SOURCE: "For Betty and the Little Female Academy: A Book of Their Own," in Children's Literature Association Quarterly, Vol. 10, No. 1, Spring, 1985, pp. 30-3.

Below, Downs-Miers suggests that literary critics have typically overlooked Fielding's The Governess as the first English novel written expressly for children because girls, not boys, are both the subject of and audience for Fielding's didactic tale.

… We now know that there had been published in England, probably as early as the late seventeenth century, books expressly for children. While the intent of these texts was clearly to instruct, they approached that intent from the point of view of children, rather than being slight revisions of adult texts. Throughout the eighteenth century, these instructional books became increasingly recreational, and sometimes even whimsical. In 1736 Thomas Boreman published A Description of a Great Variety of Animals and Vegetables, especially for the Entertainment of Youth. [John] Newbery followed in...