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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2016
This paper considers the reward books given to children as Sunday-school prizes in the north-west of England between 1870 and 1914. From the titles presented and from the authors considered to be suitable, it was possible to select a number of books which were representative of these prizes. An examination of these stories showed that there were themes which were repeatedly stressed, and that those for boys and girls were noticeably different. In the light of what is already known about the organization and purposes of Sunday schools, the choice of a particular genre of books for prizes suggests that their contents were seen as one way of socializing children into appropriate attitudes and behaviour.
1 Groser, William H., The Opening Life (London, 1911), p. 30.Google Scholar For examples of widespread religious and secular contemporary concern about the circulation of undesirable juvenile literature see Salmon, Edward, Juvenile Literature as It Is (London, 1888), pp. 184–99 Google Scholar; Yonge, Charlotte M., What Books to Lend and What to Give (London, 1887), pp. 5–14 Google Scholar; ‘Penny fiction’, Quarterly Review, 171 (1890), pp. 150-71; Humphrey, G. R., ‘The reading of the working classes’, Nineteenth Century, 33 (1893), pp. 690–701.Google Scholar
2 Hanna, G. R. and McAllister, M. K., Books, Young People, and Reading Guidance (New York, 1960), p. 140.Google Scholar
3 Avery, Harold, All Work and No Play (London, 1901)Google Scholar. Reviewed in Primitive Methodist Magazine [hereafter PMM] 1901.
4 Wilford, Florence, Tender and True (London, 1882)Google Scholar. Reviewed in Church Times [hereafter CT], Dec. 1882.
5 Unless otherwise stated in the books listed below, the place of publication is London. Books for girls: Austin, Stella, Uncle Philip (1878)Google Scholar; ‘H. M. B.’, Ida Royton’s Village Life (Bristol, 1875); Briggs, Alice J., Margaret Bishop’s Life Work (1908)Google Scholar; Everett-Green, Evelyn Evelyn, My Black Sheep (1889)Google Scholar; Paull, Mary, Mary Hazeldine’s Desk (1879)Google Scholar; Swan, Annie S., Dorothea Kirke (Edinburgh, 1884)Google Scholar; Witts, Florence, The Sisters of Trenton Manse (1902)Google Scholar.
Books for boys: Harriet Boultwood, Clerk or Carpenter (1890); Marshall, Emma, Nature’s Gentleman (1893)Google Scholar; ‘Pansy’, Man of the House (1887); Wray, James Jackson, Paul Megitt’s Delusion (1879)Google Scholar. Non-fiction books: Sabine Baring-Gould, Sermons to Children (1879); Chappell, Jenny, Women Who Have Worked and Won (1904)Google Scholar; Forster, William J., Sergeant’s Adventure (1904)Google Scholar; Page, Henry, Leaders of Men (1880)Google Scholar.
6 Seventeen categories came from 136 content items: feminine attributes; masculine attributes; marriage; character models; mother; homelife (positive and negative models); religion; inner versus worldly life (positive and negative values); fashionable people and society; self-sacrifice in both sexes; self-improvement in both sexes; deference; attitudes to money; books; vices; positive qualities in both sexes; negative qualities in both sexes.
7 Specifically, in Preston, Burnley, and other Lancashire weaving centres, nearly a third of married women worked in the 1880s, along with as many as three quarters of unmarried women. See Liddington, Jill and Norris, Jill, One Hand Tied Behind Us (London, 1978), p. 58 Google Scholar; Lewis, Jane, Women in England, 1870-1950 (Brighton, 1984), p. 156 Google Scholar; also Walton, John, Lancashire: a Social History, 1558-1939 (Manchester, 1987), pp. 286–93 Google Scholar; John, Angela, Unequal Opportunities (Oxford, 1986), p. 11.Google Scholar
8 Wray, Paul Megitt’s Delusion, pp. 46-7.
9 Review of Miss Priscilla Hunterhy ‘Pansy’, PMM, March 1880, p. 187.
10 Yonge, Charlotte M., Our New Mistress (London, 1888)Google Scholar, reviewed in CT, 9 Nov. 1888. ‘With the so-called improvement in education, the daughters of ex-servants emerge under school board influence from their grubby existence into butterfly form and not infrequently have a longing to fly into the world of teachers.’ Meade, L. T., A Brave Poor Thing (London, 1900)Google Scholar, reviewed in Baptist Magazine, June 1900, p. 303.
11 Austin, Uncle Philip, p. 106.
12 Entwistle, Dorothy, ‘Children’s reward books in Nonconformist Sunday schools, 1870-1914’ (Lancaster Ph.D. thesis, 1990), pp. 294-0, 304-7, 326–35.Google Scholar
13 Books by Ballantyne, R. M. and Kingston, W. H. G. were still popular as prizes at the turn of the century and thereafter, although the authors’ creative period had ended in the 1870s and 1880s.Google Scholar
14 Marshall, Nature’s Gentleman, p. 24.
15 Ibid., p. 2.
16 Ibid., p. 5.
17 Entwistle, , ‘Children’s reward books’, p. 402.Google Scholar
18 Marshall, , Nature’s Gentleman, p. 150 Google Scholar; Boultwood, , Clerk or Carpenter, p. 93 Google Scholar; Kingston, W. H. G., The Three Midshipmen (London, 1873), p. 4 Google Scholar.
19 Briggs, Margaret Bishop’s Life Work, p. 126.
20 Baring-Gould, Sermons 3 and 9.
