Because Sheila asked...

The "improving" books to which I referred are generally books that would have been deemed (at the end of the 19th century and the very beginning of the 20th) as appropriate Sunday School graduation gifts for girls.

I believe - from what I've got from context - that "wide awake" was code word for "Christian."

One of the books I have, for example: called Bertha's Summer Boarders. As best I remember, it featured two girls and their widowed mother. The girls were teenagers (I think 14 and 16). They were, of course, big helps around the house. The main social life of the book focused on church socials (which are not as extremely pious as they'd sound; people played games and even 'forfeits' [but probably not the kissing-kind of forfeits] at them).

The girls grow up through the course of the book and the older one even has a gentleman caller of sorts...but the book ends before even marriage is proposed. VERY old-fashioned, in the stereotypical view we have of the 19th century - a (probably mostly imaginary) world where there were no "six month's babies" or hurried marriages or furtive gropings in the parlor, and where girls grew up to be either good wives and helpmeets who had many children, or else they were spinster schoolteachers beloved by their young charges (but apparently sexless and without much of a social life outside of caring for aged parents or working to better the lot of the poor)

If people die in the book it is beatifically and usually after some crippling suffering illness. And you know they've been whisked up to Heaven. Sentimental books. V., v. sentimental.

The book I referred to was published by the Congregational Sunday-School and Publishing Society in 1893. So there's no doubt as to the intentions. They also have a list of other acceptable books in the line in the back - most of the titles are lost to the mists of time but The Water Babies is there, as is The Princess and the Goblin.

Some of the descriptions of other books:
"this is a story showing in a charming way how one little girl's jealousy and bad temper were conquered..."
"Jill is a little guardian angel to three brothers who tease and play with her..."
"...the cheery helpfulness of spirit developed by the girls in their shared circumstances.."

In other words: improving. Moralistic. Designed to teach the kiddies how to behave.

The books would make any feminist's skin crawl but in their odd way I kind of like them - I think it's because they present an idealized world where everyone is happy and "pure" and thinks good thoughts and if they're poor, they're clean and quaint, and if they're rich, they're either generous souls or they're a Scrooge-type that you know will be shocked into redemption by the end of the book.

They're very simple, and I think that's why I like them. Even if in the real world there were marriages of necessity, or women so weakened by childbearing and corset wearing that they were dead by 45, or people addicted to opium or "Lydia Pinkham's" as an escape from their dreary world, or factory labor, or tainted food...I can kind of close my eyes to what I really know what happened from history and read about apple-picking and playing whist and girls sitting around in the evening sewing on their "waists," and the whole thing seems so cozy and SAFE.

Actually - The Bird's Christmas Carol that you spoke about some time back is not too far off of this style of book.