In 1963 a facsimile edition of Jean-Jacques Grandville’s Un Autre Monde was published with an introduction by the surrealist Max Ernst, who affirmed that “A new world is born. All praise to Grandville.” When it was first printed in 1844, Un Autre Monde was very poorly received. Ironically, its critique on contemporary consumerism was misunderstood as the epigone of commodity culture. Baudelaire, for one, felt “a certain discomfort” in looking at Grandville’s illustrations, whose jaggedness made him feel as if he were staring at “an apartment where disorder is systematically organised, where bizarre cornices rest on the floor, where paintings seem distorted by an optic lens, where objects are deformed by being shoved together at odd angles, where furniture has its feet in the air.” 

Un Autre Monde comprised thirty-six full-page hand-coloured wood engravings and one hundred forty-six wood-engraved vignettes. With respect to contemporary illustration books, Grandville’s work departed from the conventional, for pictures stood alone independently of the text, which was merely subservient. Grandville depicted alternatives to common places which demonstrate the absurdity of the status quo in order to undermine it: schoolboys eat their teachers, men care for babies, yoked men pull carts, a crowd of Chinese watch French shadows. To a modern-day reader who ignores the story behind Grandville’s illustrations, Un Autre Monde might look like a mere children’s book. Yet, there is much more to it than a simple love for the bizarre and the whimsical. So, what exactly does it take for a children’s book to be such and how can we recognise one when we see it?

Until the 18^th century, works aimed at children were primarily concerned with their moral and spiritual progress. Medieval children were taught to read on parchment-covered wooden tablets containing the alphabet and basic prayers. Later versions included the so-called “hornbooks”, that is, inscribed tablets covered by a protective sheet of transparent horn. In the 17^th century Puritanism infiltrated children’s literature most predominantly, the best example in this sense being John Cotton’s Spiritual Milk for Babes (1646), containing 64 questions and answers relating to religious doctrine, morals and manners. 

It is generally accepted that until the development of the modern concept of ‘childhood’ as the time for play, growth and the love of a family and community of caring adults, a literature specifically catered to infants did not exist. This, because children were put on a par with adults, which resulted in books being mostly didactic and moralistic rather than imaginative and freewheeling. The reasons for the sudden rise of children's literature in the 18^th century include structural factors, such as the growth of a sizeable middle class, technical developments in book production, the influence of new educational theories, and changing attitudes to childhood. Whatever the causes, the result was a fairly rapid expansion of children’s literature through the second half of the 18^th century, so that by the early 1800s, the children’s book business was booming. For the first time it was possible for authors to make a living out of writing solely for children.

The late 18^th and 19^th centuries represented a period of great activity in reformulating educational principles, and there was a ferment of new ideas, some of which in time wrought a transformation in school and classroom. The first thinker to explicitly refer to the need for children to have a literature of their own was British philosopher John Locke. In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), Locke argued that at birth, the human mind is a clean slate onto which data is added through sensory perception. As such, children need to be imbued with the proper notions from an early start, especially through “easy, pleasant books”. In Locke’s words, “children may be cozen’d into a knowledge of the letters; be taught to read, without perceiving it to be anything but a sport, and play themselves into that which others are whipp’d for”. Lesson number one, children’s books rely on what we would nowadays call ‘gamification’.

Another crucial influence was that of French Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who believed that children should be allowed to develop spontaneously and joyfully. Rousseau’s ideas resonated especially in Germany, where the Grimm brothers remained the highest exponents of children literature well into the 19^th century, following the Frenchman’s intuitions. The most relevant follower of Rousseau was the Swiss reformer Johann Pestalozzi, who advocated for the importance of tailoring teaching to the pupil’s individual strengths and abilities rather than starting from the arts and the sciences. Lesson number two, children’s books are open-ended universes with potentially infinite interpretations because they speak to each child as if s/he were the only one reader.

The new social and economic changes that took place in the 19^th century, also called upon the schools, public and private, to broaden their aims and curricula. Schools were expected not only to promote literacy, mental discipline, and good moral character but also to help prepare children for citizenship, for jobs, and for individual development and success. Although teaching methods remained oriented toward textbook memorising and strict discipline, a more sympathetic attitude toward children began to appear, which was reflected in books. As the numbers of pupils grew rapidly, individual methods of “hearing recitations” by children began to give way to group methods. The monitorial system, also called the Lancastrian system, became popular because, in the effort to overcome the shortage of teachers during the quick expansion of education, it enabled one teacher to use older children to act as monitors in teaching specific lessons to younger children in groups. Similarly, the practice of dividing children into grades or classes according to their ages — a practice that began in 18^th-century Germany — was to spread everywhere as schools grew larger. Lesson number three, children’s books are as much optic as they are haptic and oral.

Not only there was an increase in the overall publication of books, but specific genres started to emerge according to the teaching methods and beliefs of teachers and parents. Genres became increasingly classified according to the techniques, the tone and the content of the individual publication. Picture books were mainly charged with teaching the alphabet whereas traditional literature included folk tales, legends and myths. The emergence of a “kids’ first” literature at the turn of the 20^th century, where children take on serious matters with (or often without) the help of adults and often within a fantasy context, testifies to the twofold nature of the genre at the time: at once a commercial candy and a social seal. By the 1880s, children’s literature had become a commercially viable aspect of the printing industry. The market was fuelled especially by London publishers, above all John Newbery, who is considered the “father” of children’s literature. In the United States, it was the coming-of-age novel that took particular hold in so far as it served Puritanism’s self-control campaign among children. Lesson number four, children’s books are an industry.

Instructional works rose in demand and were made available because literacy rates improved, and it therefore was increasingly easier to print appealing pictures that would attract young readers. Despite the growing number of children’s fiction books, classics still continued to be printed. Aesop’s Fables, for instance, illustrated by Victorian England’s most prized Edward Julius Detmold, was published in 1909 and contained 23 colour plates and a host of pen and ink drawings. The book proved so popular that it was reprinted in 2006 as a collector’s item. Among the most successful works published during the Golden Age of children’s literature, one cannot avoid mentioning those by Lewis Carroll, Carlo Collodi, Beatrix Potter, Robert Louis Stevenson, Kenneth Grahame, Rudyard Kipling, Mark Twain, Francis Hodgson Burnett, Edith Nesbit, Frank L. Baum and Astrid Lindgren. Among the most remarkable titles, Pinocchio, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and The Jungle Book. Lesson number five, children’s books come in all forms and formats. There is no right or wrong.

Some of the most imaginative genres that we now associate with children did not start off that way. In Paris in the 1690s, the salon of Marie-Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville, Baroness d’Aulnoy, brought together intellectuals and members of the nobility. There, d’Aulnoy told ‘fairy tales’, which were satires about the royal court of France with a fair bit of commentary on the way society worked or did not work. These short stories blended folklore, current events, popular plays, contemporary novels and romance. From Baroness d’Aulnoy’s living room, what we now call satire, reached far and wide. This, because subversive ideas clad in a cloak of fiction protected their authors and enthralled the masses. A series of 19^th-century novels that we now associate with children were also pointed commentaries about contemporary political and intellectual issues. One of the better-known examples is Reverend Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies: A Fairy Tale for a Land Baby (1863), a satire against child labour and a critique of contemporary science. Remarkable in this sense is also the abovementioned Un Autre Monde by Jean-Jacques Grandville. On the other side of the ocean, The Anti-Slavery Alphabet (1846) was another case in point. Published by the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society (PFASS) with the aim of promoting abolitionist ideas among youths, the book embedded strong political critique within the naivety of children’s illustrations. A knife was put to the throat of draconian censorship through harmless-looking illustrations and nursery rhymes. Lesson number six, children’s books are never what they seem.

Concomitantly to the growth of children’s literature peaked also the interest of psychologists in children’s drawings. By studying doodles, scientists attempted to grasp the mechanics whereby a child interacts with the world and the extent to which the environment in which he grows fosters his ability to communicate through different media. Children’s mental interpretations of reality on paper served as a litmus test to diagnose the health of their developing personalities on a micro level, and the potential for pedagogic improvement on a macro level. An early example in this sense is The University of California at Berkeley’s Notes on Children’s Drawings, published as early as 1897 and laying the foundations for pre-linguistic studies into developmental semiotics. Lesson number seven, children’s books are produced by adults and as such, they can tell us as much about projection (nurture) as they can about instinct (nature).

All in all, tracing the development of children’s literature means surveying the aesthetic, political, technological and cultural preconditions that made it possible for the genre to emerge from the intuitions of 17^th century philosophers, and to thrive thanks to the increasing industrialisation of the long 19^th century. The explosion of imagery from the 18^th to the early 20^th century exceeded the print production from all previous centuries combined, thus spurring the cross-fertilisation of media, subjects and styles. The case of children’s literature, in particular, unearths a wealth of visual material that reveals the origins of our image-saturated world whilst positioning kid’s books well into the fundamental lemmas that led to the formation of our present-day visual literacy.