Children's Letter Research Articles

Tablet and Smartphone or a Book: The Struggle Between Digital Media and Literacy Environment in Homes of Croatian Preschool Children and Its Effect on Letter Recognition.

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationships between the amount of time that preschool children, aged 6-7 years, spend using a tablet or a smartphone for entertainment purposes, aspects of their home literacy environment (HLE), and their letter recognition ability. Participants in the study were a convenient sample of 97 children (43 girls) aged 6-7 years and one of their parents, who agreed to participate in the research during the process of school readiness assessment. Children completed a letter recognition test, while parents filled out a questionnaire in which they gave estimates of the amount of time their child typically spends using a tablet or a smartphone for entertainment purposes during a typical week and completed a scale assessing their HLE. The results show that a smaller amount of time that children spend using a tablet or a smartphone for entertainment purposes during a typical week, higher education level of mothers, and more frequent parental engagement in interactive reading with children are positively related to children's letter recognition. However, more frequent interactive reading with the child was the only significant predictor of better letter recognition. The findings point to the importance of time spent using digital devices for entertainment purposes by preschool children, as well as the quality of their home environment, in literacy development.

Детские письма великого князя Александра Николаевича к В.А. Жуковскому: обзор, публикация, комментарий

Детские письма великого князя Александра Николаевича к В.А. Жуковскому: обзор, публикация, комментарий

Case- and form-sensitive letter frequencies in children’s picture books

Letter knowledge is a critical preliteracy skill that is essential for school readiness. Interventions designed to develop children's letter knowledge have been based on caregivers’ and teachers’ picture book reading. Despite the importance of picture books for developing children's letter knowledge, there are no published norms of letter frequencies for picture books. To create case-sensitive letter frequencies for children's picture books, we analyzed a corpus of 100 picture books containing 68,741 words made up of 264,063 lowercase and 14,134 uppercase letters. Analyzing the corpus, we determined that letter frequencies varied by letter and case (p < .001) and thus we created case-sensitive letter frequencies and letter ranks. Comparing uppercase and lowercase letter frequencies, there was a moderate correlation (r = .520). Comparing the children's picture book letter frequencies to adult letter frequencies, there were high correlations between uppercase (r = .815) and lowercase (r = .979) letter frequencies. Further, we extend conceptualizations of letter frequency norms from letter case to letter form. By measuring each letter's features, we determined which letters had the same form across uppercase and lowercase. We used these calculations to create a new set of frequency norms based on the forms of letters. We suggest that the similarities and differences across case should also be accounted for when ranking letter frequencies, especially when considering exposure to uppercase letters. These norms may provide a better representation of the letter forms that children are exposed to and can be used to better understand the foundations of literacy development.

Power, Politeness, and Print: Children's Letter Writing in Republican China

This article examines how epistolary knowledge enabled schoolchildren to provide letter-writing services for adults who were not literate enough to write their own letters, thereby elevating those children's social status and raising their awareness of their own sociocultural power. The rise of child letter writers in Republican China is instrumental in understanding the ever-increasing need for written communication, the burgeoning of universal education, the expansion of commercial publications, and the construction of a modern society at that time. To appreciate the role of children in the aforementioned issues, the article emphasizes children's agency in two respects. First, it was embodied more so in children's consciousness of their ability to assist adults and to contribute to society than in their resistance to hierarchy and adults' directives. Second, it was reflected in children's appropriation of texts or images from letter-writing manuals for their own use, in order to accumulate cultural capital. In this sense, the rise of child letter writers in Republican China was distinct and significant because it aligned with China's ongoing pursuit of salvation and strength as a modern nation-state.

Effects of training phonological awareness on children's reading skills

Phonological awareness and letter knowledge have been shown to be precursors of children's word reading and reading comprehension. As a consequence, promoting children's phonological awareness should result in better reading skills. In order to evaluate this assumption, we trained phonological awareness and letter knowledge of 370 German preschool children and compared their word reading and reading comprehension skills with those of a group of 99 untrained children. Our findings indicate strong intervention effects on children's phonological awareness and letter knowledge. However, this advantage did not result in better reading skills in general. Within the group of low-performing children, we found small effects on word reading. This effect was mediated by individual differences in phonological awareness. In summary, only for low-performing children do the findings support our theoretical assumptions. This may be attributable to differences in the orthographic transparency between German and English, which restricts a generalization of findings across languages.

Using a Digital Spelling Game for Promoting Alphabetic Knowledge of Preschoolers: The Contribution of Auditory and Visual Supports

AbstractThe authors developed a digital spelling game to promote children's early literacy skills. Based on the dual‐coding theory, the authors studied the benefits of auditory support alone versus auditory+visual support. Children played the game in three conditions: no support, hearing the whole word; auditory‐only support, hearing a word segmented; and auditory+visual support, hearing the word segmented together with seeing the highlighted position of the letters. The participants were 129 Hebrew‐speaking children (mean age = 5.7 years) from five preschools located in low–socioeconomic status neighborhoods. Children were randomly divided into one of the four groups (the three intervention conditions and a comparison group that did not play the game but watched electronic books). Children in each of the four groups participated in eight 20‐minute sessions over the course of one month (two sessions per week). Children's letter knowledge (letter names and sounds), phonological awareness (word segmentation), word spelling, and word decoding were assessed before and after the intervention. Children's visuomotor and oral skills were assessed and controlled for in the analyses. Generalized estimating equations regressions showed that the auditory+visual support and auditory‐only support groups scored higher on the posttest than the no‐support and comparison groups in letter knowledge, phonological awareness, word spelling, and word decoding. The no‐support group scored higher than the comparison group only in letter knowledge. The authors highlight ways for promoting children's understanding of the writing system and demonstrate the effectiveness of a computerized game adapted to the orthography in promoting basic early literacy skills.

Early childhood educators' knowledge about language and literacy: Associations with practice and children's learning.

Educators' language and literacy knowledge is considered important for informing classroom practices and thereby supporting children's early language and literacy development. This includes both disciplinary content knowledge (knowledge concerning how oral and written language are structured and map to one another) and knowledge for practice (knowledge of effective strategies and practices for supporting early language and literacy). In this study, we examined the associations among 485 early childhood educators' content knowledge and knowledge for practice, their observed language and literacy practices, and the emergent literacy learning of 2004 children enrolled in their classrooms. We found significant, positive correlations between measures of educators' content knowledge and knowledge for practice and classroom practice, indicating that early childhood educators with greater levels of knowledge tended to exhibit more desirable classroom language and literacy practices. We also found significant, positive associations between educators' knowledge and children's print concept, letter naming, and phonological awareness learning, but not children's oral language learning. The associations between educators' knowledge and children's print concept learning were mediated by classroom practice. Together, these results reiterate the importance of educators' language and literacy knowledge and also provide some support for practice as the mechanism through which knowledge relates to children's learning.

Early Childhood Care and Education and School Readiness in Zambia

ABSTRACTDespite increased investment in early childhood care and education (ECCE) globally, little is known about its effectiveness in low-income countries. Using kernel exact matching within a national sample of 1,623 Zambian 6-year-olds, we test the associations between ECCE participation and seven domains of children's school readiness. We find ECCE participation to be significantly and positively predictive of children's receptive vocabulary, letter naming, reasoning, fine motor, executive function, and task performance skills (d = 0.20 − 0.65). Although ECCE predicted better outcomes across program types and dosage levels, associations between ECCE participation and school readiness were descriptively if not significantly larger for children attending nonprofit (versus governmental or private) programs and for those attending ECCE between three and five hours per day (versus those attending less than three or six or more hours per day). Implications of these findings, particularly for the 68% of Zambian children who remain out of ECCE, are discussed.

"We Should Live Like One World": White Children Write About Race and Brotherhood in Letters to Harry S. Truman

After President Harry S. Truman spoke to Congress on February 2, 1948, regarding his civil rights agenda, American children saw the president as someone with whom they could speak candidly about race. This essay focuses on letters to Truman from White children who professed a nominal support for racial equality. When White students wrote to the president on the issue of race, they presented arguments about why they supported integration, explaining why popular racial stereotypes of the era were wrong. As such, these letters reveal racial ideologies circulating among White children during these years. Their letters demonstrate that in postwar classrooms across the nation, many White children learned that all prejudice was wrong, a message that stemmed in part from the devastation of the recent war. Interactions in lessons about brotherhood between White teachers and students who expressed a belief in racial equality in the late 1940s and early 1950s were key sites for the expansion of colorblindness as an ideology, which emphasized sameness in order to combat racism. This essay uses children's letters to explore examples of colorblind rhetoric as well as to discuss the broader relationship of White children with the development of racial ideology during this time.

Cross-language associations and changes in Spanish-speaking preschoolers’ English and Spanish academic abilities

ABSTRACTWe examined the cross-language relations among Spanish-speaking preschoolers’ (N= 125;Mage = 53 months,SD= 4.58) English and Spanish vocabulary, letter–word, and math skills; the changes they exhibited in those skills during 1 year of preschool; and the extent to which Spanish skills were associated with English skill gains. The results revealed that children's Spanish and English vocabulary skills were unassociated across languages, whereas their letter–word and math skills were positively associated. Children exhibited gains in vocabulary, letter–word, and math skills in English, with letter–word and math skills in Spanish at the start of preschool being positively associated with the development of those skills in English. Children also gained math skills in Spanish. However, their Spanish vocabulary and letter–word skills did not appear to change. Vocabulary skills showed positive within-language relations with children's letter–word and math skills. The findings highlight cross-language linkages between Spanish-speaking preschoolers’ academic skills in English and Spanish and how Spanish skills associate with their English academic readiness.

Fathers' language input during shared book activities: Links to children's kindergarten achievement

The present study used data from the Family Life Project (FLP) to examine predictive relations between fathers' and mothers' language input during a wordless picture book task in the home just before kindergarten entry and children's letter–word identification, picture vocabulary, and applied problems scores at the end of kindergarten. Fathers' and mothers' language input was defined as the number of different words and mean length of utterance and was measured using Systematic Analysis of Language Transcripts (SALT). Hierarchical regression analyses with demographic controls revealed that mothers' mean length of utterance predicted children's applied problems scores. More importantly, fathers' mean length of utterance predicted children's vocabulary and applied problems scores above and beyond mothers' language. Findings highlight the unique contribution of fathers to children's early academic achievement. Implications for future research, practice, and policy are discussed.

Moulding more from dough

Kalpana Pandit explores how the sensory properties, texture and reworkability of play dough make it a powerful tool for developing children's speaking skills, vocabulary, letter formation and confidence.

Keeping the reader's mind in mind: Development of perspective-taking in children's dictations

This study investigated when children can take the perspective of their reader if the information-processing demands of writing are removed by means of dictation to a scribe. Participants (N=96) aged 5, 6 and 7years dictated letters to an addressee who possessed requisite content knowledge, and then revised the letter or dictated a new letter to an addressee who lacked this knowledge (counterbalanced). Results showed that 19% of 5-year-olds, 41% of 6-year-olds, and 72% of 7-year-olds considered their reader's missing knowledge. Children's awareness of their reader's knowledge was neither related to performance on higher-order theory of mind tasks, nor to measures of executive function. Significantly greater perspective-taking was demonstrated in children's new letters than revised letters. However, although revision is considered a late-developing skill, half of even the 5-year-olds were able to make revisions (albeit few revisions demonstrated actual perspective-taking). Findings have significant implications for the emergent-literacy curriculum.

Relations Among Early Object Recognition Skills: Objects and Letters

Human visual object recognition is multifaceted and comprised of several domains of expertise. Developmental relations between young children's letter recognition and their 3-dimensional object recognition abilities are implicated on several grounds but have received little research attention. Here, we ask how preschoolers' success in recognizing letters relates to their ability to recognize 3-dimensional objects from sparse shape information alone. Seventy-three 2 1/2 to 5-year-old children completed a “Letter Recognition” task, measuring the ability to identify a named letter among 3 letters, and a “Shape Caricature Recognition” task, measuring recognition of familiar objects from sparse, abstract information about their part shapes and the spatial relations among those parts. Children also completed a control “Shape Bias” task, in which success depends on matching exact shapes but not on building an internal representation of the configuration of features characteristic of an object category or letter. Children's success in letter recognition was positively related to their shape caricature recognition scores, but not to their shape bias scores. The results suggest that letter recognition builds upon developing skills in attending to and representing the relational structure of object shape, and that these skills are common to both 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional object perception.

A fairy tale dictator: children's letters to the Duce

One of the aspects of the formation of consensus under the Fascist state concerns the construction of the Fascist ‘man’. This article takes up this notion and explores it in relation to children. The first part deal with the legislative process according to which Fascist rituals and myths were introduced into the school curriculum. The second part examines the letters that were sent to the Duce by children during the period of the regime. The majority of letters appear to have been dictated by elementary school teachers according to precise directives, but nonetheless there is some evidence of the spontaneous manifestation of the feelings of infants. The most significant aspect concerns the transfiguration of the Duce himself into a figure of fable in ways that could not but impact on the imagination of those who were born and raised between the 1920s and later 1930s.

Book Review: The Rhetoric of Certitude: C. S. Lewis's Nonfiction Prose

The Rhetoric of Certitude: C. S. Lewis's Nonfiction Prose. By Gary L. Tandy. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2009. ISBN 798-0-78338-973-0. Pp. xiii + 135. $39.95. In The Rhetoric of Certitude, Gary Tandy has produced a detailed study of the nonfiction rhetoric of C. S. Lewis. Considered as a contribution to the growing body of Lewis scholarship, this book's success is mixed. Mr. Tandy notes that a study of the rhetoric of Lewis is challenged from the outset in multiple ways. First is the size of the corpus--dozens of titles. Second is the number and diversity of the genre of those titles: literary scholarship, theology and apologetics, novels, poetry, children's fantasy, science fiction, essays, and letters. Third, and trickiest, is the seductive tendency of Lewis' writing to draw the critic away from matters of style into the substance of his arguments. Tandy addresses the first two challenges by determining to examine only(!) Lewis' nonfiction prose, encompassing the literary scholarship, the theology and apologetics, and essays. Even though this sub-set of Lewis' work is still substantial in size and quite diverse in audience, he considers that it is critical to a comprehensive assessment of Lewis' rhetoric to look for evidence of stylistic unity across a wide array of Lewis' work. Tandy states: Because of this natural separation of Lewis's into these seemingly exclusive categories, many critics have failed to recognize the unity of Lewis's rhetoric and have failed to identify those stylistic traits common both to his literary criticism and religious apologetics. (x) Tandy addresses the third challenge by simply refusing to be seduced by the content of Lewis' writing. Philosophers such as I consider this fairly odd, but Tandy has a job to do, and he sticks to it resolutely--to a fault, but that will be discussed below. This brief but loaded book is divided into five chapters. The first chapter, 'The Stance of the Last Survivor': C. S. Lewis and the Modern World, sets Lewis as a thinker and writer in the intellectual context of the twentieth century. Tandy states that Lewis viewed himself as a holdover from an earlier era, the Christian era, which Lewis thinks ended around the early nineteenth century. The first chapter sets this crucial perspective for understanding Lewis' work. Chapter 2 describes Lewis' theory of rhetoric, gleaned from his comments about language, communication, and style in his nonfiction prose (xii). This chapter includes a review of the basic categories of Lewis' theology and apologetic approach, because his view of rhetoric is so deeply entwined with his overall theory of language. In chapters 3 and 4, Tandy analyzes Lewis' practice, taking the reader through a fairly comprehensive catalog of rhetorical categories. In chapter 5, Tandy ultimately argues for the essential stylistic unity of Lewis's literary criticism and religious prose (xii). Three earlier books aim to analyze Lewis' prose: Chad Walsh's The Literary Legacy of C. S. Lewis, Richard Cunningham's C. S. Lewis: Defender of the Faith, and James Como's Branches to Heaven: The Geniuses of C. S. Lewis. All three are very good books with their own strengths, and Como, a professor of rhetoric at City University of New York, York College, has deliberately organized his book according to rhetorical categories. As far as offering an overall understanding of the excellence of Lewis' writing, ComUs brilliant essay is certainly a far more thoughtful contribution than Tandy's. Tandy's work, however, offers an extremely detailed and comprehensive basic rhetorical analysis, sticking painstakingly to that more specific and particular task. Thus, Tandy's volume has its clear contribution to make to the scholarship on Lewis. At the basic level of scholarship--the accumulation, cataloging, and marshaling of relevant primary and secondary material on the subject--Tandy's book is a significant resource in two dimensions. …

IRTs of the ABCs: Children's letter name acquisition

We examined the developmental sequence of letter name knowledge acquisition by children from 2 to five years of age. Data from 2 samples representing diverse regions, ethnicity, and socioeconomic backgrounds (ns=1074 and 500) were analyzed using item response theory (IRT) and differential item functioning techniques. Results from factor analyses indicated that letter name knowledge represented a unidimensional skill; IRT results yielded significant differences between letters in both difficulty and discrimination. Results also indicated an approximate developmental sequence in letter name learning for the simplest and most challenging to learn letters—but with no clear sequence between these extremes. Findings also suggested that children were most likely to first learn their first initial. We discuss implications for assessment and instruction.

Population Pharmacokinetics of Busulfan in Children–Letter

Appropriate busulfan dosing in children is a highly sensitive issue in the context of high dose-conditioning regimens for bone marrow transplantation (BMT). Indeed, a therapeutic window of plasma exposure to busulfan [area under the curve (AUC) from 900–1,500 μmol/L min] has been defined both avoiding severe toxicities and ensuring efficient engraftment. The article by Trame and colleagues (1) in the November 1, 2011, issue of Clinical Cancer Research proposed a new individualized i.v. busulfan dosing in children, either based on body weight or body surface area, which was derived from the results of a population pharmacokinetics (PK) analysis.The major concern is that this newly reported dosing by Trame and colleagues is much lower than that recommended in the approved European Medicines Agency (EMA) dosing and may consequently result in underexposure and thus in a dramatic increase of graft failure and decreased disease control.To evaluate the magnitude of the discrepancy between the dosing reported in the study by Trame and colleagues and the EMA dosing, each dosing strategy was retrospectively applied to a large cohort of pediatric patients who had been treated with i.v. busulfan in earlier studies (2, 3) and from which the PK at dose 1 was fully determined. This test cohort comprised 205 children adequately distributed with respect to body weight (3.5–62.5 kg, median 9 kg) as well as biologic and disease (both malignant and nonmalignant) characteristics, who were thus representative of the high heterogeneity of children undergoing BMT after busulfan-containing regimens.For each individual of the test cohort, the busulfan AUCs were calculated on the basis of each dosing strategy and the results were summarized by body weight groups. To gain more objectivity, another dosing strategy developed by an independent research group (4) was added into the comparison. This last dosing nomogram is currently recommended in ongoing European Group for Blood and Marrow Transplantation (EBMT) clinical protocols for primary immunodeficiencies in children (5). To enable reliable comparisons, the EBMT doses were adjusted to achieve the same target AUC value (1,200 μmol/L min) as that used with the 2 other dosing strategies. The results on the test cohort, as shown in Fig. 1, clearly indicate that both EMA and EBMT dosing strategies yield similar exposure within the therapeutic window in all body weight groups, whereas the strategy of Trame and colleagues exhibits a large amount of underexposure in children weighing 9 kg or above.Forty-five percent to 75% of patients weighing 9 kg or above had an AUC less than 900 μmol/L min with the use of Trame's dosing, whereas the targeting performance was adequate with the 2 other dosing nomograms, with 75% to 100% of patients reaching the AUC target. In Trame's article, the authors stated that the clearances estimated by their model were significantly lower than those previously published and no explanation on such a difference was provided. Nevertheless, we feel that several limitations deserve further attention.First, Trame's model was developed on a mix of oral and i.v. busulfan series (total of 94 patients, 4.2–80 kg; median, 27.2 kg). The minority of data were collected in the i.v. series (40 patients) whereas the majority of data come from the oral series (54 patients) which is well known to be difficult to use as a model due to the large variability in drug absorption and bioavailability. Second, data were unbalanced with respect to the body weight groups, with only 5 children weighing less than 9 kg (2 of whom were treated by oral route). The limited sample size in this extreme body weight group may have markedly influenced the model shape. Third, the authors did not report any cross-validation process of the busulfan concentration measurement techniques between the different series. All these factors either combined or taken separately may have contributed to unreliable estimates of clearance by the model. In line with this aspect, the model estimated a bioavailability of almost 100%, an unexpectedly high value considering the well-established value of 80% in adults (6) and the known glutathione S-transferase (GST) metabolism upregulation in children which would rather limit their bioavailability.To conclude, 3 dosing strategies, each one developed from independent research groups and data sets, were compared on a large and representative cohort of more than 200 patients.The dosing suggested by Trame and colleagues was shown to significantly underexpose the children weighing 9 kg or more, whereas the EMA and EBMT dosing gave consistent and comparable targeted exposures. We feel that it is important to provide such comparisons for the prescribers involved in BMT to have a full scenario of the different dosing strategies and to make their own opinion.See the Response, p. 2717No potential conflicts of interests were disclosed.

Supplementing literacy instruction with a media-rich intervention: Results of a randomized controlled trial

► We test the efficacy of a media-rich curriculum supplement that incorporates content from three PBS programs. ► We examined impacts of the supplement on early literacy outcomes. ► We found significant impacts on children's letter-recognition, letter sounds, and concepts of story and print. ► Results indicate promise of incorporating PBS content into preschools. This study investigates whether a curriculum supplement organized as a sequence of teacher-led literacy activities using digital content from public educational television programs can improve early literacy outcomes of low-income preschoolers. The study sample was 436 children in 80 preschool classrooms in California and New York. Preschool teachers were randomly assigned to implement either a 10-week media-rich early literacy intervention that employed clips from Sesame Street , Between the Lions , and SuperWhy! or to a comparison condition. The media-rich literacy supplement had positive impacts (+0.20 ≤ d ≤ +0.55) on children's ability to recognize letters, sounds of letters and initial sounds of words, and children's concepts of story and print. The study findings show the potential for incorporating literacy content from public media programming into curriculum supplements supported by professional development to impact early literacy outcomes of low-income children.

The Victorian Press and the Fairy Tale (review)

Reviewed by: The Victorian Press and the Fairy Tale Beth Palmer (bio) Caroline Sumpter , The Victorian Press and the Fairy Tale (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. xii + 254, $80 cloth. This is a book to be welcomed by scholars of the Victorian press. The central argument of Caroline Sumpter's engaging monograph is that the Victorian periodical press helped to reinvent the fairy tale for nineteenth-century audiences. In doing so it contests the assertion, put forward by Charles Dickens (in "Frauds on the Fairies," 1853) and many others since, that the age of mass media left little room for belief in fairies or an oral folkloric tradition. Instead of perceiving the fairy tale as the "antithesis of [End Page 343] the newspaper—as timeless, untouchable, and beyond the reach of politics and commerce" (3), Sumpter shows the Victorian fairy story to be constructed by and responding to the same social and political developments as the newspaper and the periodical. The first chapter spans the nineteenth century to provide an overview of the fairy tale's modulating relationship with print culture. While the chapbook was seen by many as a more fitting, antiquarian form for the publication of fairy tales, it was the newer media of the press that helped fire enthusiasm for a fairy tale revival. The second and third chapters concentrate on the children's magazines and shilling monthlies of the 1860s. Sumpter suggests that the middle-class Aunt Judy's Magazine, Good Words for the Young, and the Monthly Packet relied on fairy tales and folklore, whereas cheaper children's literature like the Boy's Own Paper went in for sensational adventure fiction. The fairy tale was of particularly vital importance to these socially conservative magazines because it was perceived to be "the record of man's earliest spiritual impulses" (42). As such it played on contemporary links between the child reader and the "childhood" of the race to formulate fantasies of origin. In this vein Max Müller's etymological and linguistic theories are revealed as important intertexts for Charles Kingsley and George MacDonald's fairy tales. Chapter three also builds on work by Geoffrey Cantor, Sally Shuttleworth, Gowan Dawson and others that examine the crossovers between science, pseudo-science and literature in magazine settings. Here Sumpter locates Charles Kingsley's The Water-Babies centrally among a matrix of texts in Cornhill and Macmillan's magazines which form an ongoing and multifaceted response to Darwin's 1859 Origin of Species. The fourth and fifth chapters move into the 1890s to examine the fairy tale in the socialist press and the elite little magazines. As with the earlier chapters, Sumpter focuses in on a decade in which she sees the periodical press undergoing significant developments in response to social change. In chapter four the analysis of Keir Hardie's Labour Leader and John Trevor's Labour Prophet offers interesting comparisons with the better-known and more successful Clarion. The final chapter turns from labour to leisure to show how writers like Laurence Housman and Edward Purcell understood "belief in the fairy tale . . . as a training in the appreciation of beauty" (151). Refreshingly, the well-known Yellow Book is mentioned, but, as with the Clarion, the better-known periodical serves as a context for exploring under-read texts like the Pageant and the Dome. In this final chapter especially, the reproductions of fairy tale illustrations receive the same kind of illuminating interpretations as the literary works. As well as analysing the uses to which fairy tales are put by magazine writers and editors, the book tackles the thorny issue of periodical readership. [End Page 344] While, at points, the ideas about readers' interpretations are necessarily conjectural, real readers' responses to fairy tales are particularly central to the sections on child readers in chapters two and four. For example, through the letters printed in the Labour Leader, Sumpter reveals children willing to understand fairy tales as political allegories but also shows how their specialist demands shaped the magazine (although she exercises healthy scepticism about whether or not children's letters to the editor were genuine). Previous work on fairy tales by scholars like Jennifer Schacker, U.C. Knoepflmacher, and...