The Evolution of Children's Literature

Schoolbooks were developed primarily to educate, teach morality, and assist in children's socialization. Books for children's education preceded the development of children's literature for pleasure. Charles Perrault and Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm wrote tales to caution children about the perils and consequences of inappropriate behavior.

Literature intended specifically for children did not develop until the mid-seventeenth century. Prior to that time children were perceived as miniature adults or as less than human, as typified by Michel de Montaigne, the sixteenth-century French humanist and essayist. In Off with Their Heads! (1992), Maria Tatar, a professor of Germanic languages and literature at Harvard University, notes that early children's literature had an unusually cruel and coercive streak. Early books were often written to frighten children into behaving as parents wished. Two approaches predominated: cautionary tales and exemplary tales. In cautionary tales the protagonist was either killed or made perpetually miserable for having disobeyed. Stories of exemplary behavior also had a strange way of ending at the deathbeds of their protagonists.

John Amos Comenius's 1658 Latin schoolbook A World of Things Obvious to the Senses Drawn in Pictures was the first picture book for children and the first to recognize that children needed their own literature. In 1744 John Newbery wrote A Little Pretty Pocket Book for children. Although other books for children had been published earlier, this book is credited as the start of English children's literature because this book was meant to entertain rather than educate. Newbery is recognized as the first serious publisher of children's literature.

Between the 1920s and the 1970s incidents of dying and death were removed or glossed over in children's reading material. Concurrently, religious material was also removed from children's schoolbooks. Only since the late 1970s and early 1980s has this tendency begun to reverse. Children's books of the twenty-first century frequently deal with feelings, divorce, sex, and death. Religion is still taboo in schoolbooks—in contrast to colonial America when ministers wrote many of the schoolbooks and the local minister often oversaw the school. The town school was considered an appropriate place for children to be taught not only their letters but also religion.