ABSTRACT
Books for children and reading for the poor became closely-linked and hotly-contended issues. The outburst of enthusiasm for education, therefore, was inspired by no simple desire to spread the art of reading. The revolutionary spirit which broke out in France was still shaking the European nations, and threatened to overthrow the thrones of princes, and to uproot all public order. One of the longest-lived and most influential was the Religious Tract Society (RTS), which became the foremost nineteenth-century institutional publisher of children's fiction. A parallel, though rather slower, development took place in the publications of Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge (SPCK). At the beginning of the century, the older society had no sense of urgency about persuading the new readers to buy good books, for they had a captive audience and an assured sale for their children's publications. In 1832, James Nisbet's list shows how far ahead of the religious societies commercial publishers were.
