The Everlasting Joy of Terrifying Children

It is often said that the Victorians invented #childhood. If they did, it was through labor laws that protected children, and because of dramatic technological and economic shifts that placed new cultural privilege on the individual. But the Victorians also reinvented children’s literature, sweeping away the previous century’s didactic spelling books and etiquette guides and replacing them with stories written for the sheer pleasure of reading. #roomtoread