Radical Cross-Writing for Working Children: Toward a Bottom-Up History of Children's Literature

In a letter to the editor of the Radical newspaper The Poor Man's Guardian, an anonymous article signed "M.A.B." urges the "mothers and teachers of both sexes, (whose business it is to instruct the rising generation)," to read educational literature with their families. Self-identifying as a wife and mother, M.A.B. provides the following list of suggested works: "the 'poor Man's Guardian,' Mr. Cobbett's 'History of the Reformation,' the 'Poor Man's book of the Church,' 'Church Examiner,' 'The National Holiday,' the 'Political Writings of Mr. Paine, and other such excellent publications.'"¹ Such pamphlets and periodicals touting constitutional reform, deism, general strikes, and redistribution of wealth are the kind of dangerous literature that made British elites ask whether teaching poor children to read "would only tend to make the people study politics, and lay them open to the arts of designing men" (Hansard HC Deb 24 April 1807). These recommended readings look nothing like the early nineteenth-century moral tales, domestic fiction, or imaginative literature widely anthologized in the Norton Anthology of Children's Literature or Patricia Demers's From Instruction to Delight, and none of the authors single out children as their intended audience. Yet M.A.B.'s recommendations point to a tradition of Radical working-class cross-writing from Britain's First Industrial Revolution that warrants integration into our histories of children's literature.² I establish this tradition by focusing on the 1830s as a watershed decade, when Radicals first identified children as an important audience.

The writings of Thomas Paine or William Benbow may not strike us as children's literature. But the suggestion that their texts were recommended reading for young people begs the question why we accept as children's literature classics some adult works that were appropriated by children, such as Robinson Crusoe, but not Paine's Rights of Man or his defense of deism, Age of Reason. Neither do we include Radical works that explicitly target a working youth audience, such as William Cobbett's surprisingly seditious A Grammar of the English Language.³ Such exclusions are all the more remarkable given that some "church and king" polemical literature, written to counteract Paine's influence among poor adults and children, passes as children's literature, including Hannah More's Village Politics and Sarah Trimmer's The Family Magazine and The Servant's Friend (Jackson 174–90). Those Radical Dissenters and reformers who regularly attract scholarship—William Godwin, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, and Mary Wollstonecraft—are specifically bourgeois Radicals, tied to Unitarianism and rational Enlightenment values—in Godwin's case, vilified but not imprisoned.⁴ The pattern suggests that we may unwittingly eliminate from consideration those texts written for and embraced by Radical working-class readers.⁵

This oversight stems from a scholarly consensus that pioneers of children's literature publishing (e.g., John and Elizabeth Newbery, John Marshall, and John Harris) served middle-class readers with books that reflect their values. Thus, the rise of English children's book publishers in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is closely associated with the rise of middle-class families, with parents who could afford to purchase books and whose children had the time and education necessary to read them. Rigorous studies have established and embellished this narrative: Isaac Kramnick charts the eighteenth-century transition from aristocratic to bourgeois values by locating the Dissenting Protestant doctrine—that life is a race fairly won through hard work—in children's literature from Little Goody-Two Shoes to The Little Engine that Could (99–132). Offering a more nuanced reading, Andrew O'Malley in The Making of the Modern Child argues that by the late eighteenth century, "Children's literature became one of the crucial mechanisms for disseminating and consolidating middle-class ideology" (11). Approaching children's books through the history of reading, M. O. Grenby's The Child Reader, 1700–1840 confirms that no one profession dominated children's book ownership, but "irrespective of authors' or publishers' intentions, children's literature was consumed predominantly by middle...