ABSTRACT
Even when presented as a tool to teach proper manners, morals, and mores, adventure fictions, including robinsonades, all fell under the suspect generic category “novel.” And fears of the noxious effects of novel reading on the young (in particular, on girls) expressed in eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century conduct books continued far into the nineteenth century. For the children of parents still alive to the cautionary words of James Fordyce, John Gregory, Lady Sarah Pennington, Hester Chapone, Hannah More, Jane West and others who cautioned parents against letting their children read fiction, “amusement” would have to be gleaned from a more acceptable genre. For such children, literary adventure might still be found in a type of literature granted much higher status than that given to the novel during the opening decades of the nineteenth century: the genre of history.
