# data[].attributes.body
Children´s literature began back when books were hand- copied and hand- carried. Conditions like no electricity or candles, the access to books, money to afford them, and many other things were luxuries opportunities.

# data[].attributes.headline
Literature from the Classical Era to Gutenberg

# data[].attributes.subject
Literature from the Classical Era to Gutenberg

# data[].attributes.body
The Roman rhetorician Quintilian, in the 1st century CE, argued for the importance of children’s literary education. Schoolbooks were the only reading material for European and English children for some centuries.
Reading for children was still largely educational in nature. In the 15th century, books of courtesy, guiding young gentlemen in the ways of gentility, became prominent, and texts such as Stans Puer ad Mensam, first appearing in English in 1479, and The Babees’ Book, gave stern, often rhymed, advice about comportment in the face of one’s elders and betters.

# data[].attributes.body
Literature changed radically in the mid- 15th century with the mechanical Printing Press by Johann Gutenberg. The press enabled the mass production and mass ownership of books, and thus the publishing industry itself. While the fables were valued for their ability to teach reading, they were clearly entertaining as well as educational.

# data[].attributes.body
Definition of children´s books: “printed works produced ostensibly to give children spontaneous pleasure, and not primarily to teach them, nor solely to make them good, nor to keep them profitably quiet”.
Children’s literature as “the scene of a battle between instruction and amusement, between restraint and freedom, between hesitant morality and spontaneous happiness”

# data[].attributes.body
It remains a strong element in contemporary children´s book apparently designed for pleasure and children´s literature remains an important instrument of education.
Didacticism imbued much of children´s literature prior to the 20th century.
What was rejected is the writing focused on teaching only.

# data[].attributes.body
Significant work during the 17th century, by Comenious, 1658. A wonderfully encyclopedic guide to myriad aspects of the world in Latin and the vernacular, illustrated with helpful woodcut diagrams. The Orbis Pictus as a watershed moment, the inception of “children’s books as objects of pleasure”.
With its combination of text and pictures to convey information, it’s classified as the first picture book for children, and it’s also the first big informational book for children. It’s thus the forerunner of a large segment of subsequent children’s literature.

# data[].attributes.headline
Enlightenment- era Works: Folklore, Novels and Poetry

# data[].attributes.subject
Enlightenment- era Works: Folklore, Novels and Poetry

# data[].attributes.body
The late 17th and early 18th centuries saw the inception of one of most enduringly important areas of children’s literature, print folklore. Certainly both nursery rhymes and folktales have a venerable history with children, and both appear early in the literature’s print timeline. Some of the folktales best known today: In English, they’re usually titled “Sleeping Beauty,” “Red Riding Hood,” “Bluebeard,” “Puss in Boots,” “Diamonds and Toads,” “Cinderella,” etc.

Perrault tales are still widely available in contemporary retellings and provide the engine behind many a Disney cartoon. His work remains enjoyable reading even today.

# data[].attributes.body
This term appears around 1726, to refer to those books that started as adult works but have since become considered children´s property, such as Gulliver´s Travels.

# data[].attributes.body
Books intended explicitly for children’s amusement, though, were starting to appear in the early 18th century. One of the earliest and celebrated such landmarks is A Little Book for Little Children by T.W.  Its main goal was clearly pleasure rather than intellectual betterment.
Children’s literature as we now identify it was becoming an established marketing genre in the mid-18th century

# data[].attributes.body
Born in 1713, began his professional life as a printer’s assistant. He published between 20 and 30 non-educational books for children. Newbery paid attention not only to the content of his titles but also to their appearance, employing attractive engravings and flowered Dutch paper covers, creating a distinctive house style that foreshadowed contemporary tendencies for publishers to stamp their own individual design on their books.
He dabbled in marketing strategies such as the book-toy combination and the two-tier pricing system that presaged the paperback/hardback pricing strategies. Newbery is important because he establishes the possibility of children’s publishing as an industry, and an industry that was so profitable that others wished to engage in it as well.

# data[].attributes.body
The discovery and creation of a market and the spread of that discovery beyond Britain did genuinely result in considerably larger numbers of children’s books and the growth of what we’d now term the industry, a world wherein people could earn their living as writers, artists, publishers, and critics of children’s literature.
Despite these developments, didacticism remained a strong force in 18th-century children’s literature. What changed were its influences, with godliness no longer the primary message, and its flavor, with the lessons increasingly incorporated into narratives effective for their writerly skill.

# data[].attributes.headline
19th Century: Folktales, Fantasy and Fun

# data[].attributes.subject
19th Century: Folktales, Fantasy and Fun

# data[].attributes.body
Folktales made a strong return with Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm. Realism began to change as well, finding an appreciation for playfulness among the morals.
The parody came from Heinrich Hoffmann’s (1845) Struwwelpeter, which took cautionary moral tales to a satirical and poetic extreme.

# data[].attributes.body
Realism, however, continued to develop as well.  Louisa May Alcott’s (1868, 1869) Little Women, a fictional story, was by no means the first example of domestic realism, but it has become the best known. It represents the domestic thread, becoming perhaps the first American children’s classic and a key representative of American life to readers abroad.
Australia began to develop its own voice in children’s literature late in the century in works that reflect not only a distinct identity but a distinct idea of childhood. The most famous example of these is Ethel Turner’s (1894) Seven Little Australians, which may have been influenced by Little Women in its lively depiction of everyday girls’ lives and its focus on a female character who chafes at the restrictions of proper womanhood.

It was England, however, that propelled the picturebook into new and exciting form in the 19th century. The key creative force behind this development was Edmund Evans, technically a printer, but performing work that today might be associated with art design and publishing.
The American Library Association, founded in 1876, was also the source of children’s librarianship, a professional category that is probably the single biggest force behind children’s literature as we know it today.

# data[].attributes.body
Literature isn’t a single, fixed organism but a large number of texts grouped together under a rubric, and that categorization is always dependent on the eye of the beholder. This overview too is a product of bias, culture, time, and practical exigencies