ABSTRACT
In Germany, as in England and France, children's literature in the modern sense begins only in the eighteenth century. A separate market for literature aimed at children and young people arose, and was carefully watched by the educational and, to some extent, by the literary community. From the mid-century on, the liberal educational ideas of John Locke were influential. They led to greater adaptation of the material to the child's grasp, but development of the intellect and mediation of knowledge were still expected to begin at an early age. Into the 1770s children's literature was dominated by compendia and encyclopaedic works, packed with facts and omitting no area of knowledge; there was no feel for child-friendly contents. Most of the corpus consisted of textbooks for private tuition, spiced with fables and moral exemplary tales. Many such works were translations from the French; the most outstanding German work is Johann Peter Miller's (1725–1789) Historischmoralische Schilderungen zur Bildung eines edlen Herzens in der Jugend [Improving Tales to Edify a Noble Heart in Youth, 5 vols, 1753– 1764].
