, gender, social class, race, and fantasy. This is achieved through a mixture of quantitative analysis, examining trends across the corpus, and close reading. Chapter 2 argues that, unlike in more expensive texts, religious themes, teachings, and references maintained a presence in cheap children’s literature from 1799 to 1890. Chapter 3 argues that while cheap children’s domestic fiction presents many of the same ideals of the domestic, motherhood, and the extended family as are found in more expensive texts, their use in cheap print reveals the conflicted attitudes on which they are built. Chapter 4 demonstrates that texts within the corpus present a simplified image of regions of the world through the use of conventional national images. Chapter 5 focuses on fantasy, identifying a remarkable stability in how fantastical elements were presented in the texts under discussion. Together these case studies reveal how this neglected aspect of children’s publishing can contribute to a new understanding of the development of British children’s literature.