• DOI:10.1086/602651
• Corpus ID: 143693178

Victorian Horizons: The Reception of Children's Books in England and America, 1880-1900

@article{Lundin1994VictorianHT,
  title={Victorian Horizons: The Reception of Children's Books in England and America, 1880-1900},
  author={Anne Lundin},
  journal={The Library Quarterly},
  year={1994},
  volume={64},
  pages={30 - 59}
}

• Anne Lundin
• Published 1 January 1994
• Art
• The Library Quarterly

This article examines the critical reception of children's books in England and America, 1880-1900. The purpose of the study is to determine the nature and extent of interest in children's books in the formative period of the "golden age of children's literature." Which periodicals covered children's books, and how did their cultural discourse, as revealed through reviewing and commentary, shape the norms and assumptions by which children's books were created and evaluated? Seventy-five literary periodicals were studied for their coverage of children's books in this period. The literary periodicals are drawn from Poole's Index, Nineteenth-Century Readers' Guide, and Wellesley Index. Using reception theory, a branch of reader-response criticism, I construct the contemporary context in which children's books were received-expressed as "horizons of expectations." A spectrum of cultural discourse included the following horizons: the treatment of children's books as a commodity; the elevation of children's books as works of art; an emphasis on illustration and pictorial effects in literature; a lack of rigid demarcation between adult and children's literature; a growing gender division; a diversification of the didactic tradition; a continuing debate on fantasy and realism; the romantic idealization of childhood and its literature; attention to the historiography of children's literature; and anxiety about the changing character of children's reading. While these concerns informed the larger history of children's literature, they converged in late Victorian England and America to create a unique climate for the reception of children's books as a body of literature, a field of study, and a form of expressive culture.