PEDIATRICS Vol. 68 No. 6 December 1981, pp. 845
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MARGARET FULLER, A NINETEENTH CENTURY AMERICAN TRANSCENDENTALIST AND FEMINIST, ON CHILDREN'S BOOKS (1845)

T. E. C. Jr MD

Margaret Fuller (1810-1850), friend and intellectual equal of Thoreau, Emerson, Hawthorne, and Bronson Alcott, was one of the very few writers of her time to show an interest in the content of children's books.

In an article published in the New-York Daily Tribune of February 5, 1845 she wrote1:

There is no branch of literature that better deserves cultivation, and none that so little obtains it from worthy hands as this of Children's books. It requires a peculiar development of the genius and sympathies, rare among the men of factitious life, who are not men enough to revive, with force and beauty, the thoughts and scenes of childhood....

There is too much among us of the French way of palming off false accounts of things on children to do them good, and showing nature to them in a magic lantern, "purified for the use of childhood," and telling stories of good little girls, and sweet little girls, or brave little boys; oh! all so good! or so bad! and, above all, so little, and every thing about them so little!—Children, accustomed to move in full-sized apartments, and converse with full-grown men and women, do not need so much of this baby-house style in their literature. They like, or would like, if they could get them, better things much better. They like the "Arabian Nights," and "Pilgrim's Progress," and "Bunyan's Emblems," and Shakespeare, and the "Iliad" and "Odyssey"; at least, they used to like them; and, if they do not now, it is because their taste has been injured by so many sugar-plums.