As primary education became compulsory from the late nineteenth century, children became an important category o{ readers. It is so because:
(i) Production of school textbooks became critical for the publishing industry.
(ii) A children's press, devoted to literature for children alone, was set up in France in 1857.
(iii) This press published new works as well as old fairy tales and folktales.
(iv) The Grimm Brothers in Germany spent years compiling traditional folk tales gathered from peasants.
(v) Anything that was considered unsuitable for children or would appear vulgar to the elites, was not included in the published version.
(vi) Rural folk tales thus acquired a new form. In this way, print recorded old tales but also changed them.
