|
Children's literature first clearly
emerged as a distinct and independent form of literature in the second half of
the 18th century, before which it had been at best only in an embryonic stage.
During the 20th century, however, its growth has been so luxuriant as to make
defensible its claim to be regarded with the respect--though perhaps not the
solemnity--that is due any other recognized branch of literature.
All potential or actual young literates,
from the instant they can with joy leaf through a picture book or listen to a
story read aloud, to the age of perhaps 14 or 15, may be called children. Thus
"children" includes "young people." Two considerations blur
the definition. Today's young teenager is an anomaly: his environment pushes him
toward a precocious maturity. Thus, though he may read children's books, he
also, and increasingly, reads adult books. Second, the child survives in many
adults. As a result, some children's books (e.g.,
Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, A.A.
Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh, and, at one
time, Munro Leaf's Story of Ferdinand)
are also read widely by adults.
In the term children's literature, the
more important word is literature. For the most part, the adjective imaginative
is to be felt as preceding it. It comprises that vast, expanding territory
recognizably staked out for a junior audience, which does not mean that it is
not also intended for seniors. Adults admittedly make up part of its population:
children's books are written, selected for publication, sold, bought, reviewed,
and often read aloud by grown-ups. Sometimes they seem also to be written with
adults in mind, as for example the popular French Astérix
series of comics parodying history. Nevertheless, by and large there is
a sovereign republic of children's literature. To it may be added five
colonies or dependencies: first, "appropriated" adult books satisfying
two conditions--they must generally be read by children and they must have
sharply affected the course of children's literature (Daniel Defoe's Robinson
Crusoe, Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's
Travels, the collection of folktales by the brothers Jacob and Wilhelm
Grimm, the folk-verse anthology Des Knaben
Wunderhorn ["The Boy's Magic Horn"], edited by Achim von Arnim and
Clemens Brentano, and William Blake's Songs
of Innocence); second, books the audiences of which seem not to have been
clearly conceived by their creators (or their creators may have ignored, as
irrelevant, such a consideration) but that are now fixed stars in the child's
literary firmament (Mark Twain's Adventures
of Huckleberry Finn, and Charles
Perrault's fairy tales; third, picture books and easy-to-read stories commonly
subsumed under the label of literature but qualifying as such only by relaxed
standards (though Beatrix Potter and several other writers do nonetheless
qualify); fourth, first quality children's versions of adult classics (Walter de
la Mare's Stories from the Bible, perhaps
Howard Pyle's retellings of the Robin Hood ballads and tales; finally, the
domain of once oral "folk" material that children have kept alive -- folktales
and fairy tales; fables, sayings, riddles, charms, tongue twisters; folksongs,
lullabies, hymns, carols, and other simple poetry; rhymes of the street, the
playground, the nursery; and, supremely, Mother
Goose and nonsense verse. (see also oral
literature, folklore)
Five categories that are often
considered children's literature are excluded from this section. The broadest of
the excluded categories is that of unblushingly commercial and harmlessly
transient writing, including comic books, much of which, though it may please
young readers, and often for good reasons, is for the purposes of this article
notable only for its sociohistorical, rather than literary, importance. Second,
all books of systematic instruction are barred except those sparse examples (e.g.,
the work of John Amos Comenius) that illuminate the history of the subject.
Third, excluded from discussion is much high literature that was not originally
intended for children: from the past, Jean de La Fontaine's Fables,
James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking tales, Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe,
Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, Alexandre
Dumas' Three Musketeers, Rudyard
Kipling's Kim; from the modern period,
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings' Yearling, J.D.
Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, The Diary
of Anne Frank, Thor Heyerdahl's Kon-Tiki,
Enid Bagnold's National Velvet. A
fourth, rather minor, category comprises books about the young where the content
but not the style or point of view is relevant (Sir James Barrie's Sentimental
Tommy, William Golding's Lord of the
Flies, F. Anstey's [Thomas Anstey Guthrie] Vice
Versa). Finally, barred from central, though not all, consideration is the
"nonfiction," or fact, book. Except for a handful of such books, the
bright pages of which still rain influence or which possess artistic merit, this
literature should be viewed from its socioeducational-commercial aspect.
Many otherwise comprehensive histories
of literature slight or omit the child's reading interests. Many observers have
made explicit the suspicion that children's literature, like that of detection
or suspense, is "inferior." They cannot detect a sufficiently long
"tradition"; distinguish an adequate number of master works; or find,
to use on thoughtful critic's words, "style, sensibility, vision."
Others, holding a contrary view, assert
that a tradition of two centuries is not to be ignored.
Though the case for a children's
literature must primarily rest on its major writers (including a half dozen
literary geniuses), it is based as well on other supports that bolster its claim
to artistic stature.
Children's literature, while a tributary
of the literary mainstream, offers its own identifiable, semidetached history.
In part it is the issue of certain traceable social movements, of which the
"discovery" of the child (see below) is the most salient. It is
independent to the degree that, while it must meet many of the standards of
adult literature, it has also developed aesthetic criteria of its own by which
it may be judged. According to some of its finest practitioners, it is
independent, too, as the only existing literary medium enabling certain things
to be said that would otherwise remain unsaid or unsayable. The nature of its
audience sets it apart; it is often read, especially by children younger than
12, in a manner suggesting trance, distinct from that of adult reading.
Universally diffused among literate peoples, it offers a rich array of genres,
types, and themes, some resembling grown-up progenitors, many peculiar to
itself. Its "style, sensibility, vision" range over a spectrum wide
enough to span matter-of-fact realism and tenuous mysticism.
Other measures of its maturity include
an extensive body (notably in Germany, Italy, Sweden, Japan, and the United
States) of commentary, scholarship, criticism, history, biography, and
bibliography, along with the beginnings of an aesthetic theory or philosophy of
composition. Finally, one might note its power to engender its own institutions:
publishing houses, theatres, libraries, itinerant storytellers, critics,
periodicals, instruction in centres of higher learning, lectureships,
associations and conferences, "book weeks," collections, exhibitions,
and prizes. Indeed, the current institutionalizing of children's literature on
an international scale has gone so far, some feel, as to cast a shadow on the
spontaneity and lack of self-consciousness that should lie at its heart.
A self-aware literature flows from a
recognition of its proper subject matter. The proper subject matter of
children's literature, apart from informational or didactic works, is children.
More broadly, it embraces the whole content of the child's imaginative world and
that of his daily environment, as well as certain ideas and sentiments
characteristic of it. The population of this world is made up not only of
children themselves but of animated objects, plants, even grammatical and
mathematical abstractions; toys, dolls, and puppets; real, chimerical, and
invented animals; miniature or magnified humans; spirits or grotesques of wood,
water, air, fire, and space; supernatural and fantasy creatures; figures of
fairy tale, myth, and legend; imagined familiars and doppelgänger; and
grown-ups as seen through the child's eyes--whether Napoleon, Dr. Dolittle,
parents, or the corner grocer. That writers did not detect this lively cosmos
for two and a half millennia is one of the curiosities of literature. At any
moment there has always been a numerous, physically visible, and audible company
of children. Whether this sizable minority, appraised as literary raw material,
could be as rewarding as the adult majority was never asked.
And so, almost to the dawn of the
Industrial Revolution, children's literature remained recessive. The chief,
though not the only, reason is improbably simple: the child himself, though
there, was not seen--not seen, that is, as a child.
In preliterate societies he was and is
viewed in the light of his social, economic, and religious relationship to the
tribe or clan. Though he may be nurtured in all tenderness, he is thought of not
as himself but as a pre-adult, which is but one of his many forms. Among Old
Testament Jews the child's place in society replicated his father's, molded by
his relation to God. So, too, in ancient
Greece and Rome the child, dressed in the modified adult costume that
with appropriate changes of fashion remained his fate for centuries to come, was
conceived as a miniature adult. His importance lay not in himself but in what
Aristotle would have called his final cause: the potential citizen-warrior. A
girl child was a seedbed of future citizen-warriors. Hence classical literature
either does not see the child at all or misconstrues him. Astyanax and Ascanius,
as well as Medea's two children, are not persons. They are stage props.
Aristophanes scorns as unworthy of dramatic treatment the children in Euripides'
Alcestis. (see also
Roman Republic and Empire)
Throughout the Middle
Ages and far into the late Renaissance
the child remained, as it were, terra incognita. A sharp sense of generation
gap--one of the motors of a children's literature--scarcely existed. The family,
young and old, was a kind of homogenized mix. Sometimes children were even
regarded as infrahuman: for Montaigne
they had "neither mental activities nor recognizable body shape." The
year 1658 is a turning point. In that year a Moravian educator, Comenius,
published Orbis Sensualium Pictus (The
Visible World in Pictures1659), a teaching device that was also the first picture book for children.
It embodied a novel insight: children's reading should be of a special order
because children are not scaled-down adults. But the conscious, systematic, and
successful exploitation of this insight was to wait for almost a century.
It is generally felt that, both as a
person worthy of special regard and as an idea worthy of serious contemplation,
the child began to come into his own in the second half of the 18th century. His
emergence, as well as that of a literature suited to his needs, is linked to
many historical forces, among them the development of Enlightenment thought
(Rousseau and, before him, John Locke); the rise of the middle class; the
beginnings of the emancipation of women (children's literature, unlike that for
grown-ups, is in large measure a distaff product) and Romanticism, with its
minor strands of the cult of the child (Wordsworth and others) and of genres
making a special appeal to the young (folktales and fairy tales, myths,
ballads). Yet, with all these forces working for the child, he still might not
have emerged had it not been for a few unpredictable geniuses: William Blake,
Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, George MacDonald, Louisa May Alcott, Mark Twain,
Collodi, Hans Christian Andersen. But, once tentatively envisaged as an
independent being, a literature proper to him could also be envisaged. And so in
the mid-18th century what may be defined as children's literature was at last
developing.
Even after the child had been
recognized, his literature on occasion persisted in viewing him as a diminutive
adult. More characteristically, however, "realistic" (that is,
nonfantastic) fiction in all countries regarded the discovered child in a mirror
that provided only a partial reflection of him. There are fewer instances of
attempts to present the child whole, in the round, than there are (as in Tolstoy
or Joyce) attempts to represent the whole adult. Twain's Huck Finn, Erich Kästner's
Emil (in Emil and the Detectives),
Vadim Frolov's Sasha (in What It's All
About), and Maria Gripe's delightful Josephine all exemplify in-the-round
characterization. More frequently, however, children's literature portrays the
young as types. Thus there is the brand of hell of the Puritan tradition; the
moral child of Mrs. Trimmer; the well-instructed child of Madame de Genlis; the
small upper class benefactor of Arnaud Berquin; the naughty child, modulated
variously in Catherine Sinclair's Holiday House and in the books of Comtesse de Ségur, E.
Nesbit, Dr. Heinrich Hoffmann (Struwwelpeter),
and Wilhelm Busch (Max und Moritz);
the rational child of Maria Edgeworth; the little prig of Thomas Day's Sandford
and Merton; the little angel (Frances Hodgson Burnett's Little
Lord Fauntleroy); the forlorn waif (Hector Malot's Sans Famille); the manly, outdoor child (Arthur Ransome's Swallows
and Amazons); etc. The rationale behind these shifting visions of childhood
is akin to Renaissance theories of "humours" or "the ruling
passion." Progress in children's literature depended partly on abandoning
this mechanical, part-for-the-whole attitude. One encouraging note in realistic
children's fiction of the second half of the 20th century in all advanced
countries is the appearance of a more organic view.
A third universal feature: children's
literature appears later than adult and grows more slowly. Only after the trail
has been well blazed does it make use of new techniques, whether of composition
or illustration. As for content, only after World War II did it exploit certain
realistic themes and attitudes, turning on race, class, war, and sex, that had
been part of general literature at least since the 1850s. This tardiness may be
due to the child's natural conservatism.
Fourth, the tempo of development varies
sharply from country to country and from region to region. It is plausible that
England should create a complex children's literature, while a less-developed
region (the Balkans, for example) might not. Less clear is why the equally high
cultures of France and England should be represented by unequal literatures.
The fifth, and most striking, general
feature is the creative tension resulting from a constantly shifting balance
between two forces: that of the pulpit-schoolroom and that of the imagination.
The first force may take on many guises. It may stress received religious or
moral doctrine, thus generating the Catholic children's literature of Spain or
the moral tale of Georgian and early Victorian England. It may bear down less on
morality than on mere good manners, propriety, or adjustment to the prevailing
social code. It may emphasize nationalist or patriotic motives, as in Edmondo De
Amicis' post-Risorgimento Cuore (The
Heart of a Child) or much Soviet production. Or its concern may be
pedagogical, the imparting of "useful" information, frequently
sugarcoated in narrative or dialogue. Whatever its form, it is distinguishable
from the shaping spirit of imagination, which ordinarily embodies itself in
children's games and rhymes, the fairy tale, the fantasy, animal stories such as
Kipling's Jungle Books, nonsense,
nonmoral poetry, humour, or the realistic novel conceived as art rather than
admonition. (see also didactic
literature)
Children's literature designed for
entertainment rather than self-improvement, aiming at emotional expansion rather
than acculturation, usually develops late. Alice in Wonderland, the first supreme victory of the imagination
(except for Mother Goose), did not
appear until 1865. Frequently the literature of delight has underground sources
of nourishment and inspiration: oral tradition, nursery songs, and the folkish
institutions of the chapbook and the penny romance. (see also
rhyme)
While the didactic and the imaginative
are conveniently thought of as polar, they need not always be inimical. Little
Women and Robinson Crusoe are at once didactically moral and highly poetical.
Nevertheless, many of the acknowledged classics in the field, from Alice
to The Hobbit, incline to
fantasy, which is less true of literature for grown-ups.
Keeping these five general features of
development in mind, certain criteria may now be suggested as helpful in making
a gross estimate of the degree of that development within any given country.
Some of these criteria are artistic. Others link with social progress, wealth,
technological level, or the political structure. In what seems their order of
importance, these criteria are:
1. Degree of awareness of the child's
identity (see above).
2. Progress made beyond passive
dependence on oral tradition, folklore, and legend.
3. Rise of a class of professional
writers, as distinct from moral reformers, schoolteachers, clerics, or versatile
journalists--all those who, for pedagogical, doctrinal, or pecuniary reasons
turn themselves into writers for children. For example, a conscious Italian
literature for young people may be said to have begun in 1776 with the
Rev. Francesco Soave's moralistic "Short Stories," and largely because
that literature continued to be composed largely by nonprofessionals, its record
has been lacklustre. It took more than a century after the Rev. Francesco to
produce a Pinocchio. And only in the
20th century, as typified by the outstanding work of a professional like Gianni
Rodari (e.g., Telephone Tales), did
children's literature in Italy seem to be getting into full stride.
4. Degree of independence from
authoritarian controls: church, state, school system, a rigid family structure.
Although this criterion might be rejected by historians of some nations, one
must somehow try to explain why the Spanish, a great and imaginative people,
took so long--indeed until 1952--to produce, in Sanchez-Silva, a children's
writer of any notable talent.
5. Number of "classics" the
influence of which transcends national boundaries.
6. Invention of new forms or genres and
the exploitation of a variety of traditional ones.
7. Measure of dependence on
translations.
8. Quantity of primary literature: that
is, annual production of children's books and, more to the point, of good
children's books.
9. Quantity of secondary literature:
richness and scope of a body of scholarship, criticism, reviewing.
10. Level of institutional development:
libraries, publishing houses, associations, etc.
To these criteria some might add a
vigorous tradition of illustration. But that is arguable. While Beatrix Potter's
words and pictures compose an indivisible unit, it is equally true that a
country may produce a magnificent school of artists (Czechoslovakia's Jirí
Trnka, Ota Janecek, and others) without developing a literature of
matching depth and variety.
The first application of such standards
reveals the expected: a gap separating the achievement of the Far East from that
of the West. Some Eastern literatures (New Guinea) have not advanced beyond the
stage of oral tradition. Others (India, the Philippines, Ceylon, Iran) have been
handicapped by language problems. Professional children's writers are rarer than
in the West: according to D.R. Kalia, former director of the Delhi Public
Library, "No such class exists in Hindi." In Japan, authoritarian
patterns--filial piety and ancestor worship--have operated as brakes, though far
less since World War II. A low economic level and inadequate technology
discourage, in such countries as Burma, Sri Lanka (Ceylon), and Thailand, the
origination and distribution of indigenous writing. A towering roadblock is the
tendency to imitate the children's books of the West. (see also
Indian literature, Japanese
literature)
It is true that this vast Eastern
region, considered as a whole, has produced a number of works ranking as
"classics." Most advanced is Japan. Its literature for children goes
back at least to the late 19th century and by 1928 was established in its own
right. Japan's "discovery" of the child seems to have been made
directly after World War II. In Iwaya Sazanami, Japan has its Grimm; in Ogawa
Minei, perhaps its Andersen; in the contemporary Ishii Momoko, a critic and
creative writer of quality; in Takeyama Michio's Harp of Burma (available in English), a high-quality postwar
controversial novel. But, though less markedly in Japan, the basic Oriental
inspiration remains fixed in folklore (also, in China and Japan, in nursery
songs and rhymes), and the didactic imperative continues to act as a hobble. By
most criteria the development of Eastern (as compared with Western) children's
literature still appears to be sparse and tentative.
In western Europe there is a sharp
variation or unevenness, as between north and south, in the tempo of
development. This basic feature was first pointed out by Paul
Hazard, a French critic, in Les
Livres, les enfants et les hommes (Eng. trans. by Marguerite Mitchell, Books,
Children and Men, 1944; 4th ed., 1960): "In the matter of literature
for children the North surpasses the South by a large margin." For Hazard,
Spain had no children's literature; Italy, with its Pinocchio and Cuore, could
point only to an isolated pair of works of note, and even France in order to
strengthen its claims had to include northern Frenchmen: Erckmann-Chatrian,
Jules Verne--and the classic Comtesse de Ségur came from Russia.
Hazard wrote in the 1920s. Since then
the situation has improved, not only in his own country, but in Italy and in
Portugal. Yet he is essentially correct: the south cannot match the richness of
England, Scotland, Germany, and the Scandinavian countries. To reinforce his
position, one might also adduce the United States, noting that the Mason-Dixon
line is (though not in the field of general literature) a dividing line: the
American South, even including the Uncle Remus stories, has supplied very little
good children's reading. As for nursery literature, though analogous rhymes are
found everywhere, especially in China, the English Mother
Goose is unique in the claims made for it as a work of art.
Why is the north superior to the south?
The first criterion of development may be illuminating. It simply restates
Hazard's dictum: "For the Latins, children have never been anything but
future men. The Nordics have understood better this truer truth, that men are
only grown-up children." ("Adults are obsolete children," says
the American children's author "Dr. Seuss.") Hazard does not mention
other factors. Historically, the south has shown greater attachment to
authoritarian controls. Also, up to recent times, it has depended heavily on
reworked folklore as against free invention. Besides, there is the mysterious
factor of climate: it could be true that children in Latin countries mature
faster and are sooner ready for adult literature. In France a special
intellectual tradition, that of Cartesian logic, tends to discourage a
children's literature. Clear and distinct ideas, excellent in themselves, do not
seem to feed the youthful imagination.
Again applying the chosen criteria,
familiar patterns are recognizable: unevenness, as compared with the United
States; belatedness -- in Argentina
the cuento infantil is hardly
detectable before 1900; and especially an unbalanced polarity, with didacticism
decidedly the stronger magnet. The close connection of the church with the
child's family and school life has encouraged a literature stressing piety, and
this at a time when the West, at least in its northern latitudes, is concerned
less with the salvation than with the imagination of the child. Fantasy emerged
only in the 1930s, in Brazil
and in Mexico, where a Spanish
exile, Antoniorrobles (pen name of Antonio Robles), continued to develop his
inventive vein. And realistic writing about the actual life of the young evolved
even more deliberately, being generally marked by a patriotic note. Though
understandable and wholesome, this did not seem to help the cause of the
imagination.
Folklore has been vigorously exploited,
often by scholars of high repute. It is largely influenced by the legendry of
Spain. Cuba, however, has
produced interesting Afro-American tales for children; Argentina offers some
indigenous folk stories and tales of gaucho life; and Central America is rich in
native traditional verse enjoyed by children.
Latin American literature in general
displays a special characteristic, part of its Iberian heritage: a partiality
for linguistic decoration, which is unpalatable to the relatively
straightforward taste of the young reader. Also the Latin-American view of the
child remains tinged with a sentimentality from which many European countries
and the United States had by 1914 more or less freed themselves. Thus verse for
children, a medium specially cultivated in Latin America, has run to the soft,
the sweet, even the lachrymose rather than to the gay, the humorous, or the
sanguine--moods more congenial to the child's sensibility. This is true even of
the children's verse of the Nobel Prize-winning poet Gabriela
Mistral. To these two weaknesses one must add a third: the practical
difficulty involved in the fact that most families cannot afford books. The
absence of a powerful middle class has had a retarding effect. (see also
poetry)
Children in Latin America often complain
that the authors write not for them but for their parents. They are given lectura
("reading matter") rather than literatura,
which is but to say that in Latin America the admonitory note, considered so
useful by church, state, and parent, continues to be sounded.
In summary, and applying the criteria:
some less advanced Latin-American countries can hardly be said to have a
children's literature at all. Others have produced notable writers: Brazil's José
Bento Monteiro Lobato, Argentina's Ana Maria Berry, Colombia's Rafael Pombo,
Uruguay's Horacio Quiroga. Yet the quality gap separating Latin-American
children's literature from that of its northern neighbour is still wide.
The English have often confessed a
certain reluctance to say good-bye to childhood. This curious national trait,
baffling to their continental neighbours, may lie at the root of their supremacy
in children's literature. Yet it remains a mystery.
But, if it cannot be accounted for, it
can be summed up. From the critic's vantage point, the English (as well as the
Scots and the Welsh) must be credited with having originated or triumphed in
more children's genres than any other country. They have excelled in the school
story, two solid centuries of it, from Sarah Fielding's The
Governess; or, The Little Female Academy (1745) to, say, C. Day Lewis' Otterbury Incident (1948) and including such milestones as Thomas
Hughes's Tom Brown's School Days (1857)
and Kipling's Stalky & Co. (1899);
and the boy's adventure story, with one undebatable world masterpiece in
Stevenson's Treasure Island (1883),
plus a solid line of talented practitioners, from the Victorian Robert
Ballantyne (The Coral Island) to the
contemporary Richard Church and Leon Garfield (Devil-in-the-Fog); the "girls' book," often trash but
possessing in Charlotte M. Yonge
at least one writer of exceptional vitality; historical fiction, from Marryat's
vigorous but simple Children of the New
Forest (1847) to the even more vigorous but burnished novels of Rosemary
Sutcliff; the "vacation story," in which Arthur Ransome still remains
unsurpassed; the doll story, from Margaret Gatty and Richard Henry Horne to the
charming fancies of Rumer Godden and the remarkable serious development of this
tiny genre in Pauline Clarke's Return of
the Twelves (1962); the realism-cum-fantasy novel, for which E. Nesbit
provided a classic, and P.L. Travers a modern, formulation; high fantasy (Lewis
Carroll, George MacDonald, C.S. Lewis, Alan Garner); nonsense (Carroll again,
Lear, Belloc); and nursery rhymes. In Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels and Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, the English furnished two archetypal narratives
that have bred progeny all over the world, and in Mary Norton's
Tom-Thumb-and-Gulliver-born The Borrowers (1952)
a work of art. In Leslie Brooke (Johnny
Crow's Garden) and Beatrix Potter
(e.g., The Tale of Peter Rabbit) they
have two geniuses of children's literature (and illustration) for very small
children--probably the most difficult of all the genres. In poetry they begin at
the top with William Blake and continue with Christina Rossetti, Robert Louis
Stevenson, Eleanor Farjeon, Walter de la Mare, A.A.
Milne, and James Reeves. In the mutation of fantasy called whimsy, Milne
(Winnie-the-Pooh) reappears as a
master. In the important field of the animal story, Kipling, with his Jungle
Books (1894, 1895) and Just So Stories
(1902), remains unsurpassed. Finally the English have produced a number of
unclassifiable masterpieces such as Kenneth Grahame's Wind
in the Willows (which is surely more than an animal story) and several
unclassifiable writers (Mayne and Lucy Boston, for example).
The social historian, surveying the same
field from a different angle, would point out that the English were the first
people in history to develop not only a self-conscious, independent children's
literature but also the commercial institutions capable of supporting and
furthering it. He would note the striking creative swing between didacticism and
delight. He would detect the sources in ballads, chapbooks, nurses' rhymes, and
street literature that have at critical moments prompted the imagination. What
would perhaps interest him most is the way in which children's literature
reflects, over more than two centuries, the child's constantly shifting position
in society.
"Children's books did not stand out
by themselves as a clear but subordinate branch of English literature until the
middle of the 18th century." At least one critic has used
"prehistorical" to designate all children's books published in England
up to 1744, when John Newbery offered A Little Pretty Pocket-Book.
Before that, and as far back as the
Middle Ages, children came in contact with schoolroom letters. There was the
Anglo-Saxon theologian and historian the Venerable Bede, with his textbook on
natural science, De natura rerum. There
were the question-and-answer lesson books of the great English scholar Alcuin;
the Colloquy of the English abbot
Aelfric; the Elucidarium of the
archbishop of Canterbury Anselm, often thought of as the first
"encyclopaedia" for young people. Not until the mid-14th century was
English (the genius of which somehow seems fitter than Latin for children's
books) thought of as proper for literature. For his son "litel Lowis" Geoffrey
Chaucer wrote in English the "Treatise on the Astrolabe"
(1391). The English child was also afflicted, in the 15th and 16th centuries, by
many "Books of Courtesy" (such as The
Babees Boke, c. 1475), the ancestors of modern, equally ineffective manuals
of conduct. (see also nonfictional
prose)
Along with these instructional works,
there flourished, at least from the very early Renaissance, an unofficial or
popular literature. It may not have been meant for children but--no one quite
knows how--children managed to recognize it as their own. It included fables,
especially those of Aesop; folk legends, such as those in the much read Gesta Romanorum; bestiaries, which, along with Aesop, may be
ancestral to that flourishing children's genre, the animal story; romances,
often clustering around King Arthur and Robin Hood; fairy
tales, of which Jack the Giant Killer was the type; and nursery rhymes,
probably largely orally transmitted. Perhaps the most influential underground
literature consisted of the chapbooks,
low-priced folded sheets containing ballads and romances (Bevis of Southampton, and The
Seven Champions of Christendom [1597] were favourites), sold by wandering
hawkers and peddlers. They fed the imagination of the poor, old and young, from
Queen Anne's reign almost through Queen Victoria's. These native products of
fancy were, in the early 18th century, reinforced by the first English
translations of the classically simple French fairy tales of Charles Perrault
and the more self-conscious ones of Madame D'Aulnoy. (see also
bestiary)
Against this primitive literature of
entertainment stands a primitive literature of didacticism stretching back to
the early Middle Ages. This underwent a Puritan mutation after the Restoration.
It is typified by that classic for the potentially damned child, A
Token for Children (1671), by James Janeway. The Puritan outlook was
elevated by Bunyan's Pilgrim's
Progress(1678),
which, often in simplified form, was either forced upon children or more
probably actually enjoyed by them in lieu of anything better. Mrs. Overtheway
(in Juliana Ewing's Mrs. Overtheway's
Remembrances, 1869), recalling her childhood reading, refers to it as
"that book of wondrous fascination." A softened Puritanism
also reveals itself in Bunyan's Book for
Boys and Girls: or, Country Rhymes for Children (1686), as well as the Divine
and Moral Songs for Children by the hymn composer Isaac
Watts, whose "How doth the little busy bee" still exhales a
faint endearing charm.
The entire pre-1744 period is redeemed
by two works of genius. Neither Robinson Crusoenor Gulliver's
Travelswas meant
for children. Immediately abridged and bowdlerized, they were seized upon by the
prosperous young. The poorer ones, the great majority, had to wait for the
beginning of the cheap reprint era. Both books fathered an immense progeny in
the children's field. Defoe
engendered a whole school of "Robinsonnades" in most European
countries, the most famous example being Wyss's Swiss
Family Robinson (1812-13).
On the whole, during the millennium
separating Alcuin from Newbery, the child's mind was thought of, if at all, as
something to be improved; his imagination as something to be shielded; his soul
as something to be saved. And on the whole the child's mind, imagination, and
soul resisted, persisted, and somehow, whether in a dog-eared penny history of The
Babes in the Wood or the matchless chronicle of Gulliver among the
Lilliputians, found its own nourishment.
Napoleon called the English a
"nation of shopkeepers," and in England art may owe much to trade.
Children's literature in England got its start from merchants such as Thomas
Boreman, of whom little is known, and especially John Newbery, of whom a great
deal more is known. Research has established that at least as early as 1730
Boreman began publishing for
children (largely educational works) and that in 1742 he produced what sounds
like a recreational story, Cajanus, the
Swedish Giant. Beginnings of English children's literature might be dated
from the first decade of the 18th century, when a tiny 12-page, undated book
called A Little Book for Little Children by
"T.W." appeared. It is instructional but, as the critic Percy Muir
says, important as the earliest publication in English "to approach the
problem from the point of view of the child rather than the adult." In sum,
without detracting from the significance of Newbery, it may be said that he was
merely the first great success in a field that had already undergone a certain
amount of exploitation.
The elevation of the
publisher-bookseller-editor Newbery (who also sold patent medicines) to the
position of patron saint is an excusable piece of sentiment. Perhaps it
originated with one of his back writers who doubled as a man of genius. In
Chapter XVIII of The Vicar of Wakefield (1766),
Oliver Goldsmith lauds his
employer as "the philanthropic bookseller of St. Paul's Churchyard, who has
written so many books for children, calling himself their friend, but who was
the friend of all mankind." There is no reason to believe that Newbery was
anything but an alert businessman who discovered and shrewdly exploited a new
market: middle class children, or rather their parents. Nevertheless this was a
creative act. In 1744 he published A
Little Pretty Pocket-. Its ragbag of contents--pictures of children's
games, jingles, fables, "an agreeable Letter to read from Jack the Giant
Killer," plus a bonus in the form of "a Ball and a
Pincushion"--are of interest only because, addressing itself
single-mindedly to a child audience, it aimed primarily at diversion. Thus
children's literature clearly emerged into the light of day.
The climate of Newbery's era was
nevertheless more suited to a literature of didacticism than to one of
diversion. John Locke's Some
Thoughts concerning Education(1693) is often cited as an early Enlightenment emancipatory influence. But
close inspection of this manual for the mental conditioning of gentlemen reveals
a strong English stress on character building and practical learning. Locke
thinks little of the natural youthful inclination to poetry: "It is seldom
seen that anyone discovers mines of Gold or Silver in Parnassus." He does
endorse, as a daring idea, the notion that a child should read for pleasure, and
he recommends Aesop. But the decisive influence was not Locke's. It came from
across the Channel with Rousseau's
best-seller Émile (1762). What
is positive in Rousseau--his recognition that the child should not be too soon
forced into the straitjacket of adulthood--was more or less ignored. Other of
his doctrines had a greater effect on children's literature. For all his talk of
freedom, he provided his young Émile with an amiable tyrant for a
teacher, severely restricting his reading to one book Robinson
Crusoe. It was his didactic strain, exemplified in the moral French
children's literature of Arnaud Berquin and Madame de Genlis, that attracted the
English. (see also "Emile:
or, On Education," )
They took more easily to Rousseau's
emphasis on virtuous conduct and instruction via "nature" than they
did to his advocacy of the liberation of personality. Some writers, such as
Thomas Day, with his long-lived Sandford
and Merton, were avowedly Rousseauist. Others took from him what appealed to
them. Sarah Kirby Trimmer, whose Fabulous
Histories specialized in piety, opposed the presumably free-thinking
Rousseau on religious grounds but was in other respects strongly influenced by
him. The same is true of Anna
Laetitia Barbauld, with her characteristically titled Lessons
for Children. But Mary Martha Sherwood could hardly have sympathized with
Rousseau's notion of the natural innocence of children; the author of The
History of the Fairchild Family (1818-47) based her family chronicle on the
proposition (which she later softened) that "all children are by nature
evil." Of all the members of the flourishing Rousseauist or
quasi-Rousseauist school of the moral
tale, only one was a true writer. Maria
Edgeworth may still be read.
Though the tone varies from Miss
Edgeworth's often sympathetic feeling for children to Mrs. Sherwood's
Savonarolan severities, one idea dominates: a special literature for the child
must be manufactured in order to improve or reform him. The reigning mythology
is that of reason, a mythology difficult to sell to the young.
Yet during the period from John
Newbery's Little Pretty Pocket-Book to
Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, children's
literature also showed signs of antisolemnity. In verse there was first of all William
Blake. His Songs
of Innocence(1789)
was not written for children, perhaps indeed not written for anyone. But its
fresh, anti-restrictive sensibility, flowing from a deep love for the very
young, decisively influenced all English verse for children. Yet the poetry the
young really read or listened to at the opening of the 19th century was not
Blake but Original Poems for Infant Minds (1804),
by "Several Young Persons," including Ann and Jane Taylor. The Taylor
sisters, though adequately moral, struck a new note of sweetness, of humour, at
any rate of nonpriggishness. Their "Twinkle, twinkle, little star,"
included in Rhymes for the Nursery (1806),
has not only been memorized but actually liked by many generations of small
children. No longer read, but in its way similarly revolutionary, was The
Butterfly's Ball and the Grasshopper's Feast (1807), by William Roscoe, a
learned member of Parliament and writer on statistics. The gay and fanciful
nonsense of this rhymed satiric social skit enjoyed, despite the seeming
dominance of the moral Barbaulds and Trimmers, a roaring success. Great nonsense
verse, however, had to await the coming of a genius, Edward
Lear, whose Book of Nonsense(1846) was partly the product of an emergent and not easily explainable
Victorian feeling for levity and partly the issue of a fruitfully neurotic
personality, finding relief for its frustrations in the noncontingent world of
the absurd and the free laughter of children.
In prose may be noted, toward the end of
the period under discussion, the dawn of romantic historical fiction, with Frederick
Marryat's Children
of the New Forest(1847),
a story of the English Civil War; and of the manly open-air school novel, with Thomas
Hughes's Tom
Brown's School Days(1857).
A prominent milestone in the career of the "realistic" children's
family novel is Holiday House (1839),
by Catherine Sinclair, in which at last there are children who are noisy, even
naughty, yet not destined for purgatory. Though Miss Sinclair's book does
conclude with a standard deathbed scene, the overall atmosphere is one of
gaiety. The victories in the field of children's literature may seem small, but
they can be decisive. It was a small, decisive victory to have introduced in Holiday
House an Uncle David, whose parting admonition to his nieces and nephews is:
"Now children! I have only one piece of serious, important advice to give
you all, so attend to me!--Never crack nuts with your teeth!"
A similar note was struck by Henry
(later Sir Henry) Cole with
his Home Treasury series, featuring
traditional fairy tales, ballads, and rhymes. The fairy tale then began to come
into its own, perhaps as a natural reaction to the moral tale. John
Ruskin's King of the Golden River (1851) and William
Makepeace Thackeray's "fireside pantomime" The
Rose and the Ring(1855) were signs of a changing climate, even though the Grimm-like
directness of the first is partly neutralized by Ruskin's moralistic bent and
the gaiety of the second is spoiled by a laborious, parodic slyness. More
important than these fairy tales, however, was the aid supplied by continental
allies: the English publication in 1823-26 of the Grimms' Fairy
Tales; in 1846 of Andersen's utterly personal fairy tales and folktales; in
the '40s and '50s of other importations from the country of fancy, notably Sir
George Dasent's version of the stirring Popular
Tales from the Norse (1859), collected by Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and
J.E. Moe. Though the literature of improvement continued to maintain its vigour,
England was readying itself for Lewis Carroll.
In 1863 there appeared The Water-Babies by Charles
Kingsley. In this fascinating, yet repulsive, "Fairy Tale for a
Land-Baby," an unctuous cleric and a fanciful poet, uneasily inhabiting one
body, collaborated. The Water-Babies may
stand as a rough symbol of the bumpy passage from the moral tale to a lighter,
airier world. Only two years later that passage was achieved in a masterpiece by
an Oxford mathematical don, the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis
Carroll). Alice's Adventures in
Wonderland improved none, delighted all. It opened what from a limited
perspective seems the Golden Age of English children's literature, a literature
in fair part created by Scotsmen: George Macdonald, Andrew Lang, Robert Louis
Stevenson, Kenneth Grahame, James Barrie. (see also
Scottish literature)
The age is characterized by a literary
level decisively higher than that previously achieved; the creation of
characters now permanent dwellers in the child's imagination (from Alice herself
to Mary Poppins, and including Long John Silver, Mowgli, intelligent Mr. Toad,
and--if Hugh Lofting, despite his American residence, be accepted as
English--Dr. Dolittle); the exaltation of the imagination in the work of
Carroll, Macdonald, Stevenson, E.
Nesbit, Grahame, Barrie, Hudson, Lofting, Travers, and the early Tolkien
(The Hobbit [1938]); the establishment
of the art fairy tale (Jean Ingelow with Mopsa the Fairy [1869]; Dinah Maria Mulock Craik with The
Little Lame Prince [1875]; Mrs. Ewing with Old
Fashioned Fairy Tales [1882]; Barrie's Peter
Pan [1904]; and the exquisite artifices of Oscar
Wilde in The Happy Prince, and
Other Tales [1888]); the transmutation and popularization, by Andrew
Lang, Joseph Jacobs, and others, of traditional fairy tales from all
sources; the development of a quasi-realistic school in the fiction of Charlotte
M. Yonge (Countess Kate); Mrs.
Ewing (Jan of the Windmill); and Mrs.
Molesworth; and, furthering this trend, a growing literary population of real,
or at least more real, children (by E. Nesbit and Ransome).
It is further characterized by the rapid
evolution of a dozen now-basic genres, including the school story, the
historical novel, the vacation story, the "group" or "gang"
novel, the boy's adventure tale, the girl's domestic novel, the animal tale, the
career novel (Noel Streatfeild's Ballet
Shoes, 1936), the work of pure whimsy (A.A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh, 1926); the solution, a brilliant one by Beatrix
Potter and a charming one by L. Leslie Brooke, of the problem of creating
literature for pre-readers and
beginning readers; and the growth of an impressive body of children's verse: the
lyric delicacy of Christina Rossetti
in Sing-Song (1872), the accurate
reflection of the child's world in Stevenson's Child's
Garden of Verses, the satirical nonsense of Hilaire
Belloc in his The Bad Child's Book
of Beasts (1896), the incantatory, other-worldly magic of Walter
de la Mare with his Songs of
Childhood (1902) and Peacock Pie (1913),
the fertile gay invention of Eleanor
Farjeon, and the irresistible charm of Milne in When
We Were Very Young (1924).
Finally it is characterized by the
dominance in children's fiction of middle and upper middle class mores; the
appearance, in the late 1930s, with Eve Garnett's The Family from One End Street, of stories showing a sympathetic
concern with the lives of slum children; the reflection, also in the 30s, of a
serious interest, influenced by modern psychology, in the structure of the
child's vision of the world; the rise, efflorescence, and decline of the
children's magazine: Boy's
Own Magazine (1855-74), Good Words for
the Young (1867-77), Aunt Judy's
Magazine (1866-85), and--famous for its outstanding contributors--The Boy's Own Paper (1879-1912); the beginning, with F.J.H. Darton
and other scholars, of an important critical-historical literature;
institutionalization, commercialization, standardization--the popularity, for
example, of the "series"; and the dominating influence of the better
English work on the reading taste of American, Continental, and Oriental
children.
During these 80 years a vast amount of
trash and treacle was produced. What will be remembered is the work of a few
dozen creative writers who applied to literature for children standards as high
as those ordinarily applied to mainstream literature.
If the contemporary wood cannot be seen
for the trees, it is in part because the number of trees has grown so great. The
profusion of English, as of children's books in general, makes judgment
difficult. Livelier merchandising techniques (the spread of children's
bookshops, for example), the availability of cheap paperbacks, improved library
services, serious and even distinguished reviewing--these are among the
post-World War II institutional trends helping to place more books in the hands
of more children. Slick transformation formulas facilitate the rebirth of books
in other guises: radio, television, records, films, digests, cartoon versions.
Such processes may also create new child audiences, but that these readers are
undergoing a literary experience is open to doubt.
Among the genres that fell in favour,
the old moral tale, if not a
corpse, surely became obsolescent but raised the question whether it was being
replaced by a subtler form of didactic literature, preaching racial, class, and
international understanding. The standard adventure story too seemed to be dying
out, though excellent examples, such as The Cave (U.S. title, Five
Boys in a Cave [1950]), by Richard Church, continued to appear. The boy's
school story suffered a similar fate, despite the remarkable work of William
Mayne in A Swarm in May (1955).
Children's vese by Ian Serraillier, Ted Hughes, James Reeves, and the later
Eleanor Farjeon, excellent though it was, did not speak with the master tones of
a de la Mare or the precise simplicity of a Stevenson. In science fiction one
would have expected more of a boom; yet nothing appeared comparable to Jules
Verne.
Conversely, there was a genuine boom in
fact books: biographical series, manuals of all sorts, popularized history,
junior encyclopaedias. Preschool and easy-to-read beginners' books, often
magnificently produced, multiplied. So did specially prepared decoys for the
reluctant reader. After the discovery of the child came that of the postchild:
conscientiously composed teen-age and "young adult" novels were issued
in quantity, though the quality still left something to be desired. A
19th-century phenomenon--experimentation in the juvenile field by those who
normally write for grown-ups--took on a second life after World War II. Naomi
Mitchison, Richard Church, P.H. Newby, Richard Graves, Eric Linklater, Norman
Collins, Roy Fuller, C. Day Lewis, and Ian
Fleming, with his headlong pop extravaganza Chitty
Chitty Bang Bang(1964),
come to mind.
A post-World War II stress on building
bridges of understanding was reflected both in an increase in translations and
in the publication of books, whether fiction or nonfiction, dealing responsibly
and unsentimentally with the sufferings of a war-wounded world. One example
among many was Serraillier's Silver Sword (1958),
recounting the trans-European adventures that befell four Polish children after
the German occupation. The Silver Sword was
a specialized instance of a general trend toward the interpretation for children
of a postwar world of social incoherence, race and class conflict, urban
poverty, and even mental pathology. Such novels as John Rowe Townsend's Gumble's
Yard (1961); Widdershins Crescent (1965);
Pirate's Island (1968); Eve Garnett's Further
Adventures of the Family from One End Street (1956); and Leila Berg's Box
for Benny (1958) represented a new realistic school, restrained in England,
less so in the United States, but manifest in the children's literature of much
of the world. It failed to produce a masterpiece, perhaps because the form of
the realistic novel must be moderately distorted to make it suitable for
children. (see also realism)
In two fields, however, English postwar
children's literature set new records. These were the historical
novel and that cloudy area comprising fantasy, freshly wrought myth, and
indeed any fiction not rooted in the here and now.
There was fair reason to consider
Rosemary Sutcliff not only the finest writer of historical fiction for children
but quite unconditionally among the best historical novelists using English. A
sound scholar and beautiful stylist, she made few concessions to the presumably
simple child's mind and enlarged junior historical fiction with a long series of
powerful novels about England's remote past, especially that dim period
stretching from pre-Roman times to the coming of Christianity. Among her best
works are The Eagle of the Ninth (1954),
The Shield Ring (1956), The
Silver Branch (1957), The Lantern
Bearers (1959), and especially Warrior
Scarlet (1958).
Not as finished in style, but bolder in
the interpretation of history in terms "reflecting the changed values of
the age," was the pioneering Geoffrey Trease. He also produced excellent
work in other juvenile fields. Typical of his highest energies is the exciting Hills
of Varna (1948), a story of the Italian Renaissance in which Erasmus and the
great printer Aldus Manutius figure prominently. Henry
Treece, whose gifts were directed to depicting violent action and
vigorous, barbaric characters, produced a memorable series of Viking novels of
which Swords from the North (1967) is
typical.
This new English school, stressing
conscientious scholarship, realism, honesty, social awareness, and general
disdain for mere swash and buckle, produced work that completely eclipsed the
rusty tradition of Marryat and George Alfred Henty. Some of its foremost
representatives were Cynthia Harnett, Serraillier, Barbara Leonie Picard, Ronald
Welch (pseudonym of Ronald O. Felton), C. Walter Hodges, Hester Burton, Mary
Ray, Naomi Mitchison, and K.M. Peyton, whose "Flambards" series is a
kind of Edwardian historical family chronicle. Leon Garfield, though not working
with historical characters, created strange picaresque tales that gave children
a thrilling, often chilling insight into the 18th-century England of Smollett
and Fielding.
In the realm of imagination England not
only retained but enhanced its supremacy with such classics as Tom's
Midnight Garden (1958), by Ann Philippa Pearce, a haunting, perfectly
constructed story in which the present and Victoria's age blend into one. There
is the equally haunting Green Knowe series, by Lucy M. Boston,
the first of which, The Children of Greene
Knowe, appeared when the author was 62. The impingement of a world of legend
and ancient, unsleeping magic upon the real world is the basic theme of the
remarkable novels of Alan Garner.
Complex, melodramatic, stronger in action than in characterization, they appeal
to imaginative, "literary" children. Garner's rather nightmarish
narrative The Owl Service (1967) is
perhaps the most subtle.
Finally there is a trio of masters, each
the architect of a complete secondary world. The vast Middle Earth trilogy The
Lord of the Rings(1954-55),
by the Anglo-Saxon and Middle English language scholar J.R.R.
Tolkien, was not written with children in mind. But they have made it
their own. It reworks many of the motives of traditional romance and fantasy,
including the Quest, but is essentially a structure, conceivably but not
inevitably allegorical, of sheer invention on a staggering scale. It is also a
sociocultural phenomenon, selling 3,000,000 copies in nine languages and
functioning, for a certain class of American teenagers, as a semisacred cult
object.
Tolkien's fellow scholar, C.S.
Lewis, created his own otherworld of Narnia. It is more derivative than
Tolkien's (he owes something, for example, to Nesbit), more clearly
Christian-allegorical, more carefully adapted to the tastes of children. Though
uneven, the seven volumes of the cycle, published through the years 1950 to
1956, are exciting, often humorous, inventive, and, in the final scenes of The Last Battle, deeply moving. (see also "Chronicles
of Narnia")
The third of these classic secondary
worlds is in a sense not a creation of fantasy. The four volumes (1952-61) about
the Borrowers, with their brief pendant, Poor
Stainless (1971), ask the reader to accept only a single impossibility, that
in a quiet country house, under the grandfather clock, live the tiny Clock
family: Pod, Homily, and their daughter Arrietty. All that follows from this
premise is logical, precisely pictured, and carries absolute conviction. Many
critics believe that this miniature world so lovingly, so patiently fashioned by
Mary Norton will last as long
as those located at the bottom of the rabbit hole and through the looking glass.
Compared with England, the United States
has fewer peaks. In Huckleberry Finn, of
course, it possesses a world masterpiece matched in the children's literature of
no other country. Little
Womenrevolutionary in its day, radiates a century later a special
warmth and may still be the most beloved "family story" ever written.
Though The Wonderful Wizard of Oz has
been recklessly compared with Alice, it
lacks Carroll's brilliance, subtlety, and humour. Nonetheless, its story and
characters apparently carry, like Pinocchio,
an enduring, near-universal appeal for children. To these older titles might
be added Stuart Little (1945) and Charlotte's
Web (1952), by E.B. White, two completely original works that appear to have
become classics. To this brief list of high points few can be added, though, on
the level just below the top, the United States bears comparison with England
and therefore any other country. (see also
American literature)
The "law" of belated
development applies in a special way. From Jamestown to the end of the Civil
War, American children's literature virtually depended on currents in England.
In the adult field Cooper and Washington Irving may stand for a true declaration
of independence. But it was not until the 1860s and '70s, with Mary Mapes
Dodge's Hans Brinker, Louisa May
Alcott's Little Women, Lucretia Hale's
Peterkin Papers, Mark Twain's Tom
Sawyer, and St. Nicholas magazine, that children's literature finally severed
its attachment to the mother country. In the marketplace, however, a uniquely
American note was sounded much earlier, the first of the Peter Parley series of
Samuel Goodrich having appeared in 1827.
In certain important fields, the United
States pioneered. These include everyday-life books for younger readers; the
non-class-based small-town story such as The
Moffats by Eleanor Estes; the Americanized fairy tale and folktale such as Uncle
Remus (1880), not originally meant for children, and Carl Sandburg's Rootabaga
Stories (1922); beginners' books such as Dr. Seuss's
The Cat in the Hat (1957); and the
"new realism." One might maintain that American children's literature,
particularly that since World War II, is bolder, more experimental, more willing
to try and fail, than England's. Moreover, it set new standards of
institutionalization, "packaging," merchandising, and publicity, as
well as mere production, especially of fact books and "subject
series."
The prehistoric annals are short and
simple. Dominated by England, native creativity--to refer only to books with
even the thinnest claim to literary quality--amounted to little. The Puritan
view of the unredeemable child obtained almost into the era of Andrew Jackson. Jonathan
Edwards put it neatly: unrepentant children were "young vipers and
infinitely more hateful than vipers." More moderate notions also existed.
Imported English ballads and tales, even a few "shockers," were
enjoyed by the young vipers. But in general, from John Cotton's Spiritual
Milk for Boston Babes (1646) through the Civil War, the admonitory and
exemplary tract and the schoolmaster's pointer prevailed. Occasionally there is
the cheerful note of non-improvement,
as in Clement Moore's "Visit from St. Nicholas" (1823), sounding
against the successful lesson-cum-moral tales of Peter Parley (Goodrich) and the
didactic "Rollo" series of Jacob
Abbott. The latter's Franconia
Stories (1850-53), however, showing traces of Rousseau and Johann
Pestalozzi, is the remote ancestor of those wholesome, humorous pictures of
small-town child life in which American writers excelled after World War I.
Affectionately based on the author's own memories, they occasionally reveal
children rather than improvable miniatures of men. (see also
Puritanism)
The children's magazines of the early
19th century did their best to amuse as well as instruct the young. Sara Josepha
Hale's "Mary Had a Little Lamb" appeared in The Juvenile Miscellany (1826-34). The atmosphere was further
lightened by Grandfather's Chair (1841)
and its sequels, retellings of stories from New England history by Nathaniel
Hawthorne. These were followed in 1852-53 by his redactions, rather
unacceptable today, of Greek legends in The
Wonder Book for Girls and Boys and Tanglewood
Tales for Girls and Boys. Hawthorne's death date (1864) coincided roughly
with a qualified subsidence of the literature of the didactic.
During the period from the close of the
Civil War to the turn of the century an Americanized white, Anglo-Saxon,
Protestant, Victorian gentility dominated as the official, though not
necessarily real, culture. At first glance such a climate hardly seems to favour
the growth of a children's literature. But counterforces were at work: a
vigorous upsurge of interest, influenced by European thinkers, in the education
and nurture of children; the dying-out of the old Puritanism; and the
accumulation of enough national history to stimulate the imagination. To these
forces must be added the appearance in Louisa May Alcott of a minor genius and
in Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) of a major one.
American materialism (and also its
optimism) expressed itself in the success myth of Horatio Alger, while a
softened didacticism, further modified by a mild talent for lively narrative,
was reflected in the 116 novels of Oliver
Optic (William Taylor Adams). But a quartet of books appearing from 1865
to 1880--heralded a happier day. These were Mary
Mapes Dodge's Hans
Brinker, or the Silver Skates(1865), which for all its Sunday-school tone, revealed to American children
an interesting foreign culture and told a story that still has charm; Louisa May
Alcott's Little Women (1868; vol. ii, 1869; and its March family sequels),
which lives by virtue of the imaginative power that comes from childhood truly
and vividly recalled; Lucretia Hale's
Peterkin
Papers(1880), just as funny today as a century ago, perfect nonsense
produced in a non-nonsensical era; and Thomas
Bailey Aldrich's Story of a Bad Boy (1870). This, it is often forgotten, preceded Tom
Sawyer by seven years, offered a model for many later stories of small-town
bad boys, and is a fair example of the second-class classic. But it took Tom
Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn to
change the course of American writing and give the first deeply felt vision of
boyhood in juvenile literature. (see also Twain,
Mark, "Adventures of Tom
Sawyer, The", "Adventures
of Huckleberry Finn, The")
To these names should be added Frank
Stockton (whose Ting-a-Ling Tales [1870]
showed the possibilities inherent in the invented fairy tale) and especially the
writer-illustrator Howard Pyle.
His reworkings of legend (The Merry
Adventures of Robin Hood, 1883; the King Arthur stories, 1903-1910, and his
novels of the Middle Ages [Otto of the
Silver Hand, 1888; and Men of Iron, 1892])
exemplify perfectly the romantic feeling of his time, as does the picture of
Shakespeare's England drawn by John Bennett in Master Skylark (1897).
The sentimentality that is sometimes an
unconscious compensatory gesture in a time of ruthless materialism expressed
itself in the idyllic Poems of Childhood (1896),
by Eugene Field, and the rural
dialect Rhymes of Childhood (1891), by
James Whitcomb Riley. These
poems can hardly speak to the children of the second half of the 20th century.
But it is not clear that the same is true of the equally sentimental novels of
Frances Hodgson Burnett. It is
easy to smile over Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886)
or her later and superior novels, A Little
Princess (1905) and The Secret Garden (1911).
Back of the absurd sentimentality, however, lies an extraordinary narrative
skill, as well as an ability to satisfy the perennial desire felt by children at
a certain age for life to arrange itself as a fairy tale.
The development of a junior literature
from 1865 to about 1920 is ascribable less to published books than to two
remarkable children's magazines: The
Youth's Companion (1827-1929, when it merged with The American Boy) and the relatively nondidactic St.
Nicholasmagazine
(1873-1939), which exerted a powerful influence on its exclusively respectable
child readers. (It is surely needless to point out that up to the 1960s
children's literature has been by and for the middle class). These magazines
published the best material they could get, from England as well as the United
States. For all their gentility, standards, including that of illustration, were
high. The contributors' names in many cases became part of the canon of world
literature. To the children of the last quarter of the 19th and first quarter of
the 20th century, the periodical delivery of these magazines presumably meant
something that film and television cannot mean to today's children. The
magazines were not "media." They were friends.
Appropriately the new century opened
with a novelty: a successful American fairy tale. The
Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900)
is vulnerable to attacks on its prose style, incarnating mediocrity. But there
is something in it, for all its doctrinaire moralism, that lends it permanent
appeal: a prairie freshness, a joy in sheer invention, the simple, satisfying
characterization of Dorothy and her three old, lovable companions. Several of
the sequels--but only those bearing L.
Frank Baum's name--are not greatly inferior.
The century underwent for the next two
decades a rather baffling decline. Some institutional progress was made in
library development, professional education, and the reviewing of children's
books. Much useful work was also accomplished in the field of fairy-tale and
folktale collections. But original literature did not flourish. There were Pyle
and Mrs. Burnett and the topflight nonsense verses of Laura E. Richards, whose
collected rhymes in Tirra Lirra (1932)
will almost bear comparison with those of Edward Lear. Less memorable are the
works of Lucy Fitch Perkins, Joseph Altsheler, Ralph Henry Barbour, Kate Douglas
Wiggin, Eliza Orne White, and the two Burgesses--Thornton and Gelett. During
these decades, de la Mare,
Miss Potter, Kipling, Barrie, Grahame, and E.
Nesbit were at work in England.
During the period between world wars new
trails were blazed in nonfiction with van Loon's Story of Mankind and V.M. Hillyer's Child's History of the World (1922). The Here and Now Story Book, by Lucy
Sprague Mitchell, published in the 1920s, was the first real example of
the "direct experience" school of writing, but it is more properly
part of the chronicle of pedagogy than of literature. The small child was far
better served by a dozen talented writer-illustrators, such as Wanda Gág,
with her classic Millions of Cats (1928) and other delightful books; and Ludwig
Bemelmans, with Madeline (1939) and
its sequels. Other distinguished names in the important and growing picture-book
field were Marjorie Flack, Hardie Gramatky, James Daugherty, the d'Aulaires, and
Virginia Lee Burton. (see also nonfictional
prose)
In the field of comic verse and pictures
for children of almost all ages, Dr. Seuss (Theodore Geisel), starting with And
to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street (1937), continued to lead, turning
out so many books that one tended to take him for granted. His talent is of a
very high order.
The 1920s and '30s produced many
well-written historical novels, striking a new note of authority and realism,
such as Drums (1925, transformed in
1928 into a boy's book with N.C. Wyeth's illustrations), by James Boyd, and The
Trumpeter of Kracow (1928), by Eric Kelly. The "junior novel" came
to the fore in the following decade, together with an increase in books about
foreign lands, minority groups, and a boom in elaborate picture books.
Children's verse was well served by such able practitioners as Dorothy Aldis and
Rosemary and Stephen Vincent Benét,
with their stirring, hearty ballad-like poems collected in A
Book of Americans(1933).
But the only verse comparable to that of Stevenson or de la Mare was the
exquisite Under the Tree (1922), by the novelist Elizabeth Madox Roberts, a
treasure that should never be forgotten.
At least three other writers produced
work of high and entirely original quality. Two of them--Florence and Richard
Atwater--worked as a pair. Their isolated effort, Mr. Popper's Penguins (1938), will last as a masterpiece of deadpan
humour that few children or adults can resist. The third writer is Laura
Ingalls Wilder. Her Little House books,
nine in all, started in 1932 with The
Little House in the Big Woods. The entire series, painting an unforgettable
picture of pioneer life, is a masterpiece of sensitive recollection and clean,
effortless prose.
Work of quality was contributed during
these two lively decades by authors too numerous to list. Among the best of them
are Will James, with his horse story Smoky
(1926); Rachel Field, whose Hitty (1929)
is one of the best doll stories in the language; Elizabeth Coatsworth, with her
fine New England tale Away Goes Sally (1934);
and the well-loved story of a New York tomboy in the 1890s, Roller
Skates (1936), by the famous oral storyteller Ruth Sawyer.
Since the 1930s the quality and weight
of American children's literature were sharply affected by the business of
publishing, as well as by the social pressures to which children, like adults,
were subjected. Intensified commercialization and broad-front expansion had some
good effects and some bad ones as well.
For any book of interest to adults,
publishers constructed a corresponding one scaled to child size. The practice of
automatic miniaturization stimulated a pullulation of fact books--termed by an
unsympathetic observer "the information trap"--marked by a flood of
subject series and simplified technology. Paperbacks and cheap reprints of
juvenile favourites enlarged the youthful reading public, just as the
multiplication of translations widened its horizon. More science
fiction was published, a field in which the stories of Robert
Heinlein and A Wrinkle in Time (1962),
by Madeleine L'Engle, stood out. An increase was also noticeable in books for
the disadvantaged child and in work of increasingly high quality by and for
blacks. In the early 1950s, children's book clubs flourished, though they
appeared to be on the wane little more than a decade later. Simple narration
using "scientifically determined vocabulary" also seemed to decrease
in popularity. There was a marked tendency to orient titles, fiction and
nonfiction, to the requirements of the school curriculum. Another trend was
toward collaborative "international" publishing. This had the double
effect of cutting colour-plate costs and promoting blandness, since it was
important that no country's readers be offended or surprised by anything in text
or illustration. Still another alteration took place in the conventional notion
of age and grade levels. Teenagers reached out for adult books; younger children
read junior novels.
The most striking development was the
growth of the "realists," most of them as earnest as Maria Edgeworth,
a few of them lighter fingered, with a fringe of far-outers. The latter were
fairly represented by Nat Hentoff in Jazz
Country (1965), for example, and Maria Wojciechowska in The
Rotten Years (1971). Teenage fiction as well as nonfiction dealt mercilessly
with ethnic exploitation, poverty, broken homes, desertion, unemployment, adult
hypocrisy, drug addiction, sex (including homosexuality), and death. A whole new
"problem" literature became available, with no sure proof that it was
warmly welcomed. The aesthetic dilemmas posed by this literature are still to be
faced and resolved. The new social realist story often had the look of an
updated moral tale: the dire consequences of nondiligence were replaced by those
of pot smoking.
Nevertheless such original works as Harriet
the Spy (1964) and The Long Secret (1965),
by Louise Fitzhugh, showed how a writer adequately equipped with humour and
understanding could incorporate into books for 11-year-olds subjects--even
menstruation--ordinarily reserved for adult fiction. Similarly trailblazing were
the semidocumentary novels of Joseph Krumgold: . . . And Now Miguel (1953), Onion
John (1958), and Henry 3 (1967),
the last about a boy with an I.Q. of 154 trying to get along in a society
antagonistic to brains. The candid suburban studies of E.L. Konigsburg
introduced a new sophistication. Her 1968 Newbery Medal winner, From
the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, was original in its tone
and humour.
As for the more traditional genres, a
cheering number of high-quality titles rose above the plain of mediocrity. The
nonfantastic animal story Lassie Come Home
(1940), by Eric Knight, survived adaptation to film and television. In the
convention of the talking animal, authentic work was produced by Ben Lucien
Burman, with his wonderful "Catfish Bend" tales (1952-67). The
American-style, wholesome, humorous family story was more than competently
developed by Eleanor Estes, with her "Moffat" series (1941-43) and Ginger
Pye (1951); Elizabeth Enright, with her Melendy family (1941-44); and Robert
McCloskey, with Homer Price (1943)--to
name only three unfailingly popular writers. Text-and-picture books for the very
young posed an obdurate challenge: to create literature out of absolutely simple
materials. That challenge, first successfully met by Beatrix
Potter, attracted Americans. The modern period produced many enchanting
examples of this tricky genre: The Happy
Lion (1954) and its sequels, the joint work of the writer Louise Fatio and
her artist husband, Roger Duvoisin; the "Little Bear" books, words by
Else Holmelund Minarik, pictures by Maurice
Sendak; and several zany tours de force by Dr. Seuss, including his
one-syllable revolution The Cat in the Hat
(1957). The picture books of Sendak, perhaps one of the few original
geniuses in his restricted field, were assailed by many adults as frightening or
abnormal. The children did not seem to mind.
Fiction about foreign lands boasted at
least one modern American master in Meindert De Jong, whose most sensitive work
was drawn from recollections of his Dutch early childhood. A Hans Christian
Andersen and Newbery winner, he is best savoured in The Wheel on the School (1954), and especially in the intuitive Journey
from Peppermint Street (1968). The historical novel fared less well in
America than in England. Johnny Tremain (1943),
by Esther Forbes, a beautifully written, richly detailed story of the
Revolution, stood out as one of the few high points, as did The
Innocent Wayfaring (1943), a tale of Chaucer's England by the equally
scholarly Marchette Chute. Poetry for children had at least two talented
representatives. One was the eminent poet-critic John
Ciardi, the other David McCord, a veteran maker of nonsense and acrobat
of language.
In fantasy, the farcical note was struck
with agreeable preposterousness by Oliver Butterworth in The Enormous Egg (1956) and The
Trouble with Jenny's Ear (1960). The prolific writer-illustrator William Pène
Du Bois has given children nothing more uproariously delightful than The
Twenty-one Balloons (1947), merging some of the appeals of Jules Verne with
those of Samuel Butler's Erewhon and
adding a sly humour all his own. Two renowned New
Yorker writers, James Thurber
and E.B. White, developed into
successful fantasists, Thurber with an elaborate series of ambiguous literary
fairy tales such as The Thirteen Clocks, White
with his pair of animal stories Stuart Little and Charlotte's
Web that for their humanity and uninsistent humour stand alone. The vein of
"high fantasy" of the more traditional variety, involving magic and
the construction of a legendary secondary world, was represented by the five
highly praised volumes of the Prydain cycle (1964-68) by Newbery Medal winner
Lloyd Alexander.
Two other works of pure imagination gave
the 1960s some claim to special notice. The first was The Phantom Tollbooth (1961) by Norton Juster, a fantasy about a boy
"who didn't know what to do with himself." Not entirely unjustly, it
has been compared to Alice. The second
received less attention but is more remarkable: The Mouse and His Child (1969), by Russell Hoban, who had been a
successful writer of gentle tales for small children. But here was a different
affair altogether: a flawlessly written, densely plotted story with quiet
philosophical overtones. It involved a clockwork mouse, his attached son, and an
unforgettable assortment of terribly real, humanized animals. Like Alice
and The Borrowers --indeed like all major children's literature--it
offered as much to the grown-up as to the young reader. With this moving,
intellectually demanding fantasy the decade ended on a satisfactory note.
A. Merget's Geschichte der deutschen Jugendliteratur ("History of German
Children's Literature") appeared in 1867, some years before the Germans had
much children's literature to consider, a demonstration of Teutonic
thoroughness. By two criteria--degree of awareness of the child's identity and
level of institutional development -- Germany leads the world. It has built a
vast structure of history, criticism, analysis, and controversy devoted to a
subject the chief property of which would appear to be its charm rather than its
obscurity. One estimate has it that in West Germany alone there are over 300
associations dedicated to the study and promotion of children's literature. Such
conscientiousness, nowhere else matched, such a serious desire to relate the
child's reading to his nurture, education, and Weltanschauung, has an admirable aspect. But by attaching juvenile
books too closely to the theory and demands of pedagogy, it may have constricted
a marked native genius. (see also German
literature)
The dominant historical influences
roughly coincide with those that have affected German mainstream literature,
though, as expected, they were exerted more slowly. The Reformation,
stressing the Bible, the catechism, and the hymnbook, bent the literature of
childhood toward the didactic, the monitory, and the pious. The Enlightenment,
however, did something to help toward the identification of the child as an
independent being. With this insight are associated the educational theories of
J.B. Basedow, J.F. Herbart, and Friedrich Froebel. One fruit of the movement was
Robinson der Jüngere (1779;
"The Young Robinson"), by Joachim Heinrich Campe, who adapted Defoe
along Rousseauist lines, his eye sharply fixed on what he considered to be the
natural interests of the child. Interchapters of useful moral conversations
between the author and his pupils were a feature of the book. Campe's widespread
activities on behalf of children, though less commercially motivated, recall
Newbery's.
Rationalism, piety, and the German
partiality for disciplined conduct were modified by the influence of two crucial
works, not intended for children but soon taken over by them. Both are part of
the Romantic movement that
swept Germany and much of the Continent during the early 19th century. Des
Knaben Wunderhorn(1805-08;
"The Youth's Magic Horn"), a collection of old German songs and folk
verse, included many children's songs, or songs that were so denominated by the
editors, Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano. The effect of the book was to
retrieve for Germany much of its rich folk heritage, to promote a new emotional
sensibility, and to draw attention to the link, as the Romantics thought,
binding folk feeling to the child's vision of the world. Des Knaben Wunderhorn became a part of German childhood, as La
Fontaine's Fables in France and Mother
Goose in England had become a part of growing up in those countries. It
helped inspire several excellent writers of verse for children: A.H. Hoffmann
von Fallersleben; August Kopisch; the writer-illustrator Count Franz Pocci, the
first German to write nonsense verse for the young; F.W. Güll; and later
poets such as Paula and Richard Dehmel.
Just as Des
Knaben Wunderhorn became a source of poetry, so the epochal folktale
collection of the brothers Grimm
helped to develop a school of prose fairy-tale writers. Not all of these
Romantics wrote with children in mind. But some of the simplest of their tales
have become part of the German child's inheritance. In today's presumably
practical era, they are once more in favour. Among these masters of the
"art" Märchen are
E.T.A. Hoffmann; C.M. Brentano; Ludwig Tieck; de la Motte Fouqué, author
of Undine; and Wilhelm Hauff, whose
talents are most nearly adapted to the tastes of children. (see also
"Grimm's Fairy
Tales," )
Two curious half-geniuses of comic verse
and illustration wrote and drew for the hitherto neglected small child. Struwwelpeter
("Shock-headed Peter"), by the premature surrealist Heinrich
Hoffmann, aroused cries of glee in children across the continent. Wilhelm
Busch created the slapstick buffoonery of Max and Moritz, the ancestors
of the Katzenjammer Kids and indeed of many aspects of the comic
strip.
The second half of the 19th century saw
an increase in commercialized sentimentality and sensation and a corresponding
decline in quality. The bogus Indian and Wild West tales of Karl
May stand out luridly in the history of German children's literature. Up
to about 1940, 7,500,000 of his books had been sold to German readers alone.
(Emilio Salgari in Italy, G.A. Henty in England, and "Ned Buntline" in
the United States, who were contemporaneously satisfying the same hunger for the
suspenseful, did not approach's May's talent for fabrication without the
slightest root in reality.)
It may have been May and others like him
who roused an educator, Heinrich Wolgast, to publish in 1896 his explosive Das
Elend unserer Jugendliteratur ("The Sad State of Our Children's
Literature"). The event was an important one. It advanced for the first
time the express thesis that "Creative children's literature must be a work
of art"; Wolgast resolutely decried nationalistic and didactic
deformations. He precipitated a controversy the echoes of which are still
audible. On the whole his somewhat excessive zeal had a wholesome effect.
Two post-Wolgast poets of childhood
worthy of mention are Christian
Morgenstern, whose macabre, pre-Dada poetry for adults later came into
vogue, and the lesser-gifted Joachim Ringelnatz. The nondidactic note they
sounded in modern times was strengthened by a whole school of children's poets.
No other country produced work in this difficult field superior to the finest
verse of the multitalented James Krüss, and especially Josef Guggenmos,
whose lyric simplicity at times recalls Blake. Guggenmos also has to his credit
a translation of A Child's Garden of
Verses, in itself an original work of art.
Between the world wars, prose showed few
high points and, after the advent of Hitler, many low ones. Der
Kampf der Tertia (1927; "The Third-Form Struggle"), by Wilhelm
Speyer, was Germany's excellent contribution to the genre of the school story.
Erich Kästner's Emil
and the Detectives(1929)
ranked not only as a work of art, presenting city boys with humour and sympathy,
but as an immediate classic in an entirely new field, the juvenile detective
story (Mark Twain's awkward Tom
Sawyer, Detective [1896] may be ignored). Kästner, the dean of German
writers for children, won an international audience with a long series of
stories of which the thesis-fable Die
Konferenz der Tiere (1949; Eng. trans. The
Animals' Conference, 1949) is perhaps the funniest as well as the most
serious.
Post-World War II literature, recovering
from the Nazi blight, was strong in several fields. In realistic fantasy there
is Vevi (1955), by the Austrian Erica
Lillegg, an extraordinary tale of split personality, odd, exciting, even
profound. Michael Ende's Jim
Knopf und Lucas der Lokomotivführer (1961; Eng. trans., Jim
Button and Luke the Engine Driver, 1963) has more than a touch of Oz; and both Kästner and Krüss have made agreeable
additions to the realm of fantasy.
In the domain of the historical
novel, Hans Baumann is a distinguished name. Lacking the narrative craft
of Miss Sutcliff, whose story lines are always clean and clear, he matched her
as a scholar and mounted scenes of great intensity in such novels as Die
Barke der Brüder (1956; Eng. trans., The
Barque of the Brothers, 1958) and especially Steppensöhne (1954; Eng. trans., Sons of the Steppe, 1958), a tale about two grandsons of Genghis
Khan. His narrative history of some exciting archaeological discoveries, Die
Höhlen der grossen Jäger (1953; Eng. trans., The
Caves of the Great Hunters, 1954; rev. ed., 1962), is a minor classic.
Mention should be made of Fritz Mühlenweg, a veteran of the Sven Hedin
expedition of 1928-32 to Inner Mongolia and the author of Grosser-Tiger
und Kompass-Berg (1950; Eng. trans., Big
Tiger and Christian, 1952). A long, richly coloured narrative of a journey
made by two boys, Chinese and European, through the Gobi Desert, it should stand
as one of the finest adventure stories of the postwar years.
One general conclusion regarding West
German children's literature after 1945 was that the native genius, which had
been impeded by pedagogical theory and nationalist dogma, again appeared to be
in free flow.
In East Germany, production was
conditioned by the association with the Soviet Union, and it appeared to be
recapitulating the developments in children's literature that had occurred in
the Soviet Union after 1917. Socialist
Realism was the basic food offered to the literary appetites of young
East Germans.
Scandinavia, but especially Sweden,
inevitably suggests a question as to why a group of small, sparsely populated
countries ranks directly after England and the United States for the variety,
vigour, and even genius of its children's literature. Hazard's north-south
theory describes; it does not explain. A few possible factors may be listed: the
inspiration of the master Andersen--yet
he does not seem greatly to have inspired his homeland; the appearance in 1900
of the Swedish Ellen Key's
two-volume Barnets århundrede (Eng.
trans., The Century of the Child, 1909),
pivotal in the history of the discovery that children really exist; a general
modern atmosphere of social enlightenment; welfare statism tempered by regard
for the individual; a school and library system, notably in Sweden, of
extraordinary humanity and efficiency; perhaps even the long, lively career of
the Stockholm Children's Theatre, a centre of creative activity. Yet the mystery
persists. Since the first half of the 19th century, Scandinavia produced
Andersen, Zacharias Topelius, Jørgen Moe, Henrik Wergeland, Helena Nyblom,
Selma Lagerlöf, Elsa Beskow, Astrid Lindgren, Tove Jansson, Maria Gripe,
Anna Lisa Warnlöf, Lennart Hellsing, Karin Anckarsvärd, Inger
Sandberg, plus a school of critics and historians second only to that of
Germany, plus many talented illustrators.
Children's literature in Sweden for
centuries reflected that of Germany, of which Sweden was a cultural province
during the Reformation and even through the Enlightenment period. The historian
Göte Klingberg traced some kind of religious-instructive reading for
children back to 1600. There is a record, though the manuscripts have vanished,
of children's plays produced at the country manors during the 1700s and into the
following century. The tradition of children's theatre has always been stronger
in Sweden than elsewhere in Europe.
A true native literature is usually
dated from 1751-53, when the tutor Count Carl
Tessin wrote his "Old Man's Letters to a Young Prince" (Gustav
III), in which instruction was tempered by the first fairy tales written for
Swedish children. The German influence, however, persisted until about the
middle of the 19th century, when Fredrika
Bremer, traveller and feminist, tried to stimulate the work of indigenous
children's writers. The dominant influence of the Finnish-born but basically
Swedish Topelius, of Hans Christian Andersen, and of the romantic spirit in
general was felt at this time. Later in the century two followers of
Andersen--Helena Nyblom and Anna Wahlenberg--enriched the tradition of the fairy
tale. The former's Sagokrans (1903;
Eng. trans., The Witch of the Woods, 1968),
preserves a rare charm.
The great landmark, however, is Miss Lagerlöf's
world classic Nils Holgerssons underbara
resa genom Sverige, 2 vol. (1906-07; Eng. trans., The
Wonderful Adventures of Nils, 1907;
Further Adventures of Nils, 1911).
Written (at the request of the state ministry of education) as a school
geography, it is the rare example of an officially commissioned book that turned
out to be a work of art. Nils, for all
its burden of instruction, is a fantasy. At the same time, a realistic
breakthrough was achieved by Laura Fitinghoff, whose historical novel about the
famine of the 1860s, Barnen från
Frostmofjället (1907; Eng. trans., Children
of the Moor, 1927), ranks as a classic.
According to the historian Eva von
Zweigbergk, didacticism ("diligence, obedience, and moderation")
obtained up to the 1920s, though she also views the period 1890-1915 as Sweden's
Golden Age. It included not only Nils but
the emergence of a school of creators of picture books for small children headed
by Elsa Beskow, whose work in pictures and text, extending over the years from
1897 to 1952, was decisive in its influence. This pre-modern period also saw
many good writers for grown-ups devoting their talents to juvenile fiction. The
sailing story Mälarpirater (1911;
"The Pirates of Lake Mälaren"), by the novelist Sigfrid
Siwertz, is a still-remembered example.
The period from 1940 on has called forth
a bewildering array of talented writers and artist-writers. In the field of
humour and nonsense there are Åke Holmberg, with his parodic Ture Sventon
detective series; the outstanding poet Lennart Hellsing, with Daniel
Doppsko (1959); Astrid Lindgren,
successful in a half dozen genres but perhaps best known as the creator of the
supergirl Pippi Longstocking; Gösta Knutsson, with her well-liked Pelle svanslös (1939; Eng. trans., The Adventures of the Cat Who Had No Tail). The psychological
realistic novel, delving deeply into the inner lives of children, has been
developed by Maria Gripe, whose Hugo and
Josephine trilogy may become classic; Gunnel Linde's Tacka vet jag Skorstensgränd (1959; Eng. trans., Chimney-Top
Lane, 1965); and Anna Lisa Warnlöf, writing under the pseudonym of
"Claque," whose two series about Pella and Fredrika show an intuitive
understanding of lonely and misunderstood children.
Harry Kullman and Martha
Sandwall-Bergström are among the few Swedish writers who have used working
class industrial backgrounds successfully. Kullman is also a historical
novelist. The prolific Edith Unnerstad has written charming family stories, with
a touch of fantasy, as has Karin Anckarsvärd, whose Doktorns
pojk' (1963; Eng. trans., Doctor's
Boy, 1965) is a quietly moving tale of small-town life in the
horse-and-buggy days. The Sandbergs, Inger and Lasse, have advanced the Beskow
tradition in a series of lovely picture books. Fantasy has been well served by
Lindgren, Edith Unnerstad, Holmberg, Hellsing, and others. Children's poetry is
a lively contemporary art, one distinguished poet being Britt G. Hallqvist.
By most criteria of development the
Swedes rank high among those creating a children's literature that is both broad
and deep.
Norway cannot boast a genius of
worldwide fame. But, beginning with the 1830s when a new literary language,
based on spoken Norwegian, was forged, Norway has possessed an identifiable
children's literature. From 1837 to 1844 Asbjørnsen
and Moe, the Grimms of Norway,
published their remarkable collection of folk stories, and thus created not only
a literary base on which the future could build but a needed sense of national
identity. Moe also wrote specifically for children. His poems are part of
Norwegian childhood, and his nature fantasy I
brønden og i tjernet ("In the Well and the Lake," 1851) made Viggo
and his little sister Beate familiar for more than a century. Equally enduring
are the fairy tales and children's verse of Norway's greatest poet Henrik
Wergeland.
The Norwegian critic Jo Tenfjord
believes that the 30 years from 1890 to 1920 represented a golden age. With this
period are associated Dikken Zwilgmeyer, author of the "Inger Johanne"
series about a small-town little girl; Barbra Ring, creator of the popular
"Peik" stories and of a play The
Princess and the Fiddler, which was produced yearly at the National Theatre
in Oslo; Gabriel Scott; and the fairy-tale writer Johan Falkberget.
Among the more prominent and well-loved
moderns are Halvor Floden, whose most famous work, centred on a gypsy waif, is Gjenta
fra lands vegen ("The Girl from the Road"); the nonsense versifier
Zinken Hopp; the poet Jan-Magnus Bruheim, three of whose collections have won
state prizes; Finn Havrevold, whose toughminded boys' teenage novel Han
Var Min Ven became available in English translation as Undertow in 1968, and who also wrote successfully for girls; Leif
Hamre, specializing in air force adventures; the prolific, widely translated Aimée
Sommerfelt, whose works range from "puberty novels" to faraway stories
set in Mexico City and northern India; Thorbjørn Egner, who is the author of,
among other books, a tiny droll fantasy, Karius and Baktus (1958; Eng. trans. 1962), which will actually
persuade small children to brush their teeth; and Alf Prøysen, creator of Mrs.
Pepperpot, a delightful little old lady who never knows when she is going to
shrink to pepperpot size. Fantasy of this kind seems less characteristic of
contemporary Norway than does the realistic novel, especially that designed for
older children.
Without Hans Christian Andersen, Danish
children's literature might have fared better. It is not that his countrymen
deify him, as much as it is that the outside world does. Indeed, because
modernized versions of his tales do not exist, his now rather antiquated Danish
tends to outmode him. Yet his gigantic shadow must have intimidated his literary
descendants, just as Dante and Cervantes intimidated theirs. Doubtless other
forces also account for the sparseness and relative conventionality of Danish
children's literature. (see also Danish
literature)
The earliest books were written for the
children of the nobility. Not till the passage of the Education Act of 1814 did
the poorer ones have access to any suitable reading matter, and this, obedient
to the prevailing European fashion, was dour in tone. The climate, of course,
relaxed when Andersen appeared with his phenomenal series, still the finest of
their kind, of invented or reworked fantastic tales. In 1884 H.V. Kaalund
published a picture book of "Fables for Children" based on the popular
verse narratives (1833) of a Thüringian pastor, Wilhelm Hey. Three years
later an unidentified Danish humorist added three cautionary tales to a
translation of six Struwwelpeter stories.
Though it does not seem to have appeared as a picture book until 1900, Christian
Winther in 1830 wrote a pleasing trifle, with an unusual fantastic touch,
called "Flugten til Amerika" ("Flight to America"). It is
still ranked as a classic. Such are some of the 19th-century oases.
Denmark's general tendency has been to
over-rely on translations or adaptations, drawn especially from its neighbour
Germany. As against this, it can point to an excellent original tradition of
nursery and nonsense rhymes.
The first such collection, made as early as 1843, stimulated not only Andersen
but such other 19th-century figures as Johan Krohn, whose "Peter's
Christmas" remains a standard seasonal delight. The tradition is relayed to
the 20th century by Halfdan Rasmussen,
whose collected Bjørnerim ("Verse
for Children") won the 1964 Danish Children's Book Prize, and Ib Spang
Olsen, with his nonsense picture book The Boy in the Moon (1962). As for the complementary prose tradition
of fireside tales, Denmark had to wait (Andersen was artist, not scholar) for
its Grimm until 1884, when a collection made by Svend Grundtvig, the son of
N.F.S. Grundtvig, a great bishop-educator, was posthumously published. (see also
German literature)
As compared with other Scandinavian
countries, post-World War II developments lagged. Picture books exhibited much
more originality than did teenage literature. Jytte Lyngbirk's girls' novels,
notably the love story "Two Days in November," however, are well
reputed, as are the realistic fictions, laid against an industrial background,
of Tove Ditlevsen. Perhaps
Denmark's boldest original talent is Anne Holm, who aroused healthy controversy
with her (to some) shocking narrative of a displaced boy's journey to Denmark,
the novel David (1963; Eng. trans., North
to Freedom, 1965).
Some informed observers ascribe
Denmark's only moderate performance to domination by the teaching profession, to
the lingering influence of conventional didacticism, and to the lack of the
economic-social forces that stimulate professional writers. As late as 1966 the
Minister of Culture commented on the scarcity of Danish juvenile authors, and
this at a time when the rest of Scandinavia was, as it remained, in the full
flood of the modern movement.
Although its language and people are not
of European origin, Finland is loosely conceived as part of the Scandinavian
bloc. Only since December 6, 1917, has it been formally independent. During much
of its history Swedish was the language of the educated class. Thus its two
outstanding premodern children's writers, the father figure Zacharias
Topelius and Anni Swan, wrote their fairy tales and folktales primarily
for a Swedish-reading audience. Their works however were promptly translated
into Finnish and became part of the native heritage. The same is true of the
contemporary Tove Jansson, 1966 Andersen Medal winner, whose series of novels
about the fantastic self-contained world of Moomintrolls,
though less successful with English-reading children, enchants young readers
throughout northern and central Europe. (see also
Finnish literature)
The labours of Topelius in the
children's field and of Elias Lönnrot
(compiler of the great Finnish epic-miscellany the Kalevala1835) in the field of national folklore constituted the soil from which
Finnish children's literature was eventually to derive nutriment. But that
literature emerged as an identifiable whole only after World War I. It is
largely folktale rooted. Indeed this small country became an international focus
of folklore research. One student has said that it probably possesses the
largest number of folktales in existence, some 30,000 of them. In the early
1960s a fairy tale competition yielded 795 manuscripts, a phenomenal statistic
in view of Finland's sparse population.
Finland, despite the fact that its
language tends to limit its audience, is part of the main current of children's
literature, even though only Jansson has won anything like an international
reputation. Two children's poets, Aila Meriluoto and Kirsi Kunnas, have achieved
renown. (see also poetry)
The French themselves are not happy with
their record. Writing in the late 1940s, critic Jean de Trigon, in Histoire
de la littérature enfantine, de ma Mère l'Oye au Roi Babar (Paris,
Librairie Hachette, 1950) said: "The French have created little children's
literature. They have received more than they have given, but they have
assimilated, adapted, transformed. The two are not the same thing, for one must
love childhood in general if one is to please children other than one's
own." In 1923 Marie-Thérèse Latzarus tolled the passing bell
in La littérature enfantine en
France dans la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle (Paris;
Les Presses Universitaires de France): "Children's literature, more's the
pity, is dying." And in 1937, in their introduction to Beaux
livres, belles histoires, the compilers Marguerite Gruny and Mathilde
Leriche wrote: "Children's literature in France is still poor, despite the
earnest efforts of the last decade." (see also French literature)
Surely Trigon was too severe. Even more
surely Mlle Latzarus has proved a false Cassandra. As for the compilers, the
very decade they scorned saw at least three magnificent achievements. The first
was Jean de Brunhoff's. Equally talented as author and artist, in 1931 he gave
the world that enlightened monarch Babar the Elephant, one of the dozen or so
immortal characters in children's literature. The next year saw the start of
Paul Faucher's admirable Père Castor series, imaginatively conceived,
beautifully designed educational picture books for the very young--not
literature, perhaps, but historically comparable to Comenius. Finally, in 1934
appeared the first of Marcel Aymé's
miraculous stories about two little girls and the talking animals whose
adventures they shared. These grave-comic fantasies were later collected as Les
Contes du chat perché (1939; Eng. trans., The
Wonderful Farm, 1951; Return to the
Wonderful Farm, 1954), and, along with de Brunhoff and Faucher, were enough
to make the decade great.
But there are no other decades to match
it. There does exist a disproportion between French literary genius as a whole
and the children's literature it has been able to produce. The explanation is
uncertain. Mme Le Prince de Beaumont, an adventurous 18th-century lady who wrote
over 70 volumes for the young, thought that children's stories should be
pervaded by "the spirit of geometry." It is possible that the blame
for France's showing might in part be laid on a persistent Cartesian spirit,
reinforced by rationalist and positivist philosophies. The Cartesian does not
readily surrender to fancy, especially of the more wayward variety. And so, even
counting Charles Perrault, the later Charles Nodier, and the contemporary Simone
Ratel and Maurice Vauthier, a dearth of first-rate fairy tales may be noted. Cartesians
would tend to be weak also in children's verse, in nonsense of any sort, in
humour (despite Babar), even in the more imaginative kind of historical novel
exemplified by Hans Baumann in Germany and Rosemary Sutcliff in England. Perhaps
French children's literature has been restrained by a Catholicism or by a
Protestantism that continued to insist on the edifying when mainstream
literature had already freed itself from explicit moralism. It may not even be
true, as Trigon thinks, that the French have fruitfully assimilated the
children's literature of foreign countries. Alice
has more or less bewildered them; Huckleberry
Finn has never been digested. The
child's cause was not much aided by the triumph of a post-Napoleonic bourgeois
cast of thought--or by the wave of post-1871 nationalism.
It is a complicated problem. But perhaps
the heart of it lies in the value the French set on maturity. For them childhood
at times has seemed less a normal human condition than a handicap. The children
themselves have often seemed to feel the pressure, which may account for the
fact that they absorb French adult books precociously. The French came much
later than did many other countries to the discovery of the child as a figure
worthy of the most sensitive understanding; that is what makes Père
Castor so important. One is not surprised to note the comparatively recent date
(1931) of a study by Aimé Dupuy, translatable as The
Child: A New Character in the French Novel.
If one skips Jean de La Fontaine, whose Fables
(1668; 1678-79; and 1693), though read by the young, were not meant for
them, French children's literature from one point of view begins with the
classic fairy tales of Charles
Perrault. These were probably intended for the salon rather than the
nursery, but their narrative speed and lucidity commended them at once to
children. The fairy tales of his contemporary Mme d'Aulnoy, like many others
produced in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, are hardly the real thing.
With a Watteau-like charm, they taste of the court, as does the Télémaque
of François Fénelon,
a fictionalized lecture on education.
Rousseau, as has been noted, did make a
difference. Émile at least drew
attention to what education might be. But the effect on children's literature
was not truly liberating. His disciple, Mme de Genlis, set a stern face against
make-believe of any sort; all marvels must be explained rationally. Her stories
taught children more than they wanted to know, a circumstance that endeared her
to a certain type of parent. Sainte-Beuve, to be fair, called her "the most
gracious and gallant of pedagogues." One of her qualities, priggishness,
was energetically developed by Arnaud Berquin in his Ami
des enfants. Berquin created the French equivalent of the concurrent English
bourgeois morality. In effect, he unconsciously manufactured an adult literature
for the young, loading the dice in favour of the values held by parents to be
proper for children. Yet one must beware of judging Berquin or his equally
moralistic successor Jean-Nicolas Bouilly by today's standards. Children
accepted them because they were the best reading available; and Anatole France's
tribute in Le Petit Pierre (1918) shows that they must have exerted some charm.
The didactic strain, if less marked than
in England or Germany, persisted throughout most of the 19th century. To it, Mme
de Ségur, in her enormously popular novels, added sentimentality, class
snobbery, but also some liveliness and occasional fidelity to child nature. Her
"Sophie" series (1850s and 60s), frowned on by modern critics, is
still loved by obstinate little French girls. Sans Famille (1878), by Hector Malot, a minor classic of the
"unhappy child" school, also continues to be read and is indeed a
well-told story. But the century's real writer of genius is of course Jules
Verne, whose first book, Un Voyage
en ballon, was originally published in 1851 in a children's magazine, Le Musée des Familles.
The period was lively enough. Production
was vast. Children's magazines flourished, particularly the remarkable Magasin
d'Éducation et de Récréation, brilliantly edited by
Jules Hetzel. Writers of the stature of George Sand, Alphonse Daudet, and
Alexandre Dumas père were not
too proud to write for children. Much worthy, though transient, work was
produced along with a mass of mediocrity, as was the case also in England and
the United States. But on the whole, as the century drew to a close, French
children might have been better served, even though one critic sees the apogee
as occurring between 1860 and 1900.
From the turn of the century to the
close of World War II, a number of superior works were produced. The books of de
Brunhoff and Faucher have already been cited. A remarkable picture of
prehistoric life by J.-H. Rosny (pseudonym of J.-H.-H. Boex) appeared in 1911
and has proved so durable that in 1967 an English translation, The
Quest for Fire, appeared. Patapoufs et
filifers, by André Maurois,
a gentle satire on war, has lasted (Eng. trans. Pattypuffs
and Thinifers, 1948; reissued 1968). His fantastic Le Pays des 36,000 volontés is almost as popular. The famous
dramatist Charles Vildrac has
done much to advance the cause of French children's literature. Two pleasant
stories of his, remotely descended from Robinson Crusoe, L'Isle rose and its sequel La Colonie, appeared in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1951 his now-classic
comic animal tale Les Lunettes du lion won
immediate success (Eng. trans., The Lion's Eyeglasses, 1969). On a high literary level, not
accessible to all children, was Le Petit
Prince (1943, both French and English, The
Little Prince) by the famous aviator-author Antoine
de Saint-Exupéry. The very vagueness of this mystical parable has
lent it a certain magnetism. Finally, it is necessary to mention a field in
which the French proved incomparable: the comic
strip combining action and satire, conceived on a plane of considerable
sophistication. Hergé's Tintinstarted in the 1930s and sold over 25,000,000 copies. Also successful was
the later and even more unconventional Astérix
series.
Production after 1945 so multiplied that
to single out names is bound to involve some injustice. A few, however, by
reason either of the originality of their talent or the scope of their
achievement, stand out. One is Maurice Druon, whose Tistou
of the Green Fingers (1957; Eng. trans. 1958), a kind of children's Candide,
demonstrated how the moral tale, given sufficient sensitivity and humour,
can be transmuted into art. Perhaps the most original temperament was that of
Henri Bosco, author of four eerie, haunting Provençal novels about the
boy Pascalet and his strange involvements with a gypsy companion, a fox, and a
dog in a shifting, legend-shrouded natural world. It may be that time will rate
these books, like those of the English writer Walter de la Mare, among the
finest of their kind. Bosco's L'Enfant et
la rivière (1955; Eng. trans., The
Boy and the River, 1956), Le Renard
dans l'île (1956; Eng. trans., The
Fox in the Island, 1958), and Barboche
(1957; Eng. trans. 1959) are notable.
Sound, realistic novels, almost free of
excess moralism, were written by at least a dozen reputable authors. Among them
Colette Vivier (The House of the Four
Winds), Paul-Jacques Bonzon (The
Orphans of Simitra), and Étienne Cattin (Night Express!) were distinguished. The domain of the imaginative
tale was well represented by Maurice Vauthier, especially by his Ecoute,
petit loup. Among those noted for their prolific output as well as the high
level of their art two names emerged. One is Paul Berna, who has worked in half
a dozen genres, including detective stories and science fiction. His Cheval
sans tête (1955) was published in England as A Hundred Million Francs and in the United States as The
Horse Without a Head and was made into a successful Disney film. A
"gang" story, using a hard, unemotional tone that recalls Simenon, it
may be the best of its kind since Emil and
the Detectives.
The death of René Guillot removed
a deeply conscientious and responsible artist. Guillot, though probably not of
the first rank, was not far below it. He left more than 50 widely translated
novels for the young and about 10 nonfiction works. For his entire body of work,
he received in 1964 the Andersen Prize. His finest achievements in the adventure
novel, based on his experiences in Africa, include The White Shadow (1948) and Riders
of the Wind (1953).
Children's verse has at least one
delightful practitioner in Pierre Gamarra. His Mandarine et le Mandarin contains Fontainesque fables of notable drollery and high technical skill.
The Belgian author Maurice Carême also has some repute as a children's
poet. In summary, contemporary French activity seems a bit lacking in colour and
versatility. But one solid achievement must be registered: the 19th century's
legacy was decisively rejected, and at last a natural child prevailed in the
imaginative work of the best French contemporaries.
Here history breaks cleanly into two
periods: pre-1917 and post-1917. In pre-Revolutionary Russia may be observed a
most dramatic illustration of the disproportion that may exist between a
children's and a mainstream literature. Beyond question the latter is one of the
greatest of the modern world. But Russia's pre-1917 children's literature is
anemic. It does include the fables
of Ivan Krylov; a great
treasury of Russian folktales (skazki)
assembled by A.N. Afanasyev; the epic tales (byliny) sung or told to children; the classic by Pyotr Yrshov, Konyok
gorbunok (1834; English adaption by Ireene Wicker, The
Little Hunchback Horse, 1942); and other stories and poems enjoyed by young
Russians but not originally designed for them. To this folk material should be
added the McGuffeyish moral tales that Tolstoy
wrote for a series of graded readers. There is also the poet-translator Vasily
Zhukovsky, praised by the respected critic Vissarion Belinsky as one of
the few poets of the century, part of whose work was dedicated to children. (see
also Russian
literature)
On the whole, however, pre-Revolutionary
Russia could make only a few feeble gestures toward the creation of an
independent children's literature. The submerged peasantry relied on the
fireside tale teller. The middle class, while far stronger than is generally
recognized, was in no position to stimulate or support a literature for its
children. The privileged class looked to the West: the children read Mme de
Genlis. Thus it came about that the child was recognized later in Russia than in
other parts of western Europe. The critic and children's writer Korney Chukovsky
speaks of the "indifference" with which "early childhood was
regarded in the past." He then points out that attitudes have changed, so
that now the child is "an adored hero."
The Revolution was the watershed. After
1917 Soviet children's literature developed more or less in accord with the
necessities of the state. This is not to say that it became identical with
Soviet propaganda. Indeed one of the finest teenage novels, Vadim Frolov's Chto
k chemu (Eng. trans., What It's All
About, 1965), is quite untouched by dogma of any kind. Soviet children's
literature, and especially its vast body of popularized science and technology
for the young, however, was in general governed by the ideals of socialist
realism, the idolization of the "new Soviet man" (as in the
widely read works of Boris Zhitkov and Arkady Gaydar), the exaltation of the
machine over the irresponsible furniture of fairyland, and especially a revised
version of the pre-18th-century miniature adult view of the child: he now had
become a potential Soviet citizen and architect of the Communist future.
Juvenile fiction and biography naturally
tended to cue themselves into the crucial episodes of Soviet history. But the
theory underlying this basically nationalist literature (suggesting similar
developments in Italy and England in the latter half of the 19th century) is by
no means clear-cut. The most influential thinker was Maksim
Gorky, who during the 1920s called for "creative fantasy," for
children's stories "which make out of the human being, instead of a
will-less creature or an indifferent workman, a free and active artist, creator
of a new culture." He asked for books that would encourage the child to
become "a knight of the spirit." Gorky's essays are a curious,
endearing mixture of Marxist doctrine (with a utopian slant) and quite standard
Western humanistic ideas. It is in Korney
Chukovsky's remarkable book Malenkiye
deti (1925) or Ot dvukh do pyati
(Eng. trans., From
Two to Five1963),
however, that the opposition of two familiar forces, entertainment and
instruction, can be sensed most clearly. The tension is typically expressed in
Chukovsky's account of the Soviet war over the fairy tale, the opposition to
which reached its high point in the 1920s and '30s. "We propose,"
wrote one journalist in a Moscow magazine in 1924, "to replace the
unrealistic folktales and fantasies with simple realistic stories taken from the
world of reality and from nature." Chukovsky, himself a writer full of
humour and invention, opposed this view, as had Gorky before him.
Though rich in folklore drawn from its
many peoples and languages, Soviet culture remained weak in the realm of
fantasy. A fairy play such as Marshak's Krugly
god (Eng. trans., The Month Brothers, 1967)
seems (at least in English) fatally heavy-handed. That Soviet children's
literature was vigorous, varied, and motivated by a genuine concern for the
child is undoubted. However, there certainly existed no Soviet
"Narnia" series, a Soviet Borrowers.
It is not difficult to see that
contemporary children's literature in Russia is lively, copious, and probably
enjoyed. It is much more difficult for those who have no Russian to judge its
value. Occasionally in translation one will come across something as superb as
the beautiful nature and animal tales in Arcturus
the Hunting Hound and Other Stories (1968) by Yury
Kazakov. But one can only record, without judging, the vast production of
such popular children's writers as Samuil Marshak, Sergey Mikhalkov, Lev Kassil,
and N. Nosov. Especially notable is the popularity of poetry, whether it be the
work of such past generation writers as Vladimir Mayakovsky or that of the
contemporary Agniya Barto. Apparently Russian children read poetry with more
passion and understanding than do English-speaking children. The mind of the
Russian child is carefully looked after. He is provided with books, often
beautifully illustrated, which many Western countries may find hard to match.
"Demand from them as much as possible, respect them as much as
possible," says Anton Makarenko, the theorist of children's literature.
|
