The Appeal of the Fantastic and the Improbable in Late Eighteenth-Century Children's Literature

Abstract

Eighteenth-century children's authors implicitly exploited the fantastic and the improbable aspects of fairy tales to complement the persuasiveness of their moralistic teachings. Whereas the coexistence of chapbook residue with middle-class pedagogy in eighteenth-century children's books has already been underlined in scholarly studies, little critical attention has been paid to the rhetorical effects exercised by the incorporation of the fantastic and the improbable in eighteenth-century children's stories. Through appealing to the audience's collective imagination, eighteenth-century children's authors both derived from and built upon a set of common aspirations shared by a middle-class audience, thus cultivating a sense of what Kenneth Burke termed consubstantiality among the readers. Focussing on John Newbery's A Little Pretty Pocket-Book (1744), The History of Goody Two-Shoes (1765), and Maria Edgeworth's ‘The Orphans’ (1796), this study explores the modus operandi through which late-eighteenth-century children's authors sought to communicate serious messages by employing improbable plotlines.