256 Pages
    by Routledge

    256 Pages
    by Routledge

    Opening the Nursery Door is a fascinating collection of essays inspired by the discovery of a tiny archive: the nursery library of Jane Johnson 1707-1759, wife of a Lincolnshire vicar. It has captured the scholarly interest of social anthropologists, historians, literary scholars, educationalists and archivists as it has opened up a range of questions about the nature of childhood within English cultural life over three centuries: the texts written and read to children, the multifarious ways childhood has been considered, shaped and schooled through literacy practices, and the hitherto ignored role of women educators in early childhood across all classes.

    Chapter 1 Introduction, Mary Hilton; PART I Handmade Worlds; Chapter 2 Child's Play or Finding the Ephemera of Home, Shirley Brice Heath; Chapter 3 Jane Johnson: A Very Pretty Story to Tell Children, Victor Watson; Chapter 4 Women Teaching Reading to Poor Children in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, Margaret Spufford; PART II 'Some Easy Pleasant Book'; Chapter 5 Samuel Richardson's Aesop[David Whitley; Chapter 6 John Newbery and Tom Telescope, John Rowe Townsend; PART III Women Writing for Children; Chapter 7 ‘The Cursed Barbauld Crew’, Norma Clarke; Chapter 8 Fairy Tales and Their Early Opponents, Nicholas Tucker; Chapter 9 In the Absence of Mrs Leicester, Janet Bottoms; Chapter 10 From the Front Line, Jan Mark; Chapter 11 ‘Of the Spontaneous Kind’?, Morag Styles; PART IV Learning to Read in School; Chapter 12 The Domestic and the Official Curriculum in Nineteenth-Century England, David Vincent; Chapter 13 ‘I Knew a Duck’, Hilary Minns; Chapter 14 Criminals, Quadrupeds and Stitching up Girls or, Classes and Classrooms in the Ragged Schools, Julia Swindells; PART V ‘Configuring a World’; Chapter 15 Configuring a World, Heather Glen;

    Biography

    Mary Hilton, Morag Styles, Victor Watson

    'The quality of the chapters is uniformly high, and they are wide-ranging, interesting and informative. This is a very successful book, packed with insight...' - The National Literacy Trust's 1997 International Annotated Bibliography of Books on Literacy.