The Critical Response to Children’s Books in Geraldine Jewsbury’s Athenaeum Reviews

Abstract

Although Geraldine Jewsbury was known to her contemporaries as a writer of fiction, essays, and children’s books, her work as a reader for publisher Richard Bentley and her anonymous reviews for the Athenaeum had significant impact on mid-Victorian book production, distribution, and consumption. One area of her influence often overlooked by critics is her work as a reviewer of children’s books for the Athenaeum. Jewsbury’s comments on children’s readings provide great insight into the books Victorian parents were buying for and reading to their children, and the values and expectations Victorians had for children’s books. Beginning in the 1860s, when children’s books began to appear in great number, Jewsbury became a prolific critic of the genre, helping to police, maintain, and advance notions of literary quality, morality, education, and cultural expectations about childhood and children’s literature. Often modeling the response she believed readers would experience, Jewsbury promoted the work of writers such as George MacDonald and Louisa May Alcott, whose books focused on adult/child relationships. Jewsbury recognized that children’s books also appealed to adult readers, whose nostalgic reaction to them reveals a manifestation of desire to revisit a childhood place of innocence and purity.