This book provides a wealth of fascinating information about many significant and lesser-known nineteenth-century Christian authors, mostly women, who were motivated to write material specifically for children’s spiritual edification because of their personal faith. It explores three prevalent theological and controversial doctrines of the period, namely Soteriology, Biblical Authority and Eschatology, in relation to children’s specifically engendered Christian literature. It traces the ecclesiastical networks and affiliations across the theological spectrum of Evangelical authors, publishers, theologians, clergy and scholars of the period. An unprecedented deluge of Evangelical literature was produced for millions of Sunday School children in the nineteenth century, resulting in one of its most prolific and profitable forms of publishing. It expanded into a vast industry whose magnitude, scope and scale is discussed throughout this book. Rather than dismissing Evangelical children’s literature as simplistic, formulaic, moral didacticism, this book argues that, in attempting to convert the mass reading public, nineteenth-century authors and publishers developed a complex, highly competitive genre of children’s literature to promote their particular theologies, faith and churchmanships, and to ultimately save the nation.

The use of school life as a closed narrative environment is well documented, and modern examples such as Malory Towers and Harry Potter show the genre’s continued appeal. While there have been several histories of the school story, especially in children’s literature, almost all of them take as their starting point Tom Brown’s Schooldays. Although occasionally acknowledged in passing, there has never been a complete study of earlier school stories, or of other fictional portrayals of school life before the middle of the eighteenth century. In Before Tom Brown, Robert Kirkpatrick traces the roots of the school story back to 2500BC, when school life was a feature of Sumerian, Egyptian and Graeco-Roman texts written as teaching aids for children. From Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales to Shakesperean comedies, he explores for the first time the use of school dialogues in the classroom, in print and on stage, and presents new evidence that the first school novel appeared in 1607. Finally, he examines the role of the school story in the broader development of the novel as the genre became established through the eighteenth century. Readers will be rewarded with a whole new perspective on the history of children’s literature.

How did the early Evangelicals pass on their beliefs to their children? This book is a study of a strangely neglected part of Evangelical history. But it is not merely, nor even especially, a historian's book - it is of general interest, absorbingly so. The reader is plunged into the child's world of the late eighteenth century, a world both surprisingly familiar and terrifyingly unknown. Their home life is examined, their schools and Sunday Schools, the sermons preached for them, the books and tracts and magazines they read, the diaries they wrote. Much of the atmosphere is death-haunted and repellent, entirely foreign to educational thought today. And yet ... the final proof of the efficacy of any system must be its fruits. Actual case-histories are considered, and conclusions attempted. The power of Evangelicalism must have vanished from the earth in a generation, had the fathers not nurtured the children, believing devoutly in their own educational abilities. Yet their many detractors have called them bigots, fanatics, fools and madmen. How fair is this judgment? And for today, how much of those first beliefs do we retain? What is our debt to those Evangelical fathers? A fascinating piece of social history is unfolded - often grim, even macabre, sometimes pathetic, occasionally gay but never, never dull.