ABSTRACT
Recent critical attention has been paid to Agnes Strickland’s significance as a historian and to Susanna Strickland’s role as a chronicler of Canadian settlement. But the activities of the two sisters and their siblings as authors of children’s books have received less attention. Elizabeth, Agnes, Jane Margaret, Catherine, and Susanna Strickland wrote over sixty works for children in the 1810s and 1820s. Jane Margaret’s biography of her sister Agnes says they “found in juvenile works the means of obtaining a little ready money.” Michael Peterman suggests that the family recognised the potential of two markets simultaneously: “gift-book annuals” and “short readable stories for children and adolescents.” Jackie C. Horne describes such works as occupying a lacuna in the critical historiography of children’s literature. This article uses the Strickland family as a means of characterising this literature: moral but at the same time rational and factual; sympathetic to the perspective of the child and intent on the construction of affective family relationships; concerned with civility and external behaviour rather than interiority; intensely, scientifically aware of the natural world in all its detail and pedagogical potential; finding in the human world a focus for compassion and social action.
