Child Consumers and the Invention of Children’s Literature

M. O. Grenby’s The Child Reader is a long-overdue study of the relationship between children and their books in the long eighteenth century. Bringing together book history and children’s literature scholarship, Grenby argues that child and adult consumers “did as much to invent modern children’s literature as . . . authors and illustrators, educationalists and publishers” (289). The Child Reader provides evidentiary confirmation for several long-held hypotheses about eighteenth-century children’s literature, concluding that children’s books of the period tended to be purchased by adults for middle-class children, and that the average child’s reading process was heavily shaped by adult intervention. Eighteenth-century children’s literature, Grenby’s research suggests, was largely consumed by children aged five to eleven, and was intended for readers who already possessed a rudimentary literacy developed using preestablished tools, such as primers and children’s Bibles; the “gift book,” frequently received at Christmas, figured largely in the formation of children’s personal libraries, as did hand-me-down books from siblings and friends. Other evidence is more surprising, indicating that more girls than boys owned books after the 1770s, and that more rural than cosmopolitan children owned books in general.

Most intriguing is Grenby’s repeated interrogation of a series of practices he terms “cross-reading”—“boys using girls’ books, Anglicans enjoying Dissenting or Catholic texts, the rich reading material designed for the poor, the young using advanced texts” (92), and, of course, children reading books intended for an adult audience and vice versa. The Child Reader reveals that throughout the eighteenth century, such cross-reading was and continued to be common, if not normal, despite the attempts of parents and educators to establish textual gradations and of publishers to segment their market. Perhaps even more radically, Grenby draws attention to the tendencies of eighteenth-century children to approach book ownership as “material,” rather than “textual,” and to see themselves as consumers rather than readers, admitting that “for many young people, the content of a book was irrelevant, or at least only one element of a book’s appeal” (286). This admission, as he notes, provides a welcome complication of the easy binary between didacticism and fantasy that continues to plague historians of children’s literature. Scholars of empire will also be interested in his argument that cross-reading “contributed to the homogenization of British culture” and the formation of national identity (288), an audacious but supported claim.

Grenby devotes a long introductory chapter to a description of his methodology—a necessary caution, given his bold attempt to reconstruct the notoriously obscure reading and book-related behaviors of children. He categorizes his sources into three general areas: biographical, textual and graphic, and extratextual. Biographical treatments of children’s reading, including memoirs, diaries, letters, and journals, provide information about the “ideological battle” surrounding education and children’s books during the period, and Grenby attends both to adults looking back on their own child reading and those who comment on the education of children they know, mostly as parents, occasionally as educators. Textual and graphic sources include depictions of children reading in novels, paintings, and sculpture; these provide Grenby with evidence for the continuing importance of the “tutelary mother-and-child dyad” and its relationship to depictions of Mary with the child Christ, as well as the didactic and “civilising” purpose of children reading (17, 24). In other words, he is very much aware of the fact that depictions of children reading are attempts to assert a desired social norm, which do influence real practices, but are not necessarily straightforwardly realistic. Finally, Grenby’s extratextual sources, probably the most satisfying to historians, include publication records, subscriptions, and children’s own marginalia. He has done scholars the incredible service of examining over five thousand eighteenth-century children’s books from four separate archives—the Osborne Collection in Toronto, the Cotsen donation at Princeton, the Children’s Book Collection at UCLA, and the Hockliffe Collection at the University of Bedfordshire—for marginalia and markings...