COVE

Maria Edgeworth, one of the most well-known didactic writers, contributed greatly to European literature, and her work is informed by the doctrine of sin.  In comparison to the other didactic strongholds found in the Victorian nursery, Edgeworth, unlike James Janeway and Mary Martha Sherwood, did not write to scare children into obedience. Edgeworth is similar to Isaac Watts in her gentle yet instructive stories that educate, thus carrying messages found in Watts's poems into fiction.   Nonetheless, she maintained a reputation as an important didactic children's writer who focused on...

Lewis Carroll's beloved Alice's Adventures in Wonderland  (1865) initiated a shift in children's literature from didacticism to entertainment. Carroll's use of poetry throughout his book ironically reinforces the didactic ideals of Victorian writers, while providing whimsy and humor for young readers and adults alike. Carroll places his parodies in conversations among characters and uses their reactions as a way to still enforce their value to young children as lessons to learn from. By parodying the poems of didactic writers such as Isaac Watts and Robert Southey, Carroll keeps their...

An anonymous reviewer of Just So Stories notes in a 1903 issue of The Atlantic :  "It was only a century ago, as everybody remembers, that literary sucklings were nurtured on the Bible, Pilgrim's Progress, Paradise Lost, and Fox's Book of Martyrs" (The Atlantic). Didactic texts like these were given to children to instruct them and show them right from wrong. Such harsh and sometimes brutal texts are very different from the entertaining and amusing books and stories that emerged in the later nineteenth century that we read to children today.  Rudyard Kipling's ...

Louisa May Alcott was a successful American novelist during the 19th century. While Alcott penned many stories during her career, she is most fondly remembered for her novel Little Women (1868, 1869), which tells the story of the four March sisters as they come of age in Concord, Massachusetts during the Civil War. The tale of Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy March has become an American classic.  Little Women is so distinctive and beloved because Alcott takes a romanticized view of childhood and combines it with the complex realities of life to create an emotional, entertaining, and thought-...

The Little House on the Prairie books are based on Wilder's childhood on the American frontier and follow the fictionalized Ingalls family as they move from Missouri to Kansas to Wisconsin. Her stories provide a rich and compelling contrast to the Victorian ideals of the late 19th century and instead embrace the romanticization of the frontier. Her narrative strays far from the time's notions of ideal girlhood as the Ingalls faced adventures and battles for survival, effectively establishing the piece as a turning point in gender neutral literature and marking a transition to the...

The legacy of the elephant in a green suit began as an entertaining bedtime story from two parents for their children. The tender care, delight, and leisure the story cultivates is a far cry from early didactic children's literature and represents the evolved benevolent intentions for the genre. When Cécile de Brunhoff thought up the story and Jean de Brunhoff illustrated its pictures, the two didn't plan for their gift to nurture and entertain thousands of children other than their own. But, that's exactly what it grew to do. The consequences of the proliferation of the story and its less...

Food is a present theme in children’s literature throughout the centuries, often symbolized as being either a treat or a warning to its consumers. Food appears in the Bible, such as the story of Adam and Eve in Genesis, didactic texts of the nineteenth century, and twentieth-century entertaining children’s novels. The theme of food as a treat or a warning appears in many authors’ and artists' works depicted in this case; Titian, Mary Martha Sherwood, Lewis Carroll, Beatrix Potter, and Roald Dahl each address the topic in significantly different ways but with surprising...

Violence has changed in literature for children. Whereas didactic texts  of the 17th, 18th, and early 19th centuries scare children, entertaining texts of the mid-to-late 19 century and beyond undercut violence and mock it.  Early didactic texts were designed to reflect the ideals of the “child of sin.” This was the notion that all children were inherently sinful, and the only way to dispel this sinful child was to scare children into obedience by showing violence towards wicked or wayward children in the books given to them like Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) and The Fairchild Family...