Chapter 1 Introduction, Mary Hilton; PART I Handmade Worlds; Chapter 2 Child's Play or Finding the Ephemera of Home, Shirley Brice Heath; Chapter 3 Jane Johnson: A Very Pretty Story to Tell Children, Victor Watson; Chapter 4 Women Teaching Reading to Poor Children in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, Margaret Spufford; PART II 'Some Easy Pleasant Book'; Chapter 5 Samuel Richardson's Aesop[David Whitley; Chapter 6 John Newbery and Tom Telescope, John Rowe Townsend; PART III Women Writing for Children; Chapter 7 'The Cursed Barbauld Crew', Norma Clarke; Chapter 8 Fairy Tales and Their Early Opponents, Nicholas Tucker; Chapter 9 In the Absence of Mrs Leicester, Janet Bottoms; Chapter 10 From the Front Line, Jan Mark; Chapter 11 'Of the Spontaneous Kind'?, Morag Styles; PART IV Learning to Read in School; Chapter 12 The Domestic and the Official Curriculum in Nineteenth-Century England, David Vincent; Chapter 13 'I Knew a Duck', Hilary Minns; Chapter 14 Criminals, Quadrupeds and Stitching up Girls or, Classes and Classrooms in the Ragged Schools, Julia Swindells; PART V 'Configuring a World'; Chapter 15 Configuring a World, Heather Glen;