ABSTRACT
This book starts from the premise that the training and management of children was a focal point for a number of middle-class ideological concerns in late eighteenth-century England. Children's reading and education was more closely scrutinized and took on a greater urgency in this period than ever before, as parents, writers, and pedagogues saw the conditioning of the rising generation as essential to creating and sustaining a new social and class order with the middle classes at its moral and productive centre. The widely diverging opinions of individuals and groups within the middle ranks of English society on such matters as religion, the monarchy, civil society, and the duties of women were, to a large extent, superseded by issues of class, social, and pedagogical reform. Rationalists and Evangelicals, republicans and monarchists, proponents and opponents of expanded women's rights found some agreement on what children needed to know and how they should behave. They all sought to expunge vicious plebeian influences from the nursery environment and to impart such virtues as industry, obedience, disdain for finery, and charity to animals and the deserving poor. Concern over the state of their young fostered in the middle classes an ideological cohesion that would, by the nineteenth century, allow for the creation of a new middle-class form of fantasy literature for children.
