The Child Reader, 1700–1840 by Matthew O. Grenby (review)

Whereas collectors of historic children’s books are usually on the lookout for pristine copies with as little traces of use as possible, Grenby, professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies at Newcastle University, is thrilled when he opens a defaced book, full of scribbles, dog-ears, blackened or even cut-out passages. For these reviled marks, he sensed, could be the missing clues to a fascinating story: the yet untold story of the child reader from the dawn of children’s literature to the end of what historians call the long eighteenth century.

In fact, Grenby deciphers this “graffiti,” ranging from “barely discernible, small pencil marks in margins that may indicate lessons to be learned” (25), and ownership inscriptions, drawings, inserted passages of text all the way to pages blackened with commentary, as a yet unexploited source of reading history. According to him, these marginalia can reveal children’s attitudes towards books, and show the use children—and their teachers/parents—made of them. To make these marks speak, he carefully combines and corroborates them with census data, autobiographies, letters, fictional, and pictorial scenes of reading. The study is based on a sample of 5,282 books from four major collections of historical children’s books: the Osborne Collection, the Cotsen Children’s Library, the Children’s Book Collection, UCLA, and the Hockliffe Collection of Early Children’s Books.

This highly readable book is divided into seven chapters, including the introduction and conclusion. Chapter two looks at the owners of the children’s books by age, gender, location, class, and religion. Not surprisingly, most books were owned by middle and upper class children; but Grenby finds much evidence for reading across class, age, and gender categories, which savvy publishers and concerned educators were trying to establish.

Following this sociological and demographic profile of book-owners, chapter three focuses on the number and kinds of books children owned and/or read. Apart from a growing number of titles especially targeting the child reader, all-age books, as we call them today, constituted the main fare for most: the Bible, popular literature, such as romances, chapbooks, and fairytales, poetry and drama also reveal that print for children was still very much part of an oral culture.

Chapter four analyses the modes of acquisition and asks who bought and chose the books the children were to read. A great number of books was given to children as gifts and tokens of affection, perhaps not surprisingly most often by aunts and mothers. Just like today, parents acted as gate-keepers and carefully selected books based on what their marketing promised. Parental control was all-important, which explains why circulating libraries, instead of being welcomed, were decried. Clara Reeve, for example, feared them as “great evil” since “young people are allowed to subscribe to them, and to read indiscriminately all they contain” (162).

This parental policing extended to the use children made of the books, which is the topic of chapter five. When, how often and how long did children read their books? The sources nuance and partly undermine the narratives of the history of reading. The increasing number of books, so one main tenet, was changing reading habits from intensive reading of a few books to extensive reading of a mass of books. Even though some children were reading more than before, intensive reading remained common practice among young readers; and while solitary, silent reading became the norm for adult readers, children generally read in closely monitored family or school community settings.

Chapter six focuses on the attitudes of young readers and reveals that children often cherished their books for very different reasons from the ones which had led the adults to acquire them. The combined evidence shows children to have been volatile readers, who appreciated books much more for their material and symbolic than for their textual qualities, using them to build houses or simply taking pride in their ownership and the honor it...