SOURCE: "From Rational to Romantic: The Children of Children's Literature in the Nineteenth Century," in Poetics Today, Vol. 13, No. 1, 1992, pp. 141-53.

In the following essay, MacLeod describes the history of nineteenth-century children's literature as a shift from rationalist concepts of the child to Romantic concepts, a shift she argues was shaped by mid-century social protest.

In the course of the nineteenth century, American children's literature made a momentous journey from eighteenth-century rationalism to nineteenth-century romanticism. When the journey was complete, the children of children's fiction, rational, sober, and imperfect at the beginning of the nineteenth century, had become innocent, charming, and perfect: the rational child had become the romantic child. The change in children's literature was by no means either smooth or steady, nor was it predictably linked to changes in adult literature. In fact, for the first half of the century, children's fiction was all but static...