Some notes on James Burns as a publisher of childrens books

Abstract

'The time has surely come', wrote Kathleen Tillotson in 1954, 'to break up Victorian novel into manageable segments; not by novelists, or phases, but simply by concentrating upon a decade or so at a time'. 1 The signs are surely clear that the presence of these words at the start of her seminal study, Novels of the eighteen-forties., was something of a clarion-call, and for the last forty years the academic cohorts have been sweeping into the territory whose fruitfulness was made so manifest in that book. Decades, novelists, categories, phases, have all been grist to the many mills of 'Victorian studies' and no one can now complain, as Mrs Tillotson did, that 'we have virtually no edited texts of Victorian novelists, and no means ... of discovering how (and why) the original editions differed from the texts we read'. 2 Where Victorian children's books are concerned however, the signs are not so clear. For all the significance that these books may have had in the lives of their youthful readers, very few of them today exercise any compulsive interest (especially for academic entrepreneurs), and anyone investigating the genre will probably agree that a coherent account is hard to come by. 'Manageable segments', whether decade-studies or categoric analyses are in short supply as is, very often, the evidence upon which they may be based. This is as true now for the eighteen-forties in children's literature as it was when Kathleen Tillotson set about giving a context to the novels of the same period. And yet that decade is one of singular interest to the historian of English children's books, for,