The Gothic, concerned with the perverse and the forbidden, with adult sexuality and religious or metaphysical doubts and heresies, seems to represent everything that children's literature, as a genre, was designed to keep out. Indeed, this does seem to be very much the way that children's literature was marketed in the late eighteenth century, at exactly the same time that the Gothic was really taking off, written by the same women novelists who were responsible for the promotion of a safe and segregated children's literature.

This collection examines the early intersection of the Gothic and children's literature and the contemporary manifestations of the gothic impulse, revealing that Gothic elements can, in fact, be traced in children's literature for as long as children have been reading.