One does not have to look hard to find the British Romantics’ anxiety concerning early nineteenth-century children’s booksor scholarly debates about Romanticism and children’s literature. Often brandished about in this fray is Charles Lamb’s letter to Coleridge railing against “that cursed Barbauld crew”. 1 Lamb is a curious figure in Romantic criticism a prolific essayist and children’s writer not often known for his children’s works, he is frequently treated as the fullest expression of the Romantic critical mind or “the perpetrator of its worst excesses.”2 Lamb certainly belongs to the British Romantic huddle: a close correspondent with Coleridge and Wordsworth, he is immortalised as “gentle-hearted Charles” in Coleridge’s “Lime-Tree Bower”. Moreover, Lamb’s representations of the child seem seminally Romantic. His cry,“The soul of a child… how apprehensive! how imaginative! how religious!”3 and his comment that “beautiful interest… made the child a man, while all the time he suspected himself to be no bigger than a child”,4 correspond with Wordsworth’s declaration that the “Child is the Father of the Man”. Yet the assumption that Lamb subscribed to a Romantic ideology of the spiritually pure child becomes problematic when examining his works for children, publishedby the Godwins’ Juvenile Library.