Stories and poems aimed at children have an exceedingly long history in Britain; lullabies, for example, were sung in Roman times, and a few nursery rhymes and games are almost as ancient. Yet so far as written-down literature is concerned, while there were stories in print before 1700 that children often seized on when they had the chance, such as translations of Aesop's fables, fairy-stories and popular ballads and romances, these were not aimed at young people in particular.
John Newbery published A Little Pretty Pocket Book in 1744, containing stories, games plus a free gift (a ball and a pin-cushion). It is a tribute to Newbery's flair that he hit upon a winning formula quite so quickly, to be pirated almost immediately in America.
The great blow to the instructive children's book was to come from an unlikely source: early 19th-century interest in folklore. Both nursery rhymes, selected Stories by James Orchard Halliwell for a folklore society in 1842, and collections of fairy-stories from the scholarly Grimm brothers, swiftly translated into English in 1823, soon rocketed to popularity with the young, quickly leading to new editions, each one more child-centred than the last. From this time onwards, younger children could expect stories written for their particular interests, and with the needs of their own limited experience of life kept well to the fore.
However, while such books were available for young children from homes wealthy enough to afford such fare, older child readers and adults still tended to read the same books as each other. What eventually determined the reading of older children was often not the availability of special children's literature as such, but access to books that contained characters, such as young people or animals, with whom they could more easily empathise, or action, such as exploring or fighting, that made few demands on adult maturity or understanding.
Questions
1. Aesop's Fables are given as an example of something that
2. A Little Pretty Pocket Book
3. In the 19th century, a particular book would be chosen by older children because it