Talking Animals and Reading Children: Teaching (Dis)Obedience in John Aikin and Anna Barbauld's Evenings at Home (Critical Essay‪)‬

1. Children's Literature and Political Animals AS WITH CONTEMPORARY CHILDREN'S LITERATURE, THE CHILDREN'S LITERATURE of the late eighteenth century was written for two audiences: the adults whose approval of the works determined whether they would be purchased in the first place, and the children whose enjoyment of the works determined whether they would continue to be purchased in the future. This dual audience--combined with the fact that children's literature is a genre defined more by its audience than by internal characteristics--complicates the task of literary criticism considerably, as evidenced by a recent schism among critics of late eighteenth-century children's literature. Some have argued that "children's books remained apolitical in the 1790s" (1) or that the political tendency of 1790s children's literature is overwhelmingly that of an anti-Jacobin, conservative middle-class. (2) Others read the children's literature of the 1790s as "part of the political assault on aristocratic England," (3) subtly but undeniably engaged with the politics of the French Revolution and actively promoting egalitarianism and an independence from tradition. (4)