The child--as a concept--is often said to have been "invented" sometime during the eighteenth or early nineteenth century.  Nevertheless, of course, children not only lived before they were invented, they read books.  Some of these books were written for them, and if these books were often heavily moralistic or merely informational--primers, catechisms (secular as well as religious), grammars--books were also written and published for children's pleasure, both in the narrow sense of amusement, and in the broader sense in which the distinguishing feature of "literature" as a category is that it delights as it instructs.  Many more books were appropriated by children (and sometimes, therefore, reprinted by publishers in formats thought attractive to children) that were written for an adult audience.  The publication of Alice in Wonderland is regarded as a landmark in English-language children's literature not because it was the first book for children, but because it was one of the first written for children that gave the child heroine and the child reader priority over adults, who, of course, have responded by appropriating the book for their use. After Alice, the deluge--so we will concentrate on what came before Alice.

This course will examine what actual children read before books like Alice were available, both books written for them and books that they appropriated, using two methodologies: we will search accounts of child readers both real and fictitious of the eighteenth and early nineteenth-century to identify types and titles, and we will also use the resources of the Baldwin Collection of  children's books to find out both what was available and how books for adults were remade for child readers.  At least half our time, then, will be spent considering how books like Arabian Nights, Robinson Crusoe, Pilgrim's Progress, The Vicar of Wakefield, Gay's Fables,  Gulliver's Travels affected the imaginative life of children (as represented in autobiographies and novels about childhood) and the other half will be spent considering how books like fairy tale collections and chapbooks, Little Goody Two Shoes, Sandford and Merton, Tom Brown's School Days, The Swiss Family Robinson, Simple Susan supplemented or supplanted adult fare available for these children.

While histories of children's literature will be available for consultation, the emphasis in this course will be on children's literature as a subset of all literature and as an index to the society in which it was written, including but not limited to the ideas held about  childhood in that culture.  Students will write two or three relatively short papers--one dealing with a work that has proved to have a dual audience; one dealing with a historical aspect of publications for children in the long eighteenth century (1660-1815); one dealing with representations of and for children as indices of the author's/buyer's/social group's conscious or unconscious assumptions about desirable formations for the next generation.  (Two of these approaches may be combined in one paper if the student finds a suitable topic and wishes to do so.)