2 - Nuts, Flies, Thimbles, and Thumbs

Summary

In their efforts to establish children’s literature as a distinct genre, eighteenth-century writers and publishers tailored their texts to the unique needs of young readers. This chapter considers how these negotiations reflect different attitudes towards children’s small bodies, limited life experience, and comparatively narrow understandings when modern conceptions of childhood were still developing. Though books for young people needed to be shorter and more syntactically straightforward than those written for adults, children’s authors were adamant that their works should not be viewed as inferior. Embracing the concept of multum in parvo (much in little), figures such as John Newbery, Anna Letitia Barbauld, and Ellenor Fenn demonstrated that the simplicity of children’s literature was the product of complex aesthetic, pedagogical, and commercial underpinnings. Early children’s books regularly offered lessons in the subjectivity and mutability of scale, framing young readers as “little giants” whose unruly growth sent them skyrocketing, showing how childish egoism produced an overinflated sense of self, or using Tom Thumb as a model for how greatness might reside within littleness. This chapter also attends to the style of children’s literature, exploring stories written in words of one syllable and short forms such as fables and couplets.