ABSTRACT
The modern history of children's books in Britain is commonly regarded as beginning in the 1740s, when John Newbery opened a shop in London and began to publish and sell books for ‘little masters and misses’. The first serious historian of the subject, Harvey Darton, wrote in Children's Books in England of ‘Newbery the Conqueror’, and (with tongue firmly in cheek) described the year 1744, in which Newbery published his first title, A Little Pretty Pocket-Book, as ‘a date comparable to the 1066 of the older histories’.
