British Children's Literature and Material Culture

The golden age of childrens 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 childrens literature within the consumer culture of this period, British Children's Literature and Material Culture explores the intersection of childrens books, consumerism and the representation of commodities within British childrens 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 childrens literature was a key consumer product, one that influenced young peoples 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 Carrolls Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There and E. Nesbits Five Children & It to Christina Rossettis Speaking Likenesses and Mary Louisa Molesworths The Cuckoo Clock. Placing childrens fiction alongside historical documents, shop catalogues, lost property records, and advertisements, Carroll provides fresh critical insight into childrens relationships with material culture and reveals that even the most fantastic texts had roots in the ordinary, everyday things.