Jackie Horne’s History and the Construction of the Child in Early British Children’s Literature aims to unpack a crucial transition in early nineteenth-century narratives for children, as the morally idealized child protagonists of the previous century are replaced by what Horne describes as “emotionally evocative” characters with whom child readers can identify more fully. Scholars once portrayed this shift in characterization as a simple move from dreary “didactic” literature to a more enjoyable “realist” tradition in children’s fiction. As Horne notes, however, the didactic impulse was not extinguished with the shift to so-called realist fiction; it simply continued in a different form, working through identification rather than explicit instruction and moral exempla. Central to Horne’s argument is the notion that reader identification with a character “is not a natural, timeless way of approaching a text, but instead a historically specific, culturally-determined one” that “emerged during a period of extreme social, technological, and economic change” (244–45).

Horne’s approach is in keeping with the new historicist turn in literary studies over the last three decades, and she acknowledges her debt to scholars like Mitzi Myers, who have worked from the 1980s onward to historicize and contextualize our understanding of early children’s literature. Specifically, Horne contends that early nineteenth-century narratives for children reveal tensions between exemplar characters and depictions of the so-called ordinary child, a mixed figure who elicits sympathetic identification because of his or her childish flaws, tempered by the potential for maturation and growth. As the concept of the ordinary child evolves over time, it is fraught with anxieties because it calls into question previous assumptions about the supremacy of parental authority. Horne brings her analysis to bear on a neglected but fascinating array of early adventure tales for children. As she so deftly demonstrates, the conflicted narratives that precede the so-called golden age of children’s literature reveal a mixed tapestry of sympathetic and exemplar figures, leading to sometimes unsettling shifts in point of view and narrative experiments with hybrid genres. Thus, one of the book’s most valuable contributions is to remind us of these surprising, often unsettling, and always engaging narratives.

Horne’s analysis is divided into four substantial and well-researched chapters. The first explores “successful” Robinsonades, which strand children and their families on deserted islands, reintegrating them into society at the close of their narratives. The Family Robinson Crusoe (1812–13), better known in English as The Swiss Family Robinson, is a prime example of such texts, and Horne’s analysis uncovers the often coercive structures of parental authority that underpin this classic text. In contrast, chapter 2 analyzes two “deadly” Robinsonades, tales in which major characters, either children or adults, die on the island. As is well known, Jean-Jacques Rousseau had advocated that children not only read but also act out The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe in their play. Arguably, the children’s Robinsonade took Rousseau’s advice a step further; rather than showing a child pretending to follow in Crusoe’s footsteps, it forced its fictive protagonist to labor in deadly earnest on a sometimes frightening Crusoe’s island.

The imagined islands of the Robinsonade serve as a species of blank canvas on which the author projects contesting constructions of childhood. If the island initially appears to be a liminal space beyond social restrictions, eventually social relations will be reinscribed within its isolated terrain, whether in an idealized, problematic, or even debased form. In Ann Fraser Tytler’s Leila (1839), the island fosters an idyllic relation between a loving father and daughter shipwrecked together; in contrast, Jefferys Taylor’s The Young Islanders (1841) offers a horrific nightmare landscape that anticipates the twentieth-century Lord of the Flies (1954). The novel features a ragtag group of stranded schoolboys who devolve and perish because they cannot cooperate and keep faith with one another.

After exploring the dangerous and seductive islands of the Robinsonade, Horne devotes her remaining chapters to issues of characterization and generic hybridity in the writing of history for children. Chapter 3 focuses on “fictionalized histories” (23), which represent an uneasy mixture of generic conventions. Jefferys Taylor’s The Little Historians (1824) interrogates historical discourse, portraying two brothers who write their own history text under the eyes of watchful adults, while Harriet Martineau’s The Peasant and the Prince (1841) combines fictional narration with nonfiction in her children’s history of the causes of the French Revolution.

Highlighting depictions of girls in historical fiction, the fourth and final chapter shows how such novels sometimes offered girls a wider range of action since they supposedly figured forth a more primitive time before domestic ideology increasingly restricted women to the home. The protagonist of Agnes Strickland’s historical novel, Alda, the British Captive (1841), exhibits masculinized traits of defiance and bravery when she, a Briton, is captured by the ancient Romans. Although Alda’s conversion to Christianity eventually tames her defiant anger, Horne argues that the novel continues to embody “deeply transgressive” (224) moments, such as Alda’s rejection of all her male suitors in favor of a happy and independent life with a devoted female friend.

Always well documented, thorough, and conscientious, Horne’s detailed analysis sometimes overmakes its points, reiterating arguments already demonstrated or providing numerous examples to back up what seems a relatively obvious assertion. Yet this is a small cavil in regard to such a valuable, rich, and much needed work. Horne’s discussions of the neglected fiction of the early nineteenth century are always insightful and engaging. At a time when we take children’s literature and modern childhood for granted, Horne enables us to envision the difficult genesis of both; thanks to her, we appreciate the strangeness of the new terrain of children’s literature as it emerges on the horizon like Crusoe’s island, its shifting contours challenging all our charts and maps.