The Little Professor

A "best books for children" list, ca. 1900

At the turn of the twentieth century, the Daily Mail polled readers to find the one hundred most-recommended books for children.  On January 25, 1900 (iss. 16798, p. 6), they ran the results, from votes by 987 respondents.  Here are the top ten:

  1. Robinson Crusoe
  2. Andersen's Fairy Tales
  3. Alice in Wonderland
  4. Tom Brown's Schooldays
  5. Pilgrim's Progress
  6. Grimm's Fairy Tales
  7. Little Women
  8. Arabian Nights
  9. Little Lord Fauntleroy
  10. Alice through the Looking-Glass

Before going on, it's interesting to compare this list to more recent ones from the NEA (which has only Little Women in common) and this list with a smaller voter sample (which has, again, Little Women in common, along with the Alice books). 

As historians of children lit will agree, in the intervening 100+ years, the definition of "children's literature" has obviously changed--in fact, the poll itself registers this problem, as "children" clearly fall anywhere from six to eighteen.  Although many of the books in the top ten might no longer make a contemporary librarian's own list for kids, children and YA continue to read the fairy tale collections, Little Women, and Alice.  And as there are still numerous editions of Robinson Crusoe in print--um, excluding The Eerie Adventures of the Lycanthrope Robinson Crusoe (when is this fad going to get staked through the heart/shot with a silver bullet, exactly?)--several somebodies are obviously reading the novel, although children may be getting a modernized version.  As, to be fair, they likely would have in the nineteenth century.  LLF is still in print, but my sense is that young readers more usually get The Secret Garden or A Little Princess (yes? no?).   Presumably, the Arabian Nights was an (ahem) abridged/bowdlerized edition, as it would be now.   To my knowledge, children of any age no longer venture near Tom Brown's Schooldays, and in my thirteen-or-so years of teaching, no student has ever heard of The Pilgrim's Progress (one of the books I regularly warn English majors that they must read, along with Paradise Lost, the Bible, and Shakespeare's plays). 

Here are some additional items of note:

  • #13 on the list was Uncle Tom's Cabin, which college-age students now have been known to find hard going.
  • What we now consider great works of classic children's/YA adult were already considered so by 1900.  Hence the presence of Treasure Island, The Swiss Family Robinson, the Jungle Books, Tanglewood Tales, Aesop's Fables, Black Beauty, Coral Island, Uncle Remus, Round the World in Eighty Days, and Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea.
  • Historians of children's literature have frequently noted how works in some genres, especially adventure and historical fiction, were "downgraded" from adult to children's lit over the course of the nineteenth century.  Thus, we have Cervantes' Don Quixote, Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Cooper's Last of the Mohicans (another book frequently impenetrable to modern students), Longfellow's poetry, and, most dramatically, Walter Scott's poetry, Quentin Durward, Kenilworth, The Talisman (even full-blown academics rarely read The Talisman...), and, of course, Ivanhoe (single-handedly responsible for making adults of my parents' generation loathe Scott).  
  • By 1900, the "canonical" works of Christian children's fiction seem to be Jessica's First Prayer (which was also used to evangelize adults), Ministering Children, A Peep behind the Scenes, Christie's Old Organ, The Wide Wide World, Queechy, Chronicles of the Schonberg-Cotta Family, and several novels by Charlotte Yonge (Heir of Redclyffe, Daisy Chain, and some others). A number of these texts had crossover adult audiences, especially Yonge's work and Chronicles.  
  • I think it's safe to say that nobody recommends Macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rome for children's reading nowadays...nor, indeed, for adult reading.
  • There are six recommendations from Dickens--David Copperfield, Pickwick, A Christmas Carol, The Old Curiosity Shop, the Christmas Books (which would have included A Christmas Carol), and A Child's History of England.  Perhaps in these post-Potter days, parents and teachers might hand an adolescent 900 pages of Dickens, but somehow...
  • Other popular novelists then who appear to have drifted out of consciousness: Charles Kingsley (Westward Ho!, Hereward the Wake, Waterbabies, Heroes) and Capt. Marryat (Masterman Ready, Peter Simple). 
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