Though the Victorian period is often considered the Golden Age of childhood, the children’s book market was an active political and moral battleground as early as the 1770s. With Rousseau’s new theories about children and their education challenging the older but well-entrenched philosophy of Locke, children’s books—and, more specifically, their illustrations—became a central issue for those invested in the debate. At the same time, violent riots in favor of Parliamentary reform caused the aristocracy to fear the possibility of a full-scale revolution like that raging in France. This fear made social control more important than ever to the upper-class, from which most authors and publishers came.