Life Scenes from a Children's Hospital

London: The Religious Tract Society, 1882. First edition.

1882 SCARCE ILLUSTRATED CHILDREN'S BOOK WITH AN UPBEAT MESSAGE ABOUT A CHILDREN'S HOSPITAL, PUBLISHED 30 YEARS AFTER FOUNDING OF THE HOSPITAL FOR SICK CHILDREN IN LONDON, THE FIRST OF ITS KIND IN ENGLAND.

10x16.5 cm tall hardcover, red cloth binding with stamped pictorial cover, title in gilt, pictorial gilt title to spine, frontis wood engraving, illustrated title vignette, 125 pp, [ii] publisher's adverts. Full page wood engravings. Covers darkened, edges rubbed, hinges weak. Text good. 5 copies OCLC.

GREAT ORMOND STREET HOSPITAL (formerly the Hospital for Sick Children) was founded on 14 February 1852 after a long campaign by Dr. Charles West, and was the first hospital in England to provide in-patient beds specifically for children.

THE RELIGIOUS TRACT SOCIETY was a British evangelical Christian organization founded in 1799 and known for publishing a variety of popular religious and quasi-religious texts in the 19th century. The society engaged in charity as well as commercial enterprise, publishing books and periodicals for profit. For the first 25 years of the society's existence, its main activity was the publication and distribution of religious tracts. In the 1820s and 1830s, the society began commercially publishing bound books and periodicals for adults and children, shifting away from its previous focus on tracts, and leading to a sharp increase in the society's income. This shift was the subject of some criticism both within and outside the organization. Subscribers to the society raised concerns that their contributions were being used to subsidize books which were aimed at a middle-class audience and priced out of reach of the working-class families that represented the previous targets of the society's evangelical efforts. From the 1860s, the Society began publishing novels aimed at women and children, providing a platform for a new generation of women writers.