ABSTRACT
It is the business of this book to describe and to attempt to evaluate the flood of fiction for children which was written during the nineteenth century with the intention of conveying moral instruction. It will deal as far as possible with the questions of who wrote such books and why, who published them, who sold and who bought them, whether anyone read them and, if so, what they learnt. Certain preliminaries are necessary for such an investigation, for it is fraught with difficulties of definition and of methods of analysis. If these tales are to be seen in proportion, they must be set against the background of educational and publishing history which gave rise to them; but such a presupposition immediately raises questions about literary evaluation and the nature of appropriate analysis. While it is to be hoped that the methods employed will explain and justify themselves in operation, the problems presented will perhaps be the clearer for being set out in advance, with an indication of the means which have been employed to tackle them.
