Timothy Larsen on the Victorian writer Once upon a time, when young princesses were still plentiful, there nevertheless was a scarcity of children’s literature throughout the kingdom. The Scottish author George MacDonald (1824-1905) recalled of his own childhood: “We had very few books for children in those days.” There were multiple reasons for this famine of words of wonder. At the most practical level, a whole series of technological innovations and trade and business developments would allow the Victorian world of MacDonald’s adulthood to be awash in affordable printed material beyond what previous generations ever could have imagined. Moreover, in the early nineteenth century, many adults were illiterate, and many families that were literate owned only a handful of books, with by the far the most common ones all being religious texts, most notably the Bible, prayer books, hymn books, Bunyan’s