'The Lion's Masquerade' is a narrative poem written by Catherine Ann Dorset. Intended for a children audience, the poem revolves around a costume party hosted by a lion. The book is also part of a series featuring animals, with the previous installment focusing on the life of a peacock and a fancy ball hosted by a butterfly.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1883.

The animals get together for a costume parade where they each dress as other animals, including an elephant dressed as a parrot, a ladybug in a hippopotamus outfit, and a fish whose cat costume causes the others to dub him a "catfish."

It's the Carnevale of 1750 and Venice's ballrooms, theatres, palazzos and squares are filled with delicious gossip, devilish fun and dangerous games. In this glittering masked world, everyone has a secret... Set in an age of decadence made famous by Casanova, Masquerade uncovers the secrets of seven teens, from the highest aristocrat to the lowest servant - their dreams, desires, loves, loyalties ... and betrayals. All the world's a stage. Let the show begin.

In this collection the multidimensional story of children’s literature in the formative period of the long nineteenth century is illuminated, questioned, and, in some respects, rewritten. Children’s literature might be characterised as the love-child of the Enlightenment and the Romantic movements, and much of its history over the long nineteenth century shows it being defined, shaped, and co-opted by a variety of agents, each of whom has their own ambitions for it and for its child readership. Is children’s literature primarily a way of educating children in the principles of reason and morality? A celebration of the Rousseauesque child? A source of pleasure and entertainment? Women, both as writers and as nurturers involved at an intimate and daily level with the raising of children, recognised early and often very explicitly the multiple capacities of literature to provide entertainment, useful information, moral education and social training, and the occasionally conflicting nature of these functions. This book was originally published as a special issue of Women’s Writing.

In her reappraisal of canonical works such as Black Beauty, Beautiful Joe, Wind in the Willows, and Peter Rabbit, Tess Cosslett traces how nineteenth-century debates about the human and animal intersected with, or left their mark on, the venerable genre of the animal story written for children. Effortlessly applying a range of critical approaches, from Bakhtinian ideas of the carnivalesque to feminist, postcolonial, and ecocritical theory, she raises important questions about the construction of the child reader, the qualifications of the implied author, and the possibilities of children's literature compared with literature written for adults. Perhaps most crucially, Cosslett examines how the issues of animal speech and animal subjectivity were managed, at a time when the possession of language and consciousness had become a vital sign of the difference between humans and animals. Topics of great contemporary concern, such as the relation of the human and the natural, masculine and feminine, child and adult, are investigated within their nineteenth-century contexts, making this an important book for nineteenth-century scholars, children's literature specialists, and historians of science and childhood.