The Children's Hour

Seven old favourites retold for children in one volume: The Pilgrim's Progress, Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels, Don Quixote, the Arabian Nights, Baron Munchausen and the stories of Shakespeare's plays — each cut down to the scenes a child remembers and introduced with a page on the man who wrote it. Eva March Tappan, a New England teacher, made the selection for American households in the 1900s, and it is a fair map of what a well-read child of that generation had heard by the age of twelve.