for US fiction, but it gradually produced homegrown works as well, in addition to sending some of its native-born authors (such as Amelia Johnson; see Genres: Domestic Fiction below) to the larger literary marketplace south of the border. The first Canadian novel for children, Catharine Parr Traill’s The Young Emigrants, Or, Pictures of Canada, Calculated to Amuse and Instruct the Minds of Youth, appeared in 1826, when it was published both in Canada and in London. As its subtitle indicates, it wears its didacticism proudly; the narrator informs us that “it is my chief object to offer pages of information to my young readers” (p. 54), and while the information is inserted into a family story, the narrative’s travelogue aspects dominate. Traill’s domestic story ends with the reunion of the emigrant family as the last sibling to remain in England comes to Canada, cementing the colonists’ presence in North America. The volume nonetheless continues for several additional pages with a description of Niagara Falls, implicitly prioritizing fact over fiction.
Elsewhere, British colonial children’s literature emerged more slowly. The first Australian example is Charlotte Barton’s A Mother’s Offering to Her Children (1841), a series of dialogues on topics including natural history and the customs of Indigenous Australians. Smaller markets lagged still further behind, as the international circulation of successful children’s books and magazines had the contradictory effect of establishing these forms in new countries while setting a standard that made local competition difficult. The first South African novel for children, Mary Ann Carey-Hobson’s The Farm in the Karoo, or, What Charley Vyvyan and His Friends Saw in South Africa (1883), was published not in South Africa but in London, by an author who identifies herself on the title page as someone “for many years resident in the Cape Colony” rather than as a true South African. New Zealand imported all its children’s fiction until 1891, when Edward Tregear published Fairy Tales and Folk-Lore of New Zealand and the South Seas; its children’s book industry did not mature until authors such as Edith Howe and Isabel Peacocke emerged in the 1910s. Nonetheless, children in Cape Town or Wellington at the turn of the twentieth century were not starved of good reading, as the internationalism of the letters columns of major children’s magazines of the period (such as the American St. Nicholas) illustrates.
Nineteenth-century British children’s publishing enjoyed multiple advantages ensuring that the exporting of children’s literature from London would continue. Favorable conditions in the motherland included a large supply of publishers, some sponsored by religious bodies that could not only afford to subsidize suitable fare for the young but also had a built-in clientele of adults ready to buy a trustworthy product. For instance, the first long-lived British children’s periodical was the Sunday School Union’s Youth’s Magazine, which survived over sixty years after its 1805 founding by a teenager; later, the Religious Tract Society founded a successful children’s publishing stable that embraced both free-standing fiction and magazines such as the popular Boy’s Own Paper (1879–1967) and Girl’s Own Paper (1880–1956). Diana Dixon (1986) lists five children’s magazines circulating in England in 1824; by 1900, there were 160, in a rich mixture of secular, sacred, and special-interest titles. Fiction formed the backbone of most late nineteenth-century magazines. Editors’ insatiable demand for new stories enabled unknown authors to make their debuts, and the refinement of copyright laws protecting their work (and those of illustrators) against piracy made the work more profitable. Meanwhile, British publishers’ increasing technological and artistic sophistication enabled them to lead the field visually. In the 1850s and 1860s, the innovative children’s publisher Edmund Evans capitalized on the new possibilities for making children’s fiction both attractive and inexpensive, after which the children’s Christmas gift book, notable for its beautiful illustrations and high production values, became a regular feature of the British publishing world.
All these developments made that world welcoming for new talent, particularly where fiction was concerned. The period from about 1850 through World War I is still called the “Golden Age” of children’s fiction – driven primarily by Britain, but with increasingly important contributions coming from the United States, Canada, and Australia as well. As the market for children’s literature grew, fiction became more and more finely differentiated, targeting different genders, age groups, social classes, religious denominations, political stances, and reading tastes, with different genres coalescing around each.
Genres: Domestic Fiction
The dominant genre at the beginning of this Golden Age was the story of family life. Because of their emphasis on child development and socialization, domestic tales were well suited to the religious and moral content considered vital to much mid nineteenth-century children’s literature. Their focus on character and on the kinds of difficulties that children might realistically encounter opened up possibilities for humor and/or pathos, initially used for didactic purposes but rapidly becoming ends in themselves.
It is appropriate, then, that the children’s novel sometimes considered the first to weight entertainment as heavily as didacticism, Catherine Sinclair’s Holiday House (1839), is a domestic tale. Described by Harvey Darton as “certainly the best original children’s book written up to that time, and one of the jolliest and most hilarious of any period” (2011, p. 225), Holiday House tells of naughty Harry and Laura and their admirable older brother, whose inspirational death is the story’s moral focus and sobers the younger siblings into maturity. Yet Harry and Laura’s antics, their tussles with their strict nanny Mrs. Crabtree, and their uncle David’s delight in nonsense solicit at least as much of the reader’s attention. Sinclair’s novel, then, did much to establish amusement as a worthy goal for juvenile fiction and stands as an early example of what later Victorians called the “pickle” book, an account of naughtiness on the part of affluent small children that is presented humorously rather than as a warning about the consequences of bad behavior. In the United States, domestic humorists also poked fun at adults, as in Lucretia Hale’s distinctly undidactic The Peterkin Papers (1880), which chronicles the misadventures of a family devoid of common sense. By 1901, E. Nesbit’s Bastable children christen themselves the “Wouldbegoods,” an aspiration that never makes it out of the conditional voice, and readers are expected to like the children because of, not despite, their inability to behave properly.
The extent to which the child might be judged culpable – a question that before the Victorian era animated both rational moralist and Puritan texts – remains important throughout the nineteenth-century domestic tale, which describes behavior ranging from saintly to rebellious. The title characters of Amelia Johnson’s Clarence and Corinne (1890), sometimes identified as the first children’s novel by an African American (in this case, originally African Canadian) author, are the offspring of a drunken father and defeated mother, and after they are orphaned and separated, they must initially make their own way in the world. Yet they endure mistreatment and injustice with little complaint, sustained by their developing Christian faith and eventually being rewarded with loving adoptive parents, professional success for Clarence (who becomes a physician), and happy marriages. In contrast, Annie Keary’s The Rival Kings (1858), like Alcott’s Little Women, depicts children as capable of murderous rage. Much as Alcott’s Jo, furious at Amy for burning her book manuscript, deliberately fails to warn her sister about thin ice while they are skating, “rival kings” Maurice Lloyd and Roger Fletcher vie in hazardous ways to gain the upper hand. Here again, matters escalate to a near-fatal denouement, after which Maurice spends hours trying to lighten Roger’s convalescence. As critic Robert Lee Wolff observes, “adults are virtually helpless” (1975, p. 312) in coping with the real hatred that these children feel, which only experience can temper. Even so, unlike some of their eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century predecessors, both Roger and Amy survive without permanent damage.
Other children in domestic novels primarily endanger themselves, not their peers. In Susan Coolidge’s What Katy Did (1872), the inaugural volume of a series of American domestic tales, fun-loving Katy develops responsibility after her heedless ways cause her serious injury. While Coolidge allows Katy to recover fully by the end of the first installment, and the novel never loses sight of the light-hearted side of family life, we still learn that childish faults may have serious consequences. Yet children in domestic novels may also