From the Dairyman's Daughter to Worrals of the WAAF: The RTS, Lutterworth Press and Children's Literature

A collection of essays based on the Children's Books History Society study conference marking the bicentenary of the Religious Tract Society and Lutterworth Press. The book uses the history of the RTS to chart the development of children's literature from the evangelical tract through to the popular school story, spanning the period from the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century. The book details the nature and development of the tract genre both in Britain and America, before looking at the range of RTS and Lutterworth output of children's titles, including the movement into magazine publishing. The work studies the two great magazines for which the RTS and Lutterworth were known to generations of children, the 'Boy's Own Paper' and the 'Girl's Own Paper', as well as other magazines, such as the 'Child's Companion'. There are also substantial chapters on popular tracts, such as 'The Dairyman's Daughter', and successful authors, from Hesba Stretton and Mrs Walton to W.E. Johns and mention of such successful authors as Elinor Brent-Dyer, Enid Blyton and Laura Ingalls Wilder. The book examines how, in order to reflect an increasingly secular age, the subject matter widened, providing more non-fiction in the periodicals as well as an increasingly broad range of fiction. It also shows how the publishing department worked within the context of a missionary society with a global reach, and how a didactically religious tone was modulated in order to present Christian values with more subtlety in an increasingly secular society. With chapters on subjects as diverse as American religious tracts, boys' school stories, secular publishing for girls and the presentation of gender roles, the book is a major contribution to publishing history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Contributors include Brian Alderson, Mary Cadogan, Aileen Fyfe and Ann Thwaite.