2004
Volume 57 Number 2025
  • ISSN: 2589-4617
  • E-ISSN: 2667-2081

Abstract

Abstract:

This article focuses on cheap reprints of Isaac Watts’s (1715) to shed new light on the development of a market for children’s books and of children as a target for literary socialisation. It combines a macro and micro perspective on the publishing history of Watts’s collection of children’s poems to illustrate the emergence of a diversified and democratised market for children’s literature. Moreover, the case study demonstrates how children’s literature intersected with eighteenth-century canonisation processes. It argues that the textual and visual characteristics of widely affordable reprints of Watts’s work not only democratised access to literary culture, but also contributed to Watts’s literary status and even shaped the canonisation of a specific selection of his poems. The case study thus challenges the notion of canon formation as an exclusively top-down phenomenon, as well as demonstrating how children of various social classes were included in these processes.

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2025-09-01
2025-12-05
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