As childhood came to be more valued in the nineteenth century, children’s books became more respectful towards the child and imagination and less directly didactic. While the didactic side of children’s literature could still be seen in the works of Peter Parley and the materialistic utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham, there was a gradual move away from heavy moralizing as seen in Edward Lear’s A Book of Nonsense(1846) and John Ruskin’s the King of the Golden River (1851), as well as in the publication of Grimm’s folk tales and Hans Christian Anderson’s stories (Hunt 1995). The real change in writing for children was an empathetic rather than directive narrative relationship with children in the works of Lewis Carroll, George MacDonald, and Charles Kingsley. These writers abandoned all pretense of instruction and offered enjoyment for children; any didacticism (which is probably impossible to escape) was decidedly secondary. Furthermore, books such as Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883) and Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn (1884) jettisoned all moral attitudes which previous writers for children thought proper to maintain (Hunt 2001). As a total liberation from didacticism, these texts broke the rules for children’s writing by blurring traditional rules of right and wrong.
Children’s literature at this time also reflected geographical and gender differences. In Britain, children seemed to enjoy stories that were set in faraway fantastical places while American children enjoyed rags-to-riches stories set in America. In addition, many children’s literature subtexts argued that a man’s place was to win wars, build nations, and develop wealth, while a woman’s place was in the home where she was to remain pious, sexually submissive, and domesticated. That isn’t to say that girls didn’t read and enjoy adventure stories, but it remained the function of girls' literature to live a more virtuous life, as seen in Elizabeth Wether’s Wide, Wide World (1850) and Maria Cummins’s The Lamp Lighter (1854). Louisa May Alcott’s world in Little Women (1869) perhaps offers a more relaxed picture of the stiff and authoritarian stereotype of family life, but it still sets the fictional pattern for girlhood in the later nineteenth century where the heroin is virtuous, comes from humble beginnings, achieves good fortunes, finds happiness in a handsome young man, and more or less grows into a sweet and submissive woman (Hunt 1995).