The Golden Age of Children's Literature: An Introduction by Abby Wolf To paraphrase Virginia Woolf, on or about November 1865, children's literature changed. With the publication of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll essentially did away with the adult in children's literature. The fantasy world of Wonderland had its own rules, which appealed to a child's sense of play rather than to an adult's sense of propriety. Instead of offering dry moral instruction, children's literature after Alice made these lessons playful and exciting: To be moral was not to sit about the house with hands-folded piety put rather to gad about the sea, the Empire, and secret gardens with what we now would call childlike abandon. The "golden age of children's literature," ushered in by Alice and ending with A.A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh books (1924-1928), idealized the child as fanciful and free and, most importantly, it insisted that the child could best learn how to be good through a storyteller's appeal to the imagination rather than through an adult's assertion of the rules of behavior. A Changing World Social and economic conditions in England and America had much to do with the rise of children's literature as its own market. The industrialization of the first half of the century brought about cheaper and more efficient methods of production. From the 1860s on, books were more easily produced and were generally considered less precious: Little hands could now soil the pages of a book without devastating the middle-class family financially. There were also fewer little hands. Although the Victorian and Edwardian family was still much larger than what we've become accustomed to a century later (for instance, the author George MacDonald had 11 children; even the socialite Sylvia Llewelyn Davies had five sons, some of whom inspired J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan), in general families had fewer children, which meant that financial resources were not spread quite so thin. Equally important to these two economic changes were the vast educational reforms that took place in the last decades of the 19th century. In England, the Education Act of 1870 made free elementary education law; by 1880, one million more children were attending school. In the 1880s, girls' education in particular saw a number of reforms, with education beyond the elementary level for middle-class girls becoming more commonplace and, indeed, respectable. The Birth of an Industry Along with the increase in book production came a greater variety of books and other reading materials for children. The quality of children's literature improved across genre as well. Christina Rossetti's 1862 poem "Goblin Market" -- which many readers now think of as an adult poem -- and her 1872 verse collection Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book are often cited as examples of the marked improvement in the quality of writing for children. Now there was not only more for young people to read, but also more for them to look at. Children's book illustrating came into its own as an art form after Alice, exemplified by Kate Greenaway's Under the Window (1870) and Arthur Rackham's edition of Grimms' fairy tales (1900). These artists and others, including Walter Crane and Randolph Caldecott in England and Howard Pyle in America, showed the influence of contemporary art movements in their work for children. With this "adult" background, children's book illustrations became an integral part of the drama of the story. Children's magazines proliferated after the 1860s, also. Perhaps the most well-known titles are The Boys' Own Paper (1879) and The Girls' Own Paper (1880), but dozens of magazines for children were published around the turn of the century, which contained not only literature but also science, sports, history, and many other subjects of interest to the Victorian and Edwardian child. The Scouts: Feeding the Mind and Body Also on the rise were movements and organizations specifically for middle-class children. Most famously, the Boy Scouts and Girls Guides (called Girl Scouts in America) were organized in 1908 by Robert Baden-Powell and his sister, Agnes Baden-Powell (Juliette Low organized the Girl Scouts in America about a decade later). Other groups in England included the Church Lads' Brigade, the Boys' Brigade, and the Cadet Corps. All of these groups had as their mandate to instill in children moral fortitude and good citizenship by means of -- to use a more modern coinage -- fun. Like his compatriot Cecil Rhodes and the American President Theodore Roosevelt, Robert Baden-Powell advocated with nearly religious zeal the connection between the sound body and the sound mind as the foundation for the good citizen (the connection between strength of body and strength of mind had its roots in the "muscular Christianity" advocated by Charles Kingsley, the author of the 1862 children's classic The Water Babies). Boy Scouts would fish, swim, hunt, and participate in other forms of sport and outdoor training, while Girl Guides (and their American counterparts) would do calisthenics and play vigorous outdoor games (and also learn the domestic skills of cooking and sewing). In Baden-Powell's scheme, the confidence they gathered from these activities as well as the sense of camaraderie they developed from them would foster spirited young people equipped to take on the responsibilities of citizenship and family. Baden-Powell's scouting movements were typical in many ways of Victorian and Edwardian children's literature, combining as they did fun and amusement with a robust sense of morality. For even in the most adventurous of the adventure stories so popular with children at this time, pluck is not a substitute for moral rectitude; rather, it is a symptom of it. Empire Day: For Queen (or King) and Country Some of the proponents of Scouts-like organizations emphasized the seriousness of the child's moral duty to country and to family over the benefits of play, and in this we see a rift open in what could be called the "golden age of children." Empire Day had been founded by Mrs. Clementina Fessenden, a Canadian, in 1897, with the idea that celebrations would take place each year on Queen Victoria's birthday, May 24. Empire Day would be marked by children throughout the Empire with plays, parades, and concerts which would celebrate Queen Victoria and her Empire. Empire Day spawned the Empire Movement which, by 1911 -- the last year of Edward VII's reign -- was under the auspices of Lord Meath, also the founder of the Lads' Drill Association in England. The goal of the Empire Movement was, in the words of Lord Meath, "to promote the systematic training of children in all virtues which conduce to the creation of good citizens." Preeminent among these virtues were the "watchwords of the Empire Movement: Responsibility, Sympathy, Duty, and Self-sacrifice." Even if the parades and drills were fun in the same way that Baden-Powell's outdoor games were fun, there was at best a seriousness of purpose and at worst a militarism to Empire Day celebrations that even the war hero Baden-Powell had never articulated so baldly. These "watchwords of the Empire Movement" -- indeed, the watchwords of the Empire itself -- were in tone a far cry from the freedom and fantasy laid out in books like Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island (1883) and Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden (1911). Fantasy and Freedom The insistence of Edwardian children's literature on fantasy and freedom -- best exemplified by J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan (1902), Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows (1908), and The Secret Garden -- begins to make another kind of sense in light of children's imperial movements. If Alice in Wonderland had opened up the world of fantasy as a pleasurable alternative to the "dull reality" faced by girls and boys in middle-class Victorian homes, then these later classic works open up worlds of fantasy that are effectively retreats from the more clearly defined "dull reality" of the young citizen's responsibility and restraint. In such a context, Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh, a series of stories and poems which hold on to Edwardian fantasy long after the Edwardian age has ended, is an even more powerful fantasy. Winnie-the-Pooh reminds us of the fantasy of childhood that existed in England and America before World War I would disillusion and destroy a generation raised on stories of liberty and adventure. Abby Wolf is a Lecturer in the History and Literature program at Harvard University.