Juvenile Nonfiction before the Golden Age of Anglo‐American Children's Literature

Abstract

This chapter is an exploration of the nonfiction texts that captivated child readers prior to the mid-nineteenth-century pivot toward fantasy and the ascension of fiction within children's reading material. The prominence of Newbery's fiction tends to overshadow the array of other pre-Golden Age texts children read, but it is a mistake to associate the literary innovation and exploration of this early period solely with fiction, especially because the schoolbooks, histories, and religious works that made up the majority of children's reading material in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and first half of the nineteenth centuries were themselves sites of fervent ideological and aesthetic transformation. The nonfiction of these centuries, like their fictional counterparts, blend education and delight; beyond adopting this Lockean approach to inculcate young readers in moral dictates, these books investigate transitioning ideas of salvation, citizenship, and commerce in the rapidly metamorphosing Atlantic world, and grapple with the position and importance of childhood to each of these essential concepts. Rather than a stagnant pool of proto-literature out of which children's texts as we now know them emerged, nonfiction in this period is a dynamic set of works that shaped the values, interests, and aims of generations of readers in ways that both were distinct from and paved the way for the ideologies of their literary successors.