Holiday faces! Aye, they are bright, shining, and beautiful as dewdrops glistening in the morning’s splendour—stars sparkling in a clear midnight sky—flowers lit up by the summer’s sun. It makes the heart of poor old PETER PARLEY glad when he sees them—whether they belong to young or old, to rich or to poor, it is one of my chief delights. I do assure you, my young friends, that a good deal of my parleying has to do with HOLIDAY FACES. I see them again and again, year after year, and they make me feel young again; and, like the old rustic of the Suffolk poet, Bloomfield, I am often ready[viii] to jump with joy when I see the cabs and coaches, post-chaises and omnibuses, crowded, inside and outside, with school children, going home for the Holidays. Old as I am growing, I still feel that I belong to the order of light hearts and merry looks—to the heraldry of smiling faces—and my escutcheon is charged with “nods and becks, and wreathed smiles.”Hurrah, then, for the Holidays, say I! Be cheerful, my young friends—not more for the sake of being merry, than for the sake of being serious again at the proper time. Unbend the bow and loosen the string, that both string and bow may have more force when again brought into action! Make the air ring then, I say, with the Holiday Cheer of Merry Christmas time! Sing, and skip, and dance, and play, like “lambkins by the hill side,” and let love reign in all your hearts, a perpetual sunshine, from year to year, and from youth to age, until you are as old as your ever sincere

Virtually every famous nineteenth-century writer (Harriet Beecher Stowe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson)— and many not so famous—wrote literature for children; many contributed regularly to children’s periodicals, and many entered the field of nature writing, responding to and forwarding the century’s huge social and cultural changes. Appreciating America’s unique natural wonders dovetailed with children’s growth as citizens, but children’s journals often exceeded a pedagogical purpose, intending also to entertain and delight. Though these volumes aimed at a relatively conservative and mostly white, middle-class, and affluent audience, some selections allowed both children and their parents room for imaginative escape from restrictive social norms. Covering a period that initially regarded children’s natural bodies as laboring resources, Stronger, Truer, Bolder traces the shifting pedagogical impulse surrounding nature and the environment through the transformations that included America’s nineteenth century emergence as an industrial power. Karen L. Kilcup shows how children’s literature mirrored those changes in various ways. In its earliest incarnations, it taught children (and their parents) facts about the natural world and about proper behavior vis-à-vis both human and nonhuman others. More significantly, as periodical writing for children advanced, this literature increasingly promoted children’s environmental agency and envisioned their potential influence on concerns ranging from animal rights and interspecies equity to conservation and environmental justice. Such understanding of and engagement with nature not only propelled children toward ethical adulthood but also formed a foundation for responsible American citizenship.

Speaking to today's fascinations and anxieties surrounding artificial intelligence, this multidisciplinary collection is the first to examine the widespread Victorian interest in human and mechanical automata. This title is part of the Flip it Open programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

The last thirty years have witnessed one of the most fertile periods in the history of children's books. A fascinating reference guide to the world of children's literature, this volume covers every genre from fairy tales to chapbooks; school stories to science fiction; comics to children's hymns