ABSTRACT
In terms of content, this period was transitional as well. It saw the reissuing of old favourites like La Fontaine’s fables and Fénelon’s Les Aventures de Télémaque, and the continuing popularity of the works of Arnaud Berquin and Mme de Genlis. In Martyn Lyons’s analysis of best-sellers from 1811 to 1830, the Abbé Barthélemy, Fénelon, La Fontaine, and Perrault are regularly at the top of, or high on, the lists.4 Many of these were now illustrated editions: Mme Le Prince de Beaumont’s Magasin des enfans appeared in 1804; Fénelon’s Les Aventures de Télémaque in 1818 and 1821, with engravings of some of the most dramatic moments in the text (like Télémaque’s descent to hell and the transformation of Mentor into Minerva); and compilations of Berquin’s tales in 1819 and 1830-34, the latter, titled L’Ami de la jeunesse, with a great number of images. e rst editions especially for children of Perrault’s fairy tales and La Fontaine’s fables, abridged and illustrated, were published aer 1800. Although fairy tales did not feature in the catalogues of prize and gi books, those by Mme d’Aulnoy and Perrault still regularly appeared in editions from the Bibliothèque Bleue, sometimes with confused attributions, and thus continued to enchant children, whether encountered on the printed page or through oral rendition by parent or nursemaid, as George Sand, born in 1804, testies in her Histoire de ma vie.5 ere was also, more signicantly, an explosion of new works aer 1800 that exploited text and image in diverse ways and sought to speak directly to young readers in language appropriate
to their age, including books for the very young or that oered a series of graduated passages for the less or more condent reader, inuenced by contemporary English writers like Laetitia Barbauld.6 e new editions of old works and the proliferation of writers-a large number of them women-producing new books for a juvenile audience were dramatically changing the face of children’s literature. Although many new works adhering for the most part to familiar formats and content were dull and derivative, others promoted a new realism in the depiction of everyday life that foreshadowed the ‘golden age’ of juvenile books in the mid-to late nineteenth century. ese writers are far too numerous to be discussed extensively here and, in many cases, their works have now virtually disappeared. is chapter oers an overview of the types of books published before 1830 and considers some of the most successful and popular works of the day.7
