The Children's Hour

Complete and unabridged, with 46 full-page plates by Frederic Leighton, David Wilkie and Lambert Barnard. Seven old favourites retold for children in one volume: The Pilgrim's Progress, Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels, Don Quixote, the Arabian Nights, Baron Munchausen and the stories of Shakespeare's plays — each cut down to the scenes a child remembers and introduced with a page on the man who wrote it. Eva March Tappan, a New England teacher, made the selection for American households in the 1900s, and it is a fair map of what a well-read child of that generation had heard by the age of twelve. Forty-six plates of painting, among them David Wilkie's Chelsea Pensioners reading the Waterloo Dispatch, carry the same old tales into the drawing rooms and castles where their first readers met them.