ABSTRACT
Children’s fi ction has always crossed over to diff erent age-groups in the sense that, historically, it has nearly always been written and published by adults, and purchased by adults for children. Before the invention of a distinct market for children’s literature in the mid-eighteenth century, adult texts regularly crossed to child readerships. Such crossings were oft en facilitated by adaptation, abridgement and illustration. Bunyan’s Th e Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Swift ’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) were adapted for children very soon aft er they were fi rst published for adults, and they have retained their place amongst children’s books until the present day. Adult fi ction has not ceased to cross over to child readers, and nineteenthcentury realist fi ction by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, the Brontës and Jane Austen, for example, can all be found shelved in the older children’s sections of bookshops and libraries today. But traffi c moving in the other direction, from child to adult readers, is historically much more unusual, and the sheer scale of the fl ow of traffi c in this direction which took place in the millennial decade is unprecedented in British publishing history.
