Economies of childhood in nineteenth-century Australia : Catherine Helen Spence's short fiction for children

This essay seeks to illustrate the overlooked role Spence’s children’s literature played in this reasoning, as well as to situate this literature in both Australian and Victorian traditions of writing for children. In so doing, it proposes that Spence’s children’s literature prefigures key late nineteenth-century trends in Australian juvenile fiction, particularly in its images of Australian city and suburban life, as well as its realistic depiction of Australian colonial children. It further attempts to show how Spence’s fiction for children stems from the broader Victorian genre of children’s didactic literature and draws, in particular, on the influence of prominent early British and Irish nineteenth-century writers of the genre, such as Anna Laetitia Barbauld (1743–1845) and Maria Edgeworth (1768–1849). Working between these two contexts, this essay reads Spence’s short stories for young children as didactic economic narratives that figuratively position the child reader as an active participant in consumer culture and a potential force for collective social and economic good, as well as formative examples of Australia’s turn towards urban domestic realism in late nineteenth-century writing for children.