ABSTRACT
This chapter presents some closing thoughts of the key concepts covered in this book. The acquisition of the skills of reading and writing came increasingly to be taken for granted, as an expected part of the childhood experience. The entry into the field of more publishers, and of writers drawn to the composition of children's fiction by motives of profit rather than philanthropy, hastened this change, and it affected the books offered as educational and improving fiction at a deeper level than their gilt outsides. The commercial publishers also rose to the challenge of the 1870s. Whenever a children's writer tells the story of the journey of romance, or focuses a view of the world through the eyes of a child, or attempts to bring history to life or to explore adolescent feeling, the nineteenth-century educators and moralists have been there before, and either by assimilation or reaction, their methods are influential still.
