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overprivileged and emotionally starved, must cure themselves with the aid of Nature and working-class Dickon. The animal story, a genre adjacent to the domestic novel, often picks up on this trope of adult (or human) irresponsibility toward the vulnerable, showing figures such as the title character of Ouida’s A Dog of Flanders (1872) and Anna Sewell’s equine narrator Black Beauty (1877) as powerless to shape their own fates.

But following in the Janeway tradition, some domestic writers described children (many of them orphans) capable not just of surviving but also of perfecting themselves, whether in a religious or a secular sense, without the adult help that is eventually vouchsafed to Johnson’s Clarence and Corinne or to Dinah Mulock’s Eurasian Cinderella Zillah Le Poer in her 1851 novella for adolescent and adult readers The Half-Caste. In the latter work, the teenaged title character is abused and degraded by her British guardians until the narrator joins the family as a governess and uncovers the secret of Zillah’s legitimate birth and sizable inheritance, which her uncle has sought to appropriate; even before his machinations are exposed, the governess is able to bring out Zillah’s hidden intelligence and beauty by treating her with kindness. Such tributes to adults’ ability to guide children notwithstanding, Rebecca in Kate Douglas Wiggin’s Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1903) and Anne in L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables (1908) are reared by initially unsympathetic figures who know little about children. Even so, both are gifted intellectually, creatively, and (especially) emotionally, capable of forming an ideal domesticity rather than needing to be formed by it. Although Wiggin and Montgomery were not writing overtly religious fiction, their protagonists nonetheless owe something to the tradition of Protestant child saints.

      Perhaps the most famous Evangelical domestic novel is an American example, Martha Finley’s Elsie Dinsmore (1867), the first installment of a 28-volume saga ending with Elsie and Her Namesakes in 1905. Elsie Dinsmore chronicles its virtuous heroine’s difficulties in balancing her duty to her overbearing father against her duty to God, a conflict only resolvable by the father’s belated recognition of his religious responsibilities. Somewhat similarly, a bestselling British waif tale published the same year under the auspices of the Religious Tract Society by “Hesba Stretton” (Sarah Smith), Jessica’s First Prayer, shows its title character discovering God without the aid of her drunken mother or the class-conscious church official who befriends her. It is she who awakens him religiously rather than the other way around, after which both are rewarded by being allowed to form a new family together. What LuElla D’Amico writes of Clarence and Corinne applies to Jessica’s First Prayer (and many other nineteenth-century Christian fictions) as well: the tale “encourages children to perceive themselves as powerful, and it suggests that adults in power can – and should – be subverted when religious or personal freedom is threatened” (2017, p. 182). Significantly, the nineteenth-century emphasis on child agency in fiction extends beyond the fictional world. Marah Gubar (2009) has argued that Golden Age children’s literature offers the child reader a blueprint for negotiating authority with adults, while Victoria Ford Smith (2017) traces the achievements of Victorian children as literary collaborators, critics, and active listeners.

Child agency was often presented not as a steady gaining of power but as a matter of ebbs and flows, sometimes allied to physical health. Jessica is one of many Victorian child protagonists to suffer a near-fatal illness. Similarly, some works by England’s premier domestic novelist for the young, Charlotte Yonge, feature characters whose protracted illnesses culminate in edifying ends. An aim here was to educate audience sensibility by compelling tears – a stock feature also in sentimental novels for somewhat older readers, including Yonge’s The Heir of Redclyffe (1853), Mulock’s John Halifax, Gentleman (1856), Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World (1850), and Maria Susanna Cummins’s The Lamplighter (1854), that may be found among the British and American best sellers of the mid nineteenth century. In such works for younger children as The Stokesley Secret (1861), however, Yonge scales down the problems that the fictional family confronts, illustrating not deathbeds but honesty, consideration, good humor, and the proper response to schoolwork. (In a characteristic passage, the narrator explains that “there is one thing that is to be expected of any good child – not to enjoy lessons; not to surpass others; not to do anything surprising; only to make a conscience of doing what is required as well as possible” [p. 226].) Yonge’s sympathetic treatment of figures such as the brother who considers himself the family dunce and the sister whose comparatively refined tastes distance her from her siblings displays the keen awareness of psychology that animates many nineteenth-century domestic novels.

      Yonge’s American fans included Alcott, who shows us Jo March “eating apples and crying over the ‘Heir of Redclyffe’” as chapter three of Little Women commences (p. 63). This moment is one of a number in Alcott’s works to illustrate appropriate responses to fiction, which Alcott, Yonge, and many other domestic novelists saw as a moral and emotional teaching tool. But if Alcott – who, like Jo, began her career writing sensational fiction for the penny press – learned some of her craft from Yonge, other writers learned from Alcott herself. Among the most notable of Alcott’s disciples was Ethel Turner, whose Seven Little Australians (1894) features a central character who starts the novel as a Jo figure and ends it as Beth. Turner’s admiration for Alcott suggests the importance of the transpacific as well as the transatlantic children’s market in the late nineteenth century, a period in which Australian children’s magazines reprinted material indiscriminately (and often uncredited) from both British and US sources.

      Genres: School Stories and Other Developmental Tales

      The position of the family as the child’s probable first environment meant that novels in other genres might well begin as domestic fiction; the opening chapters of iconic texts such as Treasure Island (1883), The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and Peter Pan (1911) all take place in the home, and often the action ends there too. Yet the genre closest to the domestic novel may be the school story. Many family sagas, from Coolidge’s Katy books to the Australian Mary Grant Bruce’s Billabong series (1910–1942), contain episodes or even entire novels set in schools, and in some cases these schools may be indistinguishable from the home. Alcott’s Little Men (1871), for instance, takes place in the school founded by Jo and her husband in the home inherited from Jo’s aunt, and since the pupils include Jo’s sons, her niece and nephew, and her husband’s nephews, it is difficult to say where family child-rearing leaves off and education begins. Indeed, Allison Speicher (2017) has identified a mini-genre consisting of American children’s tales featuring romances between schoolboys and their female teachers, a pattern that extends the “discipline powered by love” (2011, p. 15) that Joe Sutliff Sanders examines in North American Golden Age texts about orphan girls.

      The English-language school story began in the eighteenth century with Fielding’s The Governess, the first full-length English novel for children. The school described here is tiny, private, and homelike; the pupils are essentially temporary sisters, and proprietress Mrs. Teachum privileges socialization over academics. Yet when we think of the nineteenth-century British school story, we are likely to contemplate works set in boys’ schools, from Harriet Martineau’s The Crofton Boys (1844) through Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857), Frederic Farrar’s Eric, or Little by Little (1858), and Talbot Baines Reed’s The Fifth Form at St. Dominic’s (1881), to Rudyard Kipling’s Stalky & Co. (1899). From the 1880s through the 1930s, British children’s publishing witnessed a flood of boys’-school stories encouraged by factors including the new centrality of athletics to public schools’ character-building agenda and the founding of boys’ magazines such as the Boy’s Own Paper (BOP). Designed to attract middle-class boys as much as their poorer brethren, the BOP was a major forum for public-school fiction, as were rivals such as The Captain: A Magazine for Boys and Old Boys (1899–1924).

Certainly, nineteenth-century stories for girls might also have school settings. Burnett’s Sara Crewe, or What Happened at Miss Minchin’s (expanded into A Little Princess in 1905 after the success of a stage adaptation) was serialized in St. Nicholas in 1887, and L.T. Meade (Elizabeth Thomasina

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