About

This project will study the educational function of children’s stories written by the nineteenth-century author Harriet Martineau, and some of her popular, but now little-known contemporaries. It will consider the debates that were alive at that time: about the importance of children reading the “right books”, and will link this to current concerns about how fiction might help to encourage reluctant readers to learn. The project will examine the techniques by which texts written for children by British women between 1830-1850 employ teaching strategies for developing skilled readers that are still used today, in particular metacognition and reciprocal teaching (where students are encouraged to think about how they engage with the text, as they question, summarise, predict, and clarify).

The project will explore what collaborative, socially mediated learning looks like in under-researched nineteenth-century texts by Elizabeth Sewell, Dinah Craik, Jane Marcet, Mary Botham Howitt, and Harriet Martineau. I will use close stylistic comparative analysis to examine the extent to which footnotes, prefaces, and epigraphs disrupt the narrative progression of the texts. I will analyse how these textual features embody a form of reciprocal teaching as they encourage instructional and guided reading strategies, by prompting the child reader to re-examine the fictional work. This project will argue that these previously neglected writings mark a transitional point in the history of Children’s Literature, as they marry the instructional and the entertaining. An examination of these works within their contexts will highlight the importance of these under-explored texts to our understanding of Children's Literature as a genre, and help to illuminate contemporary concerns about how to nurture children’s and adolescents’ desire to read the “right books”.