The Enlightened Child: Eighteenth-Century Literature for Children

The eighteenth-century texts featured in this anthology were among the first to be written and published expressly for English speaking children. Under the widely acknowledged influence of John Locke's and Jean-Jacques Rousseau's educational philosophies, children's literature emerged as a fundamental genre to reform society through the construction of enlightened, liberal, rational and virtuous citizens, both male and female. John Newbery, Sarah Fielding, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Thomas Day, Dorothy Kilner, Sarah Trimmer, and Maria Edgeworth fused instruction with amusement in their stories, and created a fascinating catalog aimed at inculcating the new bourgeois values of the rising middle classes, and at fostering new ethical, economic, social, cultural and political values through seemingly innocent and innocuous writing.