In the eyes of many scholars, the moment Alice falls down the rabbit hole does not merely inaugurate her adventures in Wonderland: it also inaugurates a new period in the history of children’s literature. With its opening invocation of child-adult collaborative authorship, complex child-character, relish for nonsense, mockery of didactic precursors, escape to a fantastical landscape, and final vision of an ever-childlike protagonist, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) exemplifies many of the characteristics that have come to define the Golden Age of children’s literature. The term, drawn from the title of Kenneth Grahame’s collection of childhood reminiscences (1895), was first applied by scholars Roger Lancelyn Green and Humphrey Carpenter to describe children’s literature published between Alice and Winnie-the-Pooh (1926), or between roughly 1865 and World War I (Sorby, Sültemeyer 1). Some scholars, however, make a case for the inclusion of earlier works, such as Catherine Sinclair’s 1839 Holiday House. During this period, school attendance in England and the United States increased, and with it childhood literacy (Hintz and Tribunella 101). As printing technology advanced, it became more economical to produce “a vast array of colourful, attractively designed books, periodicals, and printed novelties for children” to be sold at price points accessible to a growing child readership (Reynolds 16).

During the Golden Age, many of the most prestigious authors of the day wrote for children, children’s literature was commonly reviewed in elite literary periodicals, and children’s literature dominated bestseller lists (Clark 48, 76). For example, six of the ten bestsellers in the U.S. between 1875 and 1895 were children’s books, though they were certainly also read and enjoyed by adults (Clark 52). Nor was this popularity a short-term phenomenon: indeed, many Golden Age titles and their authors remain household names today, still read in their original form and recognizable through their many adaptations. For example, the Golden Age saw the publication of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868-69), Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty (1877), Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883), Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book (1894), L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1901), J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan (1904), L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables (1908), and Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden (1911). As this list suggests, the Golden Age was a transatlantic experience, with both texts and authors traveling between Great Britain and the United States, although the national traditions evolved somewhat differently, with fantasy playing a stronger role in Great Britain (Sültemeyer 1).

Instruction and Delight

Certainly, the long-term popularity of children’s texts published at this time and the cultural status then accorded to children’s literature help to explain why scholars have described this era as a “golden age”, but so too does a shift in the content, purpose, and tone of children’s books. Many texts from the Golden Age fit more readily with contemporary visions of what children are like, how they should be treated, and what role reading should play in children’s lives than do their predecessors, in part because of the continuing influence of Victorian conceptualizations of the child on our own understandings of childhood. The change wrought in children’s literature during the Golden Age is often boiled down to a single phrase: a shift from instruction to delight. As Patricia Demers puts it, children’s texts, “which had long been considered mainly as vehicles of moral instruction, underwent vast changes in style and subject, appearing as rich fantasies, intense and dramatic novels, thrilling adventures, lyric poetry of beguiling simplicity, and wonderfully outrageous nonsense verse” (xii). While earlier children’s literature frequently foregrounded moral and ethical lessons, teaching religious precepts and the value of hard work, for example, children’s literature of the Golden Age increasingly emphasized “pleasure and creativity”, celebrated aesthetic innovation, and developed more complex child-characters (Hintz and Tribunella 103). Consider, for example, the contrast between the experiences of Goody Two-Shoes, the eponymous heroine of an early children’s novel (1765), and Twain’s Huck Finn (1884), who is likewise orphaned and impoverished. Goody Two-Shoes overcomes her situation by learning to read, working hard as a teacher, then marrying well; Huck overcomes his by finding buried treasure. Genres including the adventure story, the school story, the “bad boy” book, the domestic novel, fantasy, and nonsense flourished throughout the Golden Age, offering some (often white and middle-class) child-readers portraits of lives that looked much like their own alongside imaginative forays to the high seas, Neverland, and the exclusive boarding school.

Some Golden Age authors made their intent to break away from earlier moralizing and didacticism in preference for creativity and adventure quite clear: consider, for example, Lewis Carroll’s parodies of Isaac Watts’s famously didactic Divine Songs (1715) or the opening of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which proclaims that “persons attempting to find a moral” in the novel “will be banished” (4). However, Watts’s poetry actually enjoyed greater popularity in the nineteenth century than it did upon first publication (which is why Carroll could be confident that readers will understand his adaptations), and many readers have survived the experience of discovering the ethical heart of Huck Finn (“Religious Books”). Even fantasy texts, purportedly nonrealistic, frequently offer “profound observations about human character and contemporary society” (Carpenter 16) as well as religion, while nonsense presents “a challenge to the logic of adulthood and the laws of civil life” (Lerer 191).

As numerous scholars have shown, Golden Age literature offers children lessons in performing class and gender and in understanding capitalism and empire, among others. Noting that the rise of imperialism is “roughly contemporaneous” with the Golden Age, M. Daphne Kutzer argues that the “two grew up together”, shaping texts whether or not empire is their explicit subject, as in British boys’ boarding school stories, which frequently end with the boys graduating and taking on imperial posts, or The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, in which Tom and Huck get a happy ending by claiming a treasure amassed by the novel’s only Indigenous character (10). As these examples demonstrate, child-readers are also taught lessons in gender, by way of example if not through direct statement. According to Seth Lerer, the “idea of girlhood as a special category of identity” emerges during the Golden Age, and scholars have long debated the gender-related lessons which texts like Little Women and Anne of Green Gables offer their readers (232).

Thus, one should not overstate the extent of the shift from instruction to delight; the difference between Golden Age texts and their predecessors can perhaps best be understood as a difference of degree rather than kind. Consider, for example, an editorial statement offered by Mary Mapes Dodge, who edited St. Nicholas magazine, a prestigious children’s periodical that published works by many major Golden Age authors: “Doubtless a great deal of instruction and good moral teaching may be inculcated in the pages of a magazine, but it must be by hints dropped incidentally here and there”, as the ideal children’s text, “we must remember, is a pleasure-ground” (354). For Dodge, and for many of her peers, ideal children’s literature need not eschew instruction entirely, but rather must instruct unobtrusively, by way of artistically handled and not overly frequent “hints” rather than overt and heavy-handed didacticism.

Golden Age Constructions of the Child

Even so, as Kimberley Reynolds explains, “there was much to amuse and entice earlier readers” and, in addition to more complex and nuanced texts, “a considerable body of badly written, heavily didactic writing for children was published in the 19th century” (15-16). However, Reynolds concedes that during the nineteenth century, “the rational but ignorant child as figured in Enlightenment children’s literature gave way to more complex constructions of children—both as characters and readers” (16). Central to these “more complex constructions” were responses to Romantic idealizations of childhood. By the mid-nineteenth century, Humphrey Carpenter claims, the “old view of the child as miniature adult” had “largely receded”, thanks in part to the influence of the Romantics (9). Although the Romantics were not univocal with regards to childhood, Romantic visions of childhood tend to idealize children’s natural purity and thus emphasize their difference from adults, lamenting children’s eventual socialization and coming-of-age as a loss of innocence.

The extent to which Golden Age children’s literature espouses such a view of the child is an area of significant scholarly debate. Some scholars place considerable emphasis on Golden Age texts’ penchant to separate children from adults, both figuratively and literally, by constructing fantasy spaces like Neverland and Wonderland that allow children to escape the restrictions of adult society and thus to maintain their innocence and difference from adults. Even the more realistic novels of the period offer us idealized natural spaces to which child-protagonists escape: consider, for example, Twain’s Jackson Island and Montgomery’s Idlewild and Violet Vale. As Angela Sorby sees it, Golden Age texts feature characters who are “not just prepubescent but also prelapsarian”, “walled off from base urges and adult agendas” as well as from the free market. In Sorby’s view, the secret gardens of the Golden Age seek to separate children from sexuality and the economy, two forces that could be seen as threatening their innocence and forcing them to face Peter Pan’s greatest fear: growing up.

Some scholars take this argument a step further, seeing the Golden Age authors’ idealization of childhood as symptomatic of their own longings to never grow up, offering Freudian biographical readings that posit the “immaturity” of authors like Carroll and Barrie, as Laura Stevenson explains (427-428). Even scholars who eschew pathologizing Golden Age authors frequently take them to task for romanticizing childhood, “censur[ing authors] for producing escapist literature that failed to engage with the complexities of contemporary life and promoted a static, highly idealized picture of childhood as a time of primitive simplicity” (Gubar vii). By presenting children enmeshed in nature or fantastical spaces and immune to the events and concerns of the outside “adult” world, Golden Age authors, in this view, reduce children to symbols that serve adults’ yearnings for escape rather than imagining children as agents in their broader worlds.

But Montgomery’s Anne Shirley only discovers Idlewild after years of domestic service and life in an orphan asylum. Twain’s Huck Finn chooses to accompany Tom Sawyer to Jackson Island because leaving town really makes no difference to an uncared-for and unhoused child. Alcott’s little women nearly lose their father in the American Civil War; one sister dies of a disease contracted when ministering to the needs of an impoverished neighbor. These instances of children exemplifying and responding to contemporary real-world problems are, of course, all drawn from North American realistic fiction, which is often decentered in definitions of the Golden Age in favor of British fantasies that can hew more closely to an ideal of childhood innocence and separateness, but even Wendy chooses to leave Neverland, much as Tom and his friends leave the island, even though doing so means both growing up and returning to civilization. As Marah Gubar points out, “even animal stories such as The Wind in the Willows (1908) are infused with a deep regard for the pleasures of civilized life, as well as a resigned though by no means despairing recognition of its drawbacks” (25). The child-characters in these texts are not unaware of the society around them, entirely able to escape it, or even fully desirous of doing so. As Gubar argues, in texts like these authors “do not present young people as untouched Others, magically free from adult influence”, but rather as “socially saturated beings, profoundly shaped by the culture, manners, and morals of their time” (4-5). For example, even in the unreal space of Wonderland, Alice attempts to recite her school lessons and employ Victorian manners, allowing Carroll to satirize both. Rather than trying to freeze children in a prepubescent and prelapsarian state, as scholars such as Sorby contend, Gubar sees Golden Age texts as conflicted in their representations of childhood, highly self-conscious about “the whole problem of representing, writing for, looking at, interacting with, and worshipping children” (viii).

This problem loops us back to questions of didacticism: Golden Age authors are often most self-conscious of their potentially coercive power over children when most explicitly moralizing. For instance, after offering a few paragraphs advising child-readers to treat old maids kindly, the narrator of Alcott’s Little Women muses that the reader has likely fallen asleep during her “little homily” (343). Moments like this one demonstrate an awareness of how easily an adult-author could slip into using their authority to dominate child-readers; marking the lesson with humor suggests that the author understands children’s agency in responding to the text (or reading it selectively). Golden Age texts frequently figure children as collaborators not only through their active reading, but also by participating in the initial act of creation. Victoria Ford Smith documents a wide range of collaborations between children and adult-authors in Golden Age texts, ranging from imagined collaborations with children within the narrative frame to real-life creative partnerships. Such collaborations imagine children and adults as inhabiting the same creative space, rather than picturing children as contained in an imaginative and isolated fantasyland that adults can only look upon with longing.

Conclusion

As the foregoing discussion makes clear, the Golden Age of children’s literature has long been singled out by scholars as a distinctive moment in literary history, characterized by the proliferation and popularity of texts published explicitly for child-audiences, the high cultural status accorded to children’s publishing, the publication of a lengthy roster of enduring classics, the development of a wide array of children’s genres, and a shift away from overt didacticism and toward entertaining the reader. Despite this general consensus, however, Golden Age children’s literature remains a rich area for inquiry and debate, with scholars considering in particular whether and how Victorian children’s texts weigh in on the cultural issues and shifts of the time, how the culture that produced them understood children and childhood, and how we might expand our understanding of the literature of the Golden Age to produce a more inclusive canon. Nor is such debate limited to scholarly conversation: as any recent moviegoer could tell you, with tales like The Jungle Book and Little Women once again hitting the silver screen, the Golden Age is never far away.

Works Cited

Alcott, Louisa May. Little Women, edited by Anne K. Phillips and Gregory Eiselein. Norton,  2004.
Carpenter, Humphrey. Secret Gardens: A Study of the Golden Age of Children’s Literature. Houghton Mifflin, 1985.
Clark, Beverly Lyon. Kiddie Lit: The Cultural Construction of Children’s Literature in America. Johns Hopkins UP, 2005.
Demers, Patricia. A Garland from the Golden Age: An Anthology of Children’s Literature from 1850 to 1900. Oxford UP, 1983.
Dodge, Mary Mapes. “Children’s Magazines.” Scribner’s Monthly, July 1873, pp. 352-354.
Ford Smith, Victoria. Between Generations: Collaborative Authorship in the Golden Age of Children’s Literature. UP of Mississippi, 2017.
Gubar, Marah. Artful Dodgers: Reconceiving the Golden Age of Children’s Literature. Oxford UP, 2010.
Hintz, Carrie and Eric L. Tribunella. Reading Children’s Literature: A Critical Introduction. 2nd ed., Broadview Press, 2019.
Lerer, Seth. Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History from Aesop to Harry Potter. U of Chicago P, 2008.
Kutzer, M. Daphne. Empire’s Children: Empire and Imperialism in Classic British Children’s Books. Garland, 2000.
“Religious Books, Bibles, Hyms [sic], etc. 0462: Isaac Watts, Divine Songs.” The Hockliffe Project, Center for Textual Studies. Online at https://hockliffe.dmu.ac.uk/items/0462.html
Reynolds, Kimberley. Children’s Literature: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford UP, 2011.
Sorby, Angela. “Golden Age.” Keywords for Children’s Literature, edited by Philip Nel, Lissa Paul, and Nina Christensen, New York UP, 2021. https://keywords.nyupress.org/childrens-literature/essay/golden-age/
Stevenson, Laura C. “Literary Ladders in the Golden Age of Children’s Books.” The Sewanee Review, vol. 119, no. 3, 2011, pp. 428–44.
Sültemeyer, Jasmin. Political Anxiety in Golden Age Children’s Classics and Their Contemporary Adaptations. De Gruyter, 2021.
Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Paperview, 2004.

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Citation: Speicher, Allison. "The Golden Age of Children’s Literature". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 14 February 2024 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=19729, accessed 16 October 2024.]