‘Dress me and put my shoes on; it is time, it is the hour before dawn, so that we should get ready for school.’ This colloquy, probably from Gaul in the third or fourth century, prescribes the ideal child’s conversation, from waking and greeting his parents politely to walking home, with his slave, from school at noon.
Seth Lerer’s history of children’s literature starts with papyrus and ends with Harry Potter. It is called a ‘reader’s history’ because Lerer does not only look at literature written for children – a comparatively recent phenomenon. He also looks at what children actually read: abecedaria, excerpts from Virgil and Homer, versions of Aesop, lists and plays, folktales, prayers and psalters, boy scout manuals, magazines, and chapbook versions of Robinson Crusoe.
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