Literature, Golden Age

The term Golden Age was first applied to children’s literature in 1962 by the writer Roger Lancelyn Green in his study of significant works written between the mid-19th century and the start of the 20th century. It was not until two decades later that the term was fully explored by Humphrey Carpenter in his seminal work Secret Gardens: A Study of the Golden Age of Children’s Literature. Carpenter’s definition of the Golden Age as the period from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) to A. A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh (1926) is the most widely quoted one by scholars in the field. This definition encompasses titles such as Little Women, The Wind in the Willows, Peter Pan, The Railway Children, and The Secret Garden ...