ABSTRACT
Contemporary children’s fiction, by men or women writers, has inherited more from the nineteenth-century domestic and family classics by women than it has from the ‘bloods’ and adventure stories by men like Deborah Stevenson, Frederick Marryat or R. M. Ballantyne. Radical or Evangelical, women writers of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England wrote both for children and adults in order to improve the lot of women and the working classes. Changes in the concepts of women and of femininity in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were all making woman’s role more private and domestic, and making women economic dependants of their husbands. Lissa Paul has observed that children’s literature and women in history have shared the same forms of physical, economic and linguistic entrapment. The Cheap Repository Tracts were sold in their thousands every week, for one penny; in one year over two million were bought and distributed to the poor by the well-to-do.
