The literary opus of Dinah Maria Craik has come to be regarded as a significant reflection of Victorian expectations and values. Her children's books are important explorations of the sentiments of the innocent and the dispossessed. The Little Lame Prince and His Travelling Cloak (1875) and The Adventures of a Brownie as Told to My Child (1872) especially represent a strain of juvenile fantasy that reacted against a flood of moralistic books that attempted to stifle the natural ebullience of children. In the context of both the history of children's literature and the sociology of childhood, Craik's work underscores a turning point in the attitude toward the young, particularly regarding the role children play in sensitizing adults to the moral and creative possibilities of an imaginative sensibility.

Craik was born Dinah Maria Mulock on 20 April 1826 at Stoke on Trent in Staffordshire. Early in life, as the eldest child of a...