Philobiblon

… sit down and I’ll tell you a story.

Once upon a time, there were no “girls’ books” with pink covers and princesses on the front, and “boys’ books” with green and brown “camouflage” covers and a man with a spear, there were just children’s books.

The genre of “children’s book” is generally said to have begun in the 1740s, when three publishers, including Mary Cooper, “began to provide children with books designed to delight as well as instruct them. Increasing middle-class literacy and prosperity set the stage for this development, along with the gradual popular dissemination of John Locke’s educational philosophy, which advocated teaching children through play.” (p. 166)

In the late 18th and early 19th century, “all featured children of both sexes as characters and were intended for readers of both sexes. {They} … taught obedience, submission to authority, and selflessness as the cardinal virtues of both girls and boys.” (p. 167)

The sudden change, Elizabeth Segel suggests, occurred in the 1850s, with the market growing large enough for specialisation, with a desire to provide “suitable” reading for young misses past the childish literature stage but considered to innocent for “adult” reading, and the increasingly sharp differentiation of the genders in adult life (p. 169-170)

Boys’ books sent them out into the world, having boundless adventures, with only the occasional moral message tacked on almost as an afterthought, while girls were being trained to accept their confinement in the home, as classically represented by What Katy Did (1872), in which a her exuberance and disobedience leads to her being crippled, by which she enters the “School of Pain”, but in it she learns to be kind, virtuous and a replacement mother for her younger siblings. “The disturbing message that the ideal woman is an invalid is scarcely veiled”. (p. 174)

I had a copy of What Katy Did, and the two (?) sequels, which had been Mum’s, but remember not liking them much – I can see why now. If you want to depress yourself you can read it here.

By the time I “should” have been reading this I was in the “adult” section of the library – as I recall reading first Westerns, then romances (yes Mills and Boons, but I was only about 12), then war books … what all of that did to my head I dread to think. (And of course the Harold Robbins’s – I was about 12 when Dad said: “On no account should you read this book, which he’d got from the library; well you can guess the rest. It was “The Pirate”, and it must have made quite an impression on an impressionable mind, because I remember it still quite well!)

From E. Segel “As the twig is bent … gender and childhood reading, in E. Flynn and P. Schwickart (eds) Gender and Reading: Essays on Readers, Texts and Contents, John Hopkins Uni Press, Baltimore, 1986.