ABSTRACT
During the years of the July Monarchy (1830-48) and inuenced by Louis-Philippe’s more informal lifestyle and the devotion of the royal parents for their children, the ideal of family life had taken a strong hold on the public imagination and become the keystone of bourgeois society. e care and education of children and the development of the infant personality became a matter of great interest. is preoccupation with the family and the child’s role in it continued in the Second Empire under Napoleon III (1852-70), who with his wife, the Empress Eugénie, cultivated an image of family intimacy.1 e same phenomenon occurred in Britain, of course, where prints of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert playing with their ospring adorned the walls of many homes. It is this period from 1850 onwards, a period noted for its economic prosperity, civic improvement, and bourgeois self-assurance, that can be regarded as the most fruitful in the development of children’s literature in the nineteenth century.2
