The concept of childhood is relatively new in the history of humanity, at least in “western” culture. Only around 400 years ago the world considered children to be incomplete adults. The idea that children needed particular attention and instruction from adults to achieve successful adulthood started to develop with the onset of the industrial revolution. Experts credit English philosopher John Locke and French thinker Jean Jacques Rousseau as describing and defining childhood in the way we now know it today.
Grace Moore, a lecturer in English and Theatre Studies, and a researcher in the Centre for the History of Emotions, is curator of a new exhibition at the University of Melbourne which draws on the Baillieu Library’s large collection of children’s literature.
Dr Moore says some researchers identify A little pretty pocket-book, published by John Newbery in 1744, as the first book created in English specifically for children.
“This lovely little volume sought to both entertain and instruct its young readers, following Locke’s educational model,” she says.
Dr Moore says the cheap paper, more efficient printing techniques and the affluent middle class that emerged with industrialism allowed the idea of childhood to develop.
“There was a growing recognition that an infant’s early years should be characterised by learning through play,” she says, “while books such as Rousseau’s Émile (1762) emphasised the key role of play in helping children to think independently and to understand the world around them.
“As a result, privileged children were encouraged to relish their early years, to draw upon their imaginations, and enter a world of fantasy.”
Dr Moore says the exhibition – called Reading Adventures – uses the theme of adventure because of the genre’s prevalence in children’s literature over the centuries, but also because it demonstrates the way books for children were used to transmit ideas about the world and people’s roles in society.
Military, naval and chivalric stories are found among the earliest books for children, but the growth of the British empire – particularly after 1870 – cemented adventure as a central theme of interest for children, according to Dr Moore.
“The horizons for adventure writers in terms of their settings were broadened, while at the same time new markets appeared in settler colonies of readers whose cultural ties to the ‘mother country’ remained important to them.”
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