20 Forgotten Children’s Books That Once Ruled Childhood

In 1887, Palmer Cox, an illustrator born in Canada, published The Brownies: Their Book, converting the original lore about Scottish elves into rhyming narratives starring stock characters such as the Dude and the Cowboy. They were a smash hit, being licensed for use on soap wrappers and board games, and in 1900, camera maker George Eastman called his new low-cost camera the Brownie after them, marketing the device specifically to children. But the characters outlived the books that made them famous.

Victorian children’s writer Juliana Horatia Ewing, who was a favorite of Rudyard Kipling, published The Brownies in 1870, a story about two lazy brothers, Tommy and Johnnie, who discover that children can become helpful brownies rather than lazy boggarts. In 1915, Scouting founder Robert Baden-Powell took the name for the junior Girl Guide section directly from Ewing’s story. The section had previously been known as Rosebuds, but the new name stuck.

In Frances Hodgson Burnett’s 1886 novel Little Lord Fauntleroy, Cedric Errol, a poor but generous boy living in New York, is told he is the heir to an earldom held by his grandfather, the Earl of Dorincourt. With persistence and kindness, the young man is able to change his grandfather’s heart. Reginald Birch, the illustrator for the book, portrays him wearing a black velvet suit, a lace collar, and curly locks. Parents throughout the English-speaking world bought similar outfits for their sons, and costume records show the trend lasted for decades.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich, editor of The Atlantic Monthly, published his semi-autobiographical novel, The Story of a Bad Boy, in 1870. In it, Aldrich followed Tom Bailey, a mischievous boy living in a fictional New Hampshire town. Aldrich opened by calling his hero “not such a very bad, but a pretty bad boy,” in contrast with the saintly child heroes of the time. Six years later, Mark Twain took up that same genre with Tom Sawyer.

The Victorian novelist Charles Kingsley wrote his best-selling 1863 book The Water-Babies partly for his infant son, and partly as an outcry against the exploitation of children who were employed as chimney sweeps in Britain. The book tells the story of Tom, a little boy who drowns trying to escape from his master and turns into an underwater creature called a water-baby. The novel’s success helped drive support for the 1864 act to regulate the use of child chimney sweeps in Britain.

In 1818, Mary Martha Sherwood, an influential British evangelical writer, released The Fairchild Family, a book about three siblings whose father, Mr. Fairchild, punishes them with harsh moral lectures for their misdeeds. One of the most famous scenes has Mr. Fairchild leading his quarreling children to see the corpse of an executed man hanging from the gallows as a lesson not to be angry at one another. The book remained in print for almost 100 years, until 1913.

Wanda Gág, an American artist who studied fine-art printmaking, published Millions of Cats in 1928, about an elderly couple who set off for a single kitten and return home with “hundreds of cats, thousands of cats, millions and billions and trillions of cats.” Taking inspiration from European folktales, she spread her hand-drawn artwork across the facing pages. This approach would come to define the format for the picture book. Millions of Cats is considered the oldest American picture book still continuously in print.

The Scottish minister and author George MacDonald published At the Back of the North Wind in 1871. In it, Diamond, the poor London cabman’s son, is visited at night by a mysterious and beautiful wind. Through the tale, MacDonald explores themes of suffering, death, and divine love in terms of a myth that is accessible to children. MacDonald’s mythic fantasy stories, including At the Back of the North Wind, are widely credited by scholars as having been a major influence on C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien.

E. Nesbit, an English author and Fabian socialist, published The Story of the Treasure Seekers in 1899, a book about the schemes of six Bastable children to restore their family fortunes. The narrator is one of the children, Oswald Bastable. The novel was written from the point of view of a somewhat pompous child narrator, which was an unusual departure from the moralizing and adult-sounding voices that were common before it. Nesbit’s realistic child narration has been cited as an influence on C.S. Lewis and J.K. Rowling.

American illustrator Peter Newell created The Hole Book in 1908, following Tom Potts, a boy whose revolver accidentally fires a bullet that travels through a real die-cut hole punched through every page of the book. The runaway bullet tears through a water boiler, a grandfather clock, a parrot cage, a lady’s hat, a wedding cake, and a gas tank in a string of slapstick near-misses. The gimmick is considered an early influence on Dr. Seuss’s visual style.

DuBose Heyward, author of Porgy, turned a bedtime story his own mother used to tell him into The Country Bunny, published in 1939. Illustrated by Marjorie Flack, the story is about Cottontail, a mother rabbit raising 21 children who has to prove herself to a group of dismissive male rabbits before she can become the Easter Bunny and receive a pair of magic gold shoes from Grandfather Bunny. Her ability, not her luck, earned her the job.

In 1880, Lucretia Hale, the sister of the educator Edward Everett Hale, published The Peterkin Papers in book form, about a family so ridiculously inept they required the help of “the Lady from Philadelphia” to resolve the most trivial difficulties. In the most famous story, when Mrs. Peterkin accidentally adds salt to her coffee, the entire household turns to the advice of chemists and herbalists until the Lady from Philadelphia tells them to make a new cup. There’s no lesson to be learned. There’s only laughter.

In 1935, Carol Ryrie Brink published Caddie Woodlawn, a novel inspired by tales her grandmother, Caroline Woodhouse, had shared with her about her own childhood on the Wisconsin frontier. The book won the Newbery Medal the following year. By the mid-20th century, Caddie Woodlawn had become standard reading in thousands of American elementary school classrooms. It gave generations of kids a girl they could root for who was active and full of adventure.

Susan Warner, writing under the name Elizabeth Wetherell while her family faced severe financial hardship, released The Wide, Wide World in December of 1850. It tells the story of young heroine Ellen Montgomery as she suffers domestic trials and tribulations when she is taken away from her sick mother. The novel went through 14 editions in just two years, selling more than 100,000 copies. In fact, literary historians often call it America’s first runaway bestseller.

In 1858, Frederic Farrar, an Anglican schoolmaster who would later become Dean of Canterbury, wrote Eric, or Little by Little. It went through more than 30 editions by 1900. The novel concerns Eric Williams, a brilliant pupil at Roslyn School who slowly descends into ruin by swearing, smoking and telling lies. Farrar’s aim was to scare public-school boys into realizing where little sins lead. In this respect, he provides the somber, tearful antithesis to the far more buoyant schoolboy novel Tom Brown’s School Days.

Five Little Peppers (and How They Grew) was first published as a book in 1881 under Margaret Sidney, the pen name of author Harriet Mulford Lothrop, and followed the story of a widowed mother named Mrs. Pepper and her five children as they lived happily in spite of their poverty in a house called the “Little Brown House.” This story proved popular enough that it spawned a series of 11 sequels, along with a few film adaptations during the 1930s, and made the Peppers one of the most beloved poor families in American children’s literature.

In Rome, while recuperating from a holiday illness, novelist William Makepeace Thackeray, author of Vanity Fair, wrote and illustrated The Rose and the Ring, a “Fireside Pantomime,” to amuse his daughters and their friends. First published in London in December 1854, the story follows the rightful heirs of two kingdoms, Prince Giglio and Princess Rosalba, and playfully satirizes the pretensions of royalty and familiar elements of the genre. It remained a Christmas favorite in Britain for 100 years.

The King of the Golden River was written by John Ruskin, Victorian Britain’s preeminent art critic, in 1841 simply as an amusement for 12-year-old Effie Gray, whom he later married. In the story, Gluck, a generous and kindhearted boy, must face the cruelty of his two older brothers, who mistreat the land, until a river spirit sets things right. First published in 1851 and illustrated by Richard Doyle, it was among the first of the original British fairy tales and established that even serious minds could produce quality fiction for children.

Thomas Day, an English reformer and abolitionist who was influenced by Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s ideas that labor and virtue were more important than aristocratic privilege, wrote his novel The History of Sandford and Merton between 1783 and 1789. Day tells the story of two boys, Tommy Merton, the son of a pampered aristocrat, and Harry Sandford, the son of a virtuous farmer, as they learn from their tutor, Mr. Barlow. The book went on to become the most popular English children’s bestseller of the late 1700s and early 1800s.

The Twenty-One Balloons, by American writer and artist William Pène du Bois, was published in 1947. In it, Professor William Waterman Sherman, a retired schoolteacher, crashes his giant balloon on the volcanic island of Krakatoa. There he discovers a secret, technologically advanced community of twenty families that has lived for years above a massive diamond mine. As the volcano erupts, the city escapes, all aboard a magical flying platform. Du Bois mixed real volcanic history with pure invention, ending the tale on a note of sheer fantasy.

This content was created with the help of AI.