Victorian childhood fiction ?

[SkippyjonJones]

My dd is doing Victorians at school and we have been asked to encourage our children to read fiction about Victorian childhood. Can anybody help with ideas ? We have got Mill Girl so far.

George Macdonald was a huge inspiration for Enid Blyton - secret rooms, grottoes, passages etc.

Penelope Farmer, Charlotte Sometimes. Lovely time-travel book set partly in this period.

Well, following this thread I got the London Child of the 1870s out of the library & have been reading it to dd at bedtimes (two birds with one stone & all that - have been looking for another enjoyable-to-me-but-no-tense-bits book for ages :) ). She loves it - and I can now report that at least in her family the children read:

on Sundays - Tom Brown/Robinson Crusoe/Hans Andersen stories/Pilgrims Progress, but not Walter Scott nor any novel not listed above

More generally (and when younger, I presume) a story called Rosy's Voyage Round the World, with a full page illustration for each adventure, The Little Gypsy (also illustrated), Alice in Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass.

She also says that they had plenty of illustrated books - but that colour illustrations were "very rare and highly prized"

Threelittleducks and Mistresssloppy, if I put the kettle on and bring cakes, can I also join your gang and sit happily chatting about children's literature? My dissertation was on Laura Ingalls Wilder, written back in the days when I still had a brain, so I could bring that and wear my intellectual face?

DD is also doing the Victorians and is reading 'Little Women' (her choice). She is 7 and I have no idea what she is getting out of it, but she's enjoying it and can recount the plot, so I'm leaving her to it. Mind you, I secretly think dd is a Victorian, having a brief sojourn in the C21st, so quite possibly she 'gets' that book more than I can possibly imagine! Perhaps I should ask her what she reads when she's in her real time and report back?

The Crown of Success by A.L.O.E.

'Midnight is a Place' by Joan Aiken. All about children working in a mill. Very good indeed.

My dds are currently trying abridged Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickelby - surprisingly readable, you can buy them on Amazon.

My dds do like stories of child abuse, orphans, 5-to-a-bed boarding schools with lots of dire punishments, brimstone and treacle, beatings and gruel.

Berlie Doherty? - "Street Child" is meant to be based on the true story of the philanthropist who established the Dr Barnados charity. I didn't really rate the book as a particularly good read, but teachers seem to like it, and it is pitched at the right level for children aged about 10. And how about her "Children of Winter" - she's not my favourite author though.

Or there's "Lyddie" by Katherine Paterson - opens in 1841 when she is a small child and charts her life in e.g. cotton mill etc - set in rural poverty in America, so wrong country, but a good book.

Maybe try The Lottie Project by Jaqueline Wilson. Depending on her age she might find it quite engaging?

and to listen to librivox.org/at-the-back-of-the-north-wind-by-george-macdonald/here

I have just found The Back of the North Wind free to read online if anyone else is interested as well

here

Thanks everyone what an amazing ammount of suggestions !

Hee hee hee. Feel free ladies

I would be very glad to happily chat away for a long long long time! Until your brains rotted and fell away and you needed new ones and they fell away....!!

Ah, 'tis the one thing I am so good at which is utterly useless in rl!

I think, perhaps, she needs her own forum?

Hmm, planning on focussing on children's lit for final degre project . Threelittleducks you say........

Threelittleducks one of the modules I'll be doing in my OU thingy for Eng Lit/Lang is about children's fiction. I shall be hunting you down at the time...

I love George MacDonald's Fairy Tales. Truly amazing. Yes, he was a pioneer, but not in the same way Carroll was. Possibly because of is religious standing/older generation. He did encourage Carroll.

Please please look at the work by J.M Barrie.
He did so much more than Peter Pan and writes so beautifully. He truly loved children too - the kind of man who would be labelled paedophile now probably because of his childlike mentality and ability to communicate with them (dissertation topic was based on this).
Little Bird, I think, is the name of the book that underlines this the most.

mistressploppy - I yearn for the day I can sit and chat away about stuff like this - it is my other child! If only I could get a job researching and writing about it, I woud be sooooo happy!!!

How about the Laura Ingalls Wilder books (Little House...)? She was writing about her life from around the 1870s onwards (she was born 1867). Again not Victorian exactly but the same period.

Tom Sawyer and Huck finn are fairly realist aren't they? (it's a long time since I read some of these). Maybe there was more North American realist children's fiction at this time.

Tom Brown's schooldays, that's definitely Victorian, not fantasy, British, etc. perhaps a bit old for the 9-11 year olds currently studying the Victorians.

Yes, realism is different entirely. Carroll was the first to show children that they could live in the imagination and that there is no right or wrong way to do this.

You do get your writers who wrote for children, but were always with an agenda or heavy moral guidance.

Nesbitt opened up realism, but it came much later.

Some writers wrote realistically about the lives of children in the later medieaval times (William Blake - Songs of Innocence and Experience) in order to try to get others to see how hard children had it and how reforms needed to be made to save the 'innocents'.

It really is very interesting.

I kind of mentally credit MacDonald as well with promoting the very first children's lit (Alice... in 1965, with his own At the Back of the North Wind following in 1871), as it was he who pressed and recommended 'Lewis Carroll' to publish the stories, and it was his children Carroll had originally read his first drafts to.

Takver - I've read Lilith and really got a lot out of it. More than Phantastes, as that has less of a plot in some ways: I love Mac Donald as an author though. I've never read to my kids the Princess books or his fairy tales or At the Back of the... , as I preferred them to find them out for themselves, and sometimes the moralising is a little boring (I don't mind it for itself but it drags the story a little). All but one of mine really enjoyed The Water Babies too.

Threelittleducks, I want to be your friend and have intellectual chats about children's fiction, that was really interesting

The only ones that feel and read as Victorian to me (other than Dickens) are The Secret Garden, A Little Princess and The Water Babies. George MacDonald wrote his books in the mid-Victorian period but as they are mostly fantasy, their setting is not terribly time and location-specific.

The Montmorency books by Eleanor Updale are set in Victorian Britain, as as the Sally Lockhart mysteries by Philip Pullman.

Leon Garfield wrote some books set in Victorian London - Smith and Black Jack, I think. And Mary Hooper has written one called Fallen Grace about Victorian mourning.

I really liked At the back of the North Wind (featuring a Victorian stable boy), until the end when the boy just died, TB or pneumonia, very Victorian.

As I child I didn't mind the moralising, I don't think my dds mind it either, as an adult I find it a bit much.

X post with you Fennel . . .

I think the original request in the op was for fiction about Victorian childhood - but the op has probably run away screaming under this deluge of books.

DD is also studying the Victorians atm - will dig out some of these for her!