Learning History from Children's Fiction

What is it about?

People, especially children, learn a lot of history from fiction. But how accurate or biased is the history in children's fiction. This paper looks at a collection of stories based in the same place and time, but with different authors, and looks at how they commonly present the historical content to their child readers.

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Why is it important?

The history presented in the children's books studied here is very biased. It is largely accurate about discrete facts, but has many improbable aspects to it. For example, the children in these stories, although they should be very poor street children, are commonly presented as middle-class, and relatively untroubled by crime, disease, vice or hunger. They also are quite uneducated at a time when elementary school education had become compulsory for English children.