Favell Lee Mortimer was a tireless best-selling author of biblical, geographical, and reading texts for children. Her grandniece Rosalind Constable stated in a 1950 article that The Peep of Day (1833), Mortimer's most notable work, "sold over a million copies in the original edition, and was translated into thirty-eight languages." Near the turn of the twentieth century it was republished with its austere language tempered for modern young readers. Mortimer held to the moralistic trend in children's literature long after the fairy tale was supposed to have emerged triumphant. She inherited the mantle of moral education for children from the previous generation, led by Sarah Trimmer and Mary Sherwood, and it was the evangelistic branch represented by Sherwood to which Mortimer belonged, rather than the established branch of moral narrative found in Trimmer's works. Mortimer's purpose was to write accurately of morals and mores for readers up to age five...