SOURCE: "Oberon Leads the Counteroffensive," in Engines of Instruction, Mischief and Magic: Children's Literature in England from Its Beginnings to 1839, University of Nebraska Press, 1989, pp. 191-223.

In the excerpt that follows, Jackson substantiates the contribution that poetry made to children's literature, crediting children's poetry with initiating in the eighteenth century the strain of fantasy literature that would ultimately seek to entertain children as much or more than it did to instruct.

Nonsense and Funny-sense: Comic Poetry

The real breakthrough in imaginative and humorous or adventurous books came in poetry rather than prose perhaps because the latter had been so exclusively preempted in the service of Church and State; perhaps it was mere chance. One of the things that comes through poorly in written criticism such as this is the living voice of an age. Generally in earlier times people sang more, possibly a benefit of the absence of...