The 'golden age' of children's literature in the late 19th and early
20th century coincided with a boom in the production and trade of
commodities. The first book-length study to situate children's
literature within the consumer culture of this period, British
Children's Literature and Material Culture explores the intersection of
children's books, consumerism and the representation of commodities
within British children's literature. In tracing the role of objects in
key texts from the turn of the century, Jane Suzanne Carroll uncovers
the connections between these fictional objects and the real objects
that child consumers bought, used, cherished, broke, and threw away.
Beginning with the Great Exhibition of 1851, this book takes stock of
the changing attitudes towards consumer culture - a movement from
celebration to suspicion - to demonstrate that children's literature was
a key consumer product, one that influenced young people's views of and
relationships with other kinds of commodities.
Drawing on a wide spectrum of well-known and less familiar texts from
Britain, this book examines works from Lewis Carroll's Through the
Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There and E. Nesbit's Five
Children & It to Christina Rossetti's Speaking Likenesses and Mary
Louisa Molesworth's The Cuckoo Clock. Placing children's fiction
alongside historical documents, shop catalogues, lost property records,
and advertisements, Carroll provides fresh critical insight into
children's relationships with material culture and reveals that even the
most fantastic texts had roots in the ordinary, everyday things.
