“Very Capital Reading for Children”

Abstract

This chapter treats the transformation of classical myth into children’s pleasure reading by Nathaniel Hawthorne (A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys, 1851 and Tanglewood Tales, 1853) and Charles Kingsley (The Heroes, 1855), with attention to earlier handbooks and collections and to contemporary reservations about myth as suitable reading for children. Both authors use the fairy tale as a model and assume a natural affinity between children and the time in which the myths originated, but they also differ significantly. In Hawthorne’s Romantic vision, myth is archetypal and universal, equally suited to girls and boys, and conducive to free and imaginative play in an American setting; in Kingsley’s progressive vision, myth belongs to a childlike historical moment and serves as a prelude to the different sorts of education that await his boy and girl readers and as a vehicle for Christian and British values.