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Anne Markey, ed., Children's Fiction 1765-1808: John Carey; Margaret King Moore, Lady Mount Cashel; Henry Brooke. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2011. Pp. 189. B/w ill. $60.00.
The study of eighteenth-century children's literature poses peculiar difficulties, as Peter Opie has noted, and one of these is access. Texts of children's books are not always readily available outside of the archive, what with the genre underrepresented on ECCO and the microform series of the Bodleian's Opie Collection owned by only a handful of libraries. Facsimiles traditionally have helped to fill the gap, but they, too, can be difficult to get, as many were produced as keepsakes for library friends' groups or in series published in Japan. Even better than facsimiles for the contextualization of seemingly simple texts are full-dress editions, but few have been published since the short-lived Oxford University Press series under Brian Alderson's editorship back in the late 1960s.
Things have been looking up, though, with the appearance of the Broadview editions of Sarah Fielding's The Governess and Thomas Day's History of Sandford and Merton, and now this anthology of fiction for children in Open Court's series "Early Irish Fiction c.1680-1820." It features three works in English by Carey, King, and Brooke that were in circulation for decades, but which have rarely figured in critical discussion of the period's children's books; they also foreground issues that continue to figure in criticism of modern Irish children's literature. As regional or children's fiction, none of the...