Children's Books and Reading

One of the first sustained scholarly inquiries into children's literature as a field, Montrose Jonas Moses's 1907 study asks a question that still resonates: what do children owe their books, and what do their books owe them? Writing at a moment when children's literature was beginning to crystallize as a distinct category neither wholly educational nor purely recreational, Moses surveys the genre's messy evolution from didactic fables and moral tales toward something closer to what we would recognize as modern children's fiction. He argues passionately that adults charged with selecting books for young readers carry a profound responsibility to distinguish between what merely entertains and what genuinely nourishes a child's imagination and moral sense. The book functions both as historical record and impassioned polemic, capturing a transitional era when the Victorians' strict moralizing gave way to more adventurous, child-centered storytelling. For anyone interested in how children's literature came to be what it is, this remains a revealing artifact of its founding anxieties.