ABSTRACT
Bearing in mind the huge popularity of the Robin Hood legend over several centuries, the number of books presenting his life and adventures for young readers in the nineteenth century is surprisingly low.2 At the beginning of the century, there was little apart from prose renderings of the old ballads in chapbook form. In 1804 Benjamin Tabart brought out a 40-page prose version, followed by William Darton’s children’s story in 1818.3 The popularity of Scott’s Ivanhoe (1819) prompted Longman to issue a new edition of Joseph Ritson’s great late eighteenth-century collection of the Robin Hood ballads in 1820, specifically designed as ‘a book which could with propriety be put into the hands of young persons’.4 More than 60 years later Routledge was to revive Ritson for the ‘reward’ and ‘prize’ market.5 The first children’s novel seems to have been Robin Hood and His Merry Foresters (1841), appearing under the pseudonym ‘Stephen Percy’ (i.e. Joseph Cundall), a book that saw numerous reprints in England and America up to the end of the century.6 It was a fairly short book, intended for young children. The first substantial novel for boy readers, written by John B. Marsh, came out a quarter of a century later, in
1865.7 And in 1883 an innovative American version of the legend by Howard Pyle was published in London in a limited edition.8 Apart from these publications, Robin Hood books for juvenile readers prior to the Edwardian era are puzzlingly few and far between.
