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Last time we looked at the great novelists of the period, like Dickens and the Bronte sisters. Now, as children became better educated, books, and indeed, newspapers were written specially for them.
In 1879 there appeared the first issue of a weekly newspaper called The Boy's Own paper. It was followed a year later by a special paper for girls which was called, wait for it, The Girl's Own Paper. Initially both papers were published weekly until just before the first world war when they became monthly. They both continued to be published well into the 1960's
There is no doubt that the papers wanted to guide young people to live a good, healthy life. A religious group suggested the original idea. Stories, though, were based on adventure and there were notes on how to study nature. There were also the usual games and puzzles. Initially the paper attempted to appeal to boys of all classes, but by the 1890s it would seem to concentrate on boys from wealthier backgrounds..
Many important people contributed to the paper. The famous cricketer, Dr W G Grace wrote some articles, as did Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, he of Sherlock Holmes fame and Robert Baden Powell, the founder of the Boy Scouts. On a personal level, so did my uncle but that was in the 1930's.
Meanwhile books for young readers became more frequent. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote Treasure Island while R M Ballantyne wrote Coral Island. I'm cheating a bit here as they were both Scottish. But Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was, despite his name, definitely English and he wrote under the pseudonym of Lewis Carroll and I am sure most of you know of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and the follow-up, Through the Looking-Glass. The last one includes two poems of which I am sure Edward Lear would have been proud. They are great examples of nonsense verse and are called "Jabberwocky", and “The Hunting of the Snark. You could try and find them and have a read.
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