ABSTRACT
The proliferation of readers for moral and educative fiction for the young, for whom the old style of Sunday school tract was an inadequate provision, was dealt with in the 1860s and 1870s by the development of kinds of fiction for specific sections of the juvenile market. The outlets for such books were multiplying, and the expectations of the purchasers were much more various than those of earlier generations of Sunday school superintendants and philanthropic gentry. Publishers and writers found a way of supplying them all by catering for readers not by religious or social categories, for these were becoming too numerous, but by the simpler criterion of sex. The change was of course not complete, for old-fashioned tracts remained, often thought of as one of several kinds of girls’ books, and in publications for boys class distinctions remained in, for example, the range of provision of non-fiction; but the boy’s story, from the 1860s onwards, was a genre which commanded a readership from ragged school to country house.
