ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with development of kinds of fiction books for specific sections of the juvenile market. The book's first attraction is that although it begins with the hero's birth and childhood, and centres upon his life at the ages of 16 and 17, it is clearly not a children's book. Pre-eminent among these books, occupying a special place in the ancestry of the boys' story, was Robinson Crusoe. Its continued popularity after the strictly doctrinaire period had gone by was founded on its fictional appeal. The most outstanding signpost is that of the career, beliefs and influence of Arnold of Rugby, and the transformation that his ideas underwent as they were turned into a code of practice for mid- and late Victorian schooling. William Henry Giles Kingston, who wrote over a hundred books for boys between 1850 and 1880. Kingston handles a romance story as a captured myth, as other evangelical writers do, to reinforce Christian belief.
