Empire’s Children: Empire and Imperialism in Classic British Children’s Books

Empire’s Children places classic British children’s fictional texts into the cultural context of imperial Britain, focusing on themes of patriotism and imperialism from 1895 to about 1945. The book begins with Rudyard Kipling and ends with Arthur Ransome, examining the crucial years from the height of Britain’s empire at the end of the nineteenth century to its waning years prior to the Second World War. Empire’s Children explores the way that British imperialist tendencies lingered into children’s texts well into the 1980s. Other writers examined include Frances Hodgson Burnett, E. Nesbitt, A.A. Milne and Hugh Lofting, all of whom continue in print and all of whom were enormously popular and well-regarded authors of their time.