I have always been a reader; I have read at every stage of my life, and there has never been a time when reading was not my greatest joy. And yet I cannot pretend that the reading I have done in my adult years matches in its impact on my soul the reading I did as a child. I still believe in stories. I still forget myself when I am in the middle of a good book. Yet it is not the same. Books are, for me, it must be said, the most important thing; what I cannot forget is that there was a time when they were at once more banal and more essential than that. When I was a child, books were everything. And so there is in me, always, a nostalgic yearning for the lost pleasure of books. It is not a yearning that one ever expects to be fulfilled. — Anne Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale (2006), 32

The Relation of Children's Literature to Victorian Conceptions of Childhood

The Genres of Children's Literature

Modes of Publication

The History of Children's Literature

Theme and Subject

Victorian Authors of Children's Fiction

Children's Literature and Gender

Related material

Resources


Last modified 12 January 2016