This anthology of nineteenth-century English-language children's literature brings together over 120 works, including poems, stories and extracts from novels. The collection explores both famous and lesser-known works from writers as diverse as Maria Edgeworth, Edward Lear, Louisa May Alcott, Catherine Parr Traill, Charles Kingsley, Horatio Alger Jr, Susan Coolidge, Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson, Ethel Turner, Thomas Hardy, Frances Hodgson Burnett and Rudyard Kipling. All texts are introduced with contextualizing headnotes and are organized chronologically; they can also be referenced by theme, genre, author and country. Peter Hunt's introduction discusses the ways in which the history of children's literature may be, and has been, read, and sets out four key criteria for selecting the texts: that they are historically significant, representative of their period or country, readable, and comprehensible in extract form.
Edited by one of the leading scholars in children's literature studies, this important anthology will provide students and general readers with an indispensable, much needed, and above all, entertaining account of the development of the form in the UK, the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.