ABSTRACT
The writers who specialised in Rewards did so, generally, out of a mixture of motives: a majority of them were women, often spinsters, and for them writing children’s moral tales offered a respectable, even feminine occupation less tedious and cramping than the limited round of female occupations, and it satisfied the pressing need felt by very many to be of use in the world, in a social and charitable sense; it also brought in a little money, if that were needed. Most of the individuals one can distinguish in this crowd turn out to have some sort of experience of books beyond the average, but few had an education comparable to the schooling which put most educated men of the period in possession of the classical heritage. Their work, therefore, while it is often very reliant upon and imitative of other writers, forms a distinct, demotic tradition outside the high literary culture, founded upon a very few models endlessly perpetuated, which are either contributed by one or other of the popular traditions, or invented or imported by the few strongest writers working within the genre. These
leading, influential individuals were often called to their work by deep feeling, partaking of the second wave of the Evangelical movement, which blended a renewed religious conviction with that strong concern for human suffering which was the hallmark of right feeling in the 1840s. An examination of their writing should reveal the dominant patterns of the Reward tale, and show both their sources in traditional, popular and contemporary story-telling traditions, and their power as models for the later generations of such writers.
