This project is the fulfilment of my Master of Research, completed at Western Sydney University (Australia) in 2017-2018.

It draws on the vast Angus & Robertson Archive, housed in the Mitchell collection at the State Library of New South Wales.

​

Access

Publishing for Children is available for download via ResearchDirect. The  corresponding datasets (compiled using Microsoft Excel), with detailed explanations of the data, and a map of the book reviews are available here under a Creative Commons 4.0 licence.

​

Abstract

Publishing for Children explores how Angus & Robertson, a prominent Australian publisher, contributed to the development of Australian children’s literature in the early twentieth-century. Grounded in the interdisciplinary field of book history and adopting a mixed-methods approach, it initiates a conversation about this previously neglected aspect of Australian literary history. Drawing on historical bibliometric data, it seeks to establish a chronology of the firm’s initial involvement in Australian children’s publishing under the leadership of George Robertson from 1897 to 1933. It moves beyond close readings of canonical texts to identify and appraise all seventy-one Australian children’s books produced by the firm in this period, contextualised within histories of Angus & Robertson and Australian children’s literature. This chronology includes a consideration of the under-researched Cornstalk imprint (operating 1924-1929).

 

This thesis also seeks to foreground the business practices behind the publication and promotion of this corpus. The commercial aspects of book production are significant but are often neglected in children’s literature studies. To examine these practices, Publishing for Children incorporates close qualitative and distant quantitative analysis of historical materials in the Angus & Robertson Archive, an extensive repository of records held by the State Library of New South Wales. Notably, it involves statistical analysis of a collection of 4,000 contemporary book reviews that have been routinely underutilised in previous scholarship.

 

In this way, Publishing for Children presents Angus & Robertson as both a cultural and commercial actor. It acknowledges the national importance of their activities as they produced notable Australian children’s books and successfully pioneered a broader tradition of domestic children’s publishing despite the significant economic obstacles of the period. However, it also foregrounds the distinctly commercial motivations that underpinned their business decisions, challenging the dominant image of Angus & Robertson as a nationalistic, beneficent firm.