An approach to children's literature (=introductroy chapters to Language and Theme in children's literature)

For instance, does ‘children’s literature’ refer to books written for, or read by children, or both? The first definition, ‘written for children’, would only focus on the author’s original target audience and would therefore include historical ‘children’s books’ which are not read by children anymore and are only of interest to a few literary adults. The second, ‘read by children’ would encompass anything ever read by children, including books which were intended for adults and later adopted by children, as for instance ‘Robinson Crusoe’, as well as comics and other material children read but most adults would not associate with children’s ‘literature’. What about books intended for children but read by adults? What about textbooks, encyclopedias or other non-fiction written for children? Do they count as children’s literature?

Knowles and Malmkjaer (1996: 2) define ‘children’s literature’ simply as ‘any narrative written and published for children’, a definition that excludes some poetry written for children and also assumes that ‘written for children’ and ‘published for children’ are synonymous. This is not necessarily the case, as some books are published as children’s books in one country and as books for adults in another - for instance Philip Pullman’s ‘Northern Lights’ which was sold as a book for adults in Britain and as a children’s book in the USA (cf. ‘The Children’s Bookseller’: 22.). The same is true for many of the ‘Harry Potter’ books of which there are children’s and adult versions available, even in the same bookstore, the only difference lying in the packaging and the price, which is higher for the adult version. This may be a recent phenomenon, but the demarcation lines separating children’s and adult literature have never been clear-cut and texts have always passed from one ‘system’ to the other over the course of time (cf. Shavit 1986, 65f.). Publishing indeed plays a crucial role in the classification of books as children’s books. If the writer’s intention is left out entirely we arrive at Townsend’s pragmatic definition, quoted by Knowles and Malmkjaer (1996: 1). If he [the publisher] puts a book on the children’s list, it will be reviewed as a children’s book and will be read by children (or young people), if it is read at all. If he puts it on the adult list, it will not – or at least not immediately (Knowles and Malmkjaer 1996: 1).

In my view, as a definition, this is not satisfactory enough for our purposes. If we talk about ‘children’ and their ‘literature’, we should be as clear as possible of what is meant by these terms. Why is it that children’s literature is so difficult to define, the field has such hazy boundaries? This question leads right into the center of the issue.

The definition of children’s literature lies at the heart of its endeavor: it is a category of books the existence of which absolutely depends on supposed relationships with a particular reading audience: children (Lesnik-Oberstein 1996: 17).

Children’s literature as a field tends to resist clear-cut definitions, it is ambivalent, an oddity, ‘a species of literature whose boundaries are very hazy’ (Hunt 1990,1). This has to do with the fact that both terms, ‘children’ and ‘literature’, are culturally and historically determined concepts. When we look at the children of ‘children’s literature’ we realize that their first and foremost defining characteristic, namely age, has varied considerably over time. Up to what age a person is regarded as a child has changed much in the history of childhood (e.g. cf. Ariès 1975). It seems that the characteristics we regard as typical of children, that is, lack of experience, resulting in a certain behavior, time for play, little responsibility, and in particular, our ideas of the sweetness and innocence of children go back to the Romantic period, while our conviction that children are in need of adult supervision originated in the middle of the 18th century (cf. Shavit 1986: 26). It is important to keep in mind that our ideas of what children are and what makes them children, is constructed.

‘Notions of the ‘child’, ‘childhood’ and ‘children’s literature’ […] embody the social construction of a particular historical context […] such notions today are bound up with the language and ideology of Romantic literature and criticism (Myers 1992, in Watkins 1996: 35).

What constitutes a child is therefore a culturally determined concept and subject to change. One critic’s idea of what ‘children’ are or what makes them children may be very different from another’s, and the same is true for writers. And then there are the children in the books, and the reading children who may be very different children indeed if notions of childhood have changed.

For this reason there can be no ‘intrinsic’ definition of ‘children’s literature’, as the cultural and social context always comes into play. Lesnik-Oberstein (1996: 17) goes so far as to say that

the two constituent terms-‘children’ and ‘literature’ - within the label ‘children’s literature’ cannot be separated and traced back to original independent meanings, and then reassembled to achieve a greater understanding of what ‘children’s literature’ is. Within the label the two terms totally qualify each other and transform each other’s meaning for the purposes of the field. In short: the ‘children’ of children’s literature are constituted as specialised ideas of ‘children’ […]

In short, both ‘children’ and the ‘literature’ written for them, are shaped by ‘the views held within the adult population about children and young people themselves and their place in society’. (Hollindale 1988?)

Over the following pages I will look closely at both terms in their context to gain a better understanding of their meanings and the way they interact to result in ‘children’s literature’.

Children’s literature and children’s literature criticism define themselves as existing because of, and for, ‘children’, and it is these ‘children’ who remain the passion of – and therefore the source of conflict for – children’s authors and critics (Lesnik-Oberstein 1996: 29).

Looking at the issue from the ‘literature’ side, however,

[...] there is an implicit definition of children’s literature which has little necessarily to do with children: it is not the title of a readership but of a genre, collateral perhaps with fable or fantasy (Hollindale 1988: 26).

In my opinion the integration of these two ways of looking at the subject will bring us a considerable step closer to a comprehensive understanding. For this reason, I will take a short look at the term ‘literature’, which raises as many questions as ‘children’. The conventional, in many contexts still prevalent, underlying ‘definition’ or understanding of literature as ‘the inaccessible, the pretentious, the difficult’ (Hunt 1991: 23) that only the ‘self-elected’ with ‘trained intuition’ (Hunt 1991: 50) can access is particularly detrimental in the context of children’s ‘literature’, in fact it would actually exclude it, as it has done for a long time when children’s literature was excluded from the canon. Unfortunately, it is still in the back of the mind of many who write about children’s literature and is responsible for their hostile attitude against ‘literature’ (cf. I, 5). Over the last decades this conventional notion of ‘literature’ has been deconstructed (cf. Hunt 1991) and it has been pointed out that the label ‘literature’ has been applied as a ‘value’ term (e.g. Hunt 1991: 51), which is embedded in a context of culture and power and cannot be defined in terms of its linguistic features. The question linguists and critics have then been concerned with is, if literature can be defined at all or if it is essentially no different from other discourses. I think it is a different discourse. Cook’s ‘idea of schema refreshment through discourse deviation’ (1994: 206), which I will discuss in chapter 10, provides an explanation for the special status of literature compared to other discourses, and is particularly interesting in regard to children’s literature.

In conclusion, both terms ‘children’ and ‘literature’ are cultural concepts and it is ‘the cultural context that dominates the categorization’ (Hunt 1991: 51) of books as children’s books.

2 The History of Children’s Literature: from ‘Instruction’ to ‘Delight’

Aesthetic quality has always been seen as a very important characteristic of the literary text. The special pleasure that can be derived from reading such a text makes it different from a merely informational text. Texts written with the sole intention to instruct or inform children are therefore usually excluded from the field ‘children’s literature’. The purpose to teach children, however, comes in many disguises: it is rarely explicitly stated (except in some non-fiction) and more often than not intertwined with the purpose to amuse in one and the same text. The history of children’s literature, as the field in general, is characterized by this opposition between literary qualities that ‘delight’ the reader, and didactic purposes aiming at ‘instruction’, c.f. for instance the title of the Oxford anthology of children’s literature I will draw on, ‘From Instruction to Delight’. (Demers and Moyles 1982), which interprets the whole history of children’s literature as a journey from the one to the other.

The book regarded as the beginning of children’s ‘literature’ in this anthology is Newbery’s ‘Little Pretty Pocketbook’. The decision of what counts as the first children’s book is of course to some extent arbitrary, as such decisions invariably have to be, in this case it is based on the opposition between ‘instruction’ and ‘delight’: The ‘Little Pretty Pocketbook’ is the first book targeted at children that explicitly brings in ‘delight’, as it is ‘intended for the Instruction and Amusement of little Master Tommy and pretty Miss Polly [...]’ (Newbery in Demers and Moyles 1982: 104) and it is the second term that makes it a landmark of children’s literature. By our standards this is rather surprising, after all there seems nothing more natural than a writer’s expression of his intention to amuse children, (an expressive intention to instruct would more likely be kept quiet nowadays). When we take a short look at the history of children’s literature, however, we realize that this idea is very ‘modern’ and the production of literature (that is material written with the aim to delight) specifically for children a comparatively recent phenomenon.

For the emergence of a literature especially for children certain social and cultural conditions were necessary. It was not possible in a world in which the child was seen as part of the adult world (Shavit 1986, 6f.). According to Ariès ‘Geschichte der Kindheit’ (1975) this was the case in medieval society, which had no awareness of the child as a being with separate, and special needs, no concept of childhood. As soon as babies could live without the constant attention of the mother or nurse they entered society at large without a transitional period (Ariès 1975: 209). The period before the child was able to take part in adult society was very short, as the lifespan in general was much shorter than it is today, and it did not count much: infant mortality was very high, so one had to expect that very young children would die anyway and for this reason were not important. This attitude can still be found in the 17th century (209).

According to Ariès (1975: 210), it was in the 14th century that a tendency developed in art to assign the child more importance; there were for instance portraits of children. Over the next centuries this changing view of childhood slowly spread to other areas of life. In the 16th and 17th centuries awareness of childhood as a separate state can be seen in the dress of upper class children, which for the first time differed from adults’. The beginning polarization of the world of children and adults brought with it different notions of childhood. At first children came to be seen as a source of pleasure and amusement. Adults began to find the naivety and cuteness of children amusing and on a large scale began to take pleasure in hugging and cuddling them (Aries 1975: 210f.). They might have done this before but now it was spoken about. It was also in the 17th century that a second notion, propagated by moralists and educators, began to develop, which emphasized the importance of the ‘spiritual well-being’ of children. Psychological and moral interest in the upbringing and education of children began to replace the view of child as toy (Ariès 1975: 217), and characterizes attitudes towards childhood to this day (Ariès 1975: 215). This is where the origins of children’s literature lie, even though there was nothing published specifically for children before 1700 (cf. Hunt 1991: 21).

John Locke’s treatise ‘Some Thoughts Concerning Education’ (1693) reflected the change in attitudes towards children (cf. Hunt 1995: 12). The Puritan notion of the child as a vessel of sin was replaced by the new Enlightenment view of the child as ‘tabula rasa’, a blank slate that could be written on (cf. Townsend 1996: 677). Locke’s educational philosophy advocated instruction in combination with pleasure, and saw the possibility that ‘children could play themselves into what others are whipped for’ (Townsend 1996: 677). Slowly this began to be reflected in the literature for the child. It had started with the Puritans’ ‘Hell-Fire’ tales, which were now followed by stories written by the ‘Rational Moralists’ (cf. Demers and Moyles 1982) in the tradition of Locke. However, these tales were still predominantly instructional, and at times just as gruesome as the Puritans’ tales. Newbery, a shrewd publisher and businessman, and admirer of Locke’s educational philosophy perceived the gap in the market and began to publish children’s books. His first title, ‘A Little Pretty Pocketbook’ (1744), is, as mentioned above, generally regarded as the beginning of ‘children’s literature’, as it was the first book expressly written to delight children, while attempting a compromise between the interests of parents and children. Its proclaimed motto is ‘Delectando monemus: Instruction with Delight’ (Newbery in Demers and Moyles 1982: 105).

[Newbery’s] many titles brought together the pleasurable and the instructive, frequently between the same covers. The two aims – to teach and to please – have remained twined together ever since (Townsend 1996: 677).

Of course Newbery was not the first to delight children, only the first to do so expressively. Fairytales and folktales were always told to children and enjoyed by them but also by adults. Bottigheimer (1996: 152) distinguishes between the original stories about fairies enjoyed by adults, and fairy tales. Tales about fairies are ‘elaborate narratives that depict the fairy kingdom and elfland; the leprechauns, kobolds, gnomes, elves, and little people […] based on surviving Celtic lore’ (152). They often have ‘amoral consequences and conclusions’. In the seventeenth century, versions of these tales about fairies were in fact intended for French adult aristocratic audiences but soon found a child readership. The lower classes also told their children fairy stories. After 1700 fairy stories intended for a child audience began to appear.

Fairy tales, unlike tales about fairies, more often than not, do not include fairies in their cast of characters and are generally brief narratives in simple language that detail a reversal of fortune, with a rags-to-riches plot that often culminates in a wedding. Magical creatures regularly assist earthly heroes and heroines achieve happiness, and the entire story is usually made to demonstrate a moral point […] (Bottigheimer 1996: 152).

Folk-tales include many genres, for instance animal tales, nonsense tales, jests, burlesques, chapbook romances and many more (cf. Bottigheimer 1996: 161). Some folk tales, like Robin Hood, Tom Thumb, Jack and the Giant, ‘thematize the confrontation of small, weak, poor but witty hero against a large, strong, rich, but stupid real or metaphorical giant’ (Bottigheimer 1996: 162). Folk-tales are difficult to distinguish from fairy tales, except that almost all of the folk-tales, according to Bottigheimer (1996:162) ‘enjoy a truly ancient literary lineage’. Both fairy tales and folk-tales are important components of children’s literature. In fact, the history of children’s literature is to a large extent the history of fairytales and folktales. For a long time they were for the most part children’s territory, it was even thought that children understood them better than adults (cf. Bottigheimer 1996: 162).

It seems natural that children, because of their comparatively powerless social position, would particularly empathize with the weak disadvantaged hero/ine who wins out in the end. Moreover, fairy tales and folk-tales are radical and extreme not only in the heroes’ reversals of fortune, but also in the punishment of evil, thus affording pleasure in justice (which may have to compensate for lack of it in the real world). The weakling wins, often by defeating a powerful figure that can be compared to the parent or any other powerful adult in the child’s life. This rise to power of the disadvantaged hero/ine can be seen as a possibility that children could throw over the adult order, at least symbolically, and serves as a reminder that there is justice, which wins in the end, and despite the apparently greater power of the giant/witch or whoever it is who is conquered. This has probably always attracted children, and put off many adults who passionately opposed these tales as reading material for children in the name of protecting them.

Fairy tales and folk-tales were part of an underground tradition and attacked from all sides, at different times for different reasons: they were ‘regarded by the Tudor and Stuart literati as ‘peasant absurdities’ (Townsend 1996: 680), the Puritans railed against them because of their fictional nature and because they feared they might ‘disgust... children with what is useful and of real importance’ (Demers and Moyles 1982: 78), besides having ‘not even the shadow of common sense in them’ (Demers and Moyles 1982: 78), and, ‘by the 18th century [they were regarded] as contrary to reason’ (Townsend 1996: 680). As much as their predecessors, Locke and his followers, including Newbery, opposed the old tales, the ‘Ballads and foolish Books’ already deplored by White in 1671. In fact, efforts were made till well into the 19th century to ban fanciful adventurous tales such as folktales and ballads of legend and romance once and for all from the nursery.

Despite these attacks, the old tales survived and were passed on from generation to generation. Aside from the oral tradition, this is largely due to their preservation in ‘chapbooks’, ‘slim, cheap pamphlets sold by pedlars throughout the country that contained romances, dramas, and histories (Hunt 1995: 27). Towards the end of the 18th century there were chapbooks published specifically for children but even before that children read them. As everything published for children was heavily instructional, there was no competition for these little books (Demers and Moyles 1982), until Newbery set up the tradition of publishing books that tried to please both children and adults, while (in his own interest) opposing the original tales as fiercely as anyone else.

It was not till Romanticism that the rehabilitation of these old tales began:

their emergence into respectable print is probably associated with the rise of Romanticism, the greater esteem for imagination that had followed the Age of Reason, and the replacement to some extent of classical influences by Nordic ones’ (Townsend 1996: 680).

The Romantics’ preference of fairy tales over more realistic fiction (cf. Hunt 1992: 12) helped to make them again socially acceptable and contributed to their later re-establishment as literature which was considered ‘proper’ at least for children. Contemporary notions of the child as innocent, sweet, closer to God and in some way wiser than adults, as well as the glorification of childhood as a state of innocence can be traced back to ‘Romantic ideologies of childhood’ (Hunt 1992: 12), which regarded childhood as a somewhat mythical state, more natural than adulthood, because yet unspoilt.

By the mid-nineteenth century a number of authors, to differing degrees associated with the Romantic movement, had appeared, who signalled important changes in children’s literature, and, according to Demers and Moyles (1982: 219ff.), ushered in the Golden Age of children’s literature.

Unlike their doctrinaire contemporaries they were willing to endorse entertainment as a creditable goal in their works for the young, and were capable of fashioning delightful vehicles to ensure success (219).

Blake’s ‘Songs of Innocence and Experience’ (1794), Roscoe’s ‘The Butterfly’s Ball and the Grasshopper’s Feast (1807), Lamb’s ‘Poetry for children’ (1809), and Lear’s ‘The Book of Nonsense’ (1846), among other works, survived from that time. Interestingly, it was these books that were by no means typical of children’s literature of the time, which were heavily influential, tasting as they did ‘more of honey than of medicine’ (Demers and Moyles 1982: 221). According to Demers and Moyles (1982) and also Knowles and Malmkjaer (1996: 3), a number of writers of instructional and moral tales, now forgotten (except in histories of children’s literature), remained in the majority for a long time to come. Examples are Thomas Day’s ‘The History of Sandford and Merton’ (1783-9) and Mrs. Trimmer’s ‘Fabulous Histories’ (1786), later renamed as ‘The History of the Robins’.

In the 19th century, there was for the first time ‘a mass output of popular juvenile fiction’ (Knowles and Malmkjaer 1996: 3) and the emergence of what came to be called ‘traditional juvenile fiction’ which can be divided into the ‘adventure story’ and the ‘school story’. Both offered role models the reader could identify with. Representatives of the adventure story are Ballantyne, Kingston, Marryat and G.A. Henty. With Stevenson the genre reaches its height, and is at the same time transcended. The school story became a popular genre with Thomas Hughes’s ‘Tom Brown’s Schooldays’ (1857).

In the early nineteenth century, the output of books for children continued to grow, but emphasis was still largely on the didactic and instructional […] By the mid-nineteenth century, imagination was in favour among the more forward-looking writers (Townsend 1996: 680).

The second half of the 19th century (and beginning of the 20th century, up to the outbreak of the First World War) is generally regarded as the ‘Golden Age’ of children’s literature with authors such as Ruskin, Dickens, Wilde, Grahame, Rossetti, in different genres casting off the restraints of hundreds of years of instruction. Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice in Wonderland’, published in 1865, is often regarded as the final victory of the imagination. At the same time, there was still a large output of heavily instructional, didactic literature for children, ‘the work of third-and fourth-rate writers turning out what the market demanded’ (Townsend 1996: 680).

The Victorian ideal of childhood, in brief, was that children should be good and do as they were told. Piety, often to an unrealistic degree, was approved of; the activity of tract societies and the growing trade in Sunday School ‘rewards’ resulted in a torrent of ‘goody-goody’ books. To look at the Victorian children’s books still familiar today is in one way misleading but in another way illuminating: the survivors are far from representative of the entire output and come almost invariably from the minority that ignored, bent or broke the rules (Townsend 1996: 680).

The First World War ended the Golden Age of children’s literature. Compared to the years before, both wars and the interwar period were an impoverished period of children’s writing, with less importance and status assigned to children’s books and their writers (cf. Townsend 1996: 682).

The stresses of war and post-war shortages restricted publishing during the second war as they had done in the First, and the decade of recovery was the 1950s (Townsend 1996: 683).

The 1950s led up to a very prolific period of writing, often called the second ‘Golden Age’, with a large number of books published in many different genres, such as the adventure story, historical novel, fantasy, realistic fiction (cf. Townsend 1996: 684f.). The major writers representing the ‘Golden Age’ include Lucy Boston, Philippa Pearce, William Mayne, Alan Garner, Jill Paton Walsh, Leon Garfield, and Joan Aiken among others (cf. Hollindale and Sutherland 1995, 256ff.). Hollindale and Sutherland (1995: 259) attribute the flowering of children’s literature at the time to the remarkable freedom of non-artistic influences authors enjoyed. This ‘period of exceptional artistic licence for the children’s author’ (259), however, ended in the 1970s with the arrival of a new agenda of political correctness, thus opening again the debate on ‘instruction’ and ‘delight’, this time in a modern dress. While authors of children’s books these days are not so much in danger of being openly criticized for the morals they propagate, they may be accused of a number of different –isms. This may be even more dangerous because it is often not made obvious that different morals/politics are at issue and that the standards of ‘political correctness’ against which works are measured are ideological as well. This is not to say that ideology in children’s literature should not be discussed, but on a different level (cf. I, 6,7).

This short overview of the historical development of children’s literature is important for the discussion that follows because it shows the war that has been fought over the bodies of children over the question if children are allowed to have an imagination or not. It also shows the roots of the issues discussed today, and the similarities, and this is important because our own immersion in our cultural climate means that we are far less able to see contemporary issues like the debate on political correctness from a distance than we are able to see historical issues. The split between more or less didactic writing for children and books that feed the imagination has always been of interest. It is important to bear in mind that the children’s books that survive and become classics are often the delightful ones, those that go against the rules of the time, while instructional works tend to be forgotten, unless they are particularly gruesome and disgusting as some cautionary tales. Fairytales have been favorites with children for a long time and have survived the different morals that have at different times been attached to them. This goes to show that children’s inclinations are not so easy to influence or divert as adults think (or would wish), and that they like or dislike stories for their own reasons, no matter what the ‘moral’ is, as adults would have it.