By Emily Bazelon, Slate Senior Editor
and Erica S. Perl, author children’s magazine and novelist
During the 18th century and for much of the 19th, there wasn't a whole lot of North American literature for children. And when children's books did get published, they weren't designed for pleasure. Books were for schooling or for teaching religious and moral lessons—with properly serious illustrations chaperoning the text.
This somber mode continued through the mid-1860s. And then it went poof, dispelled by artists who became children's illustrators by happenstance.
By the end of the 19th century, the art in kids' books had become madcap and zany and irreverent. One can trace the imagery and style that are familiar from the classics of one's own childhood.
Click here for a slide show on the history of children's book illustration in the United States, based on Timothy G. Young's new book, Drawn To Enchant.
Erica S. Perl is the author of Ninety-Three in My Familyand Chicken Bedtime Is Really Early. She has also written two novels for young people that are forthcoming from Harcourt, and she contributes to Pajamazon, the children's book column at Offsprung.com.
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