My next two columns for The Sunday Guardian were a two-part series on children's literature, mostly from the western world. Part 1 is here and Part 2 is here. And the whole piece is below.
Our childhoods are composed so thickly
of stories that they are often our warmest memories of cold winter nights and
our sweetest reminders of the things we most cherish. We tended to find stories
in everything, and soon we began to demand them. At one point, we empowered
ourselves: we began to read them. And while the concept of a specific genre of
literature written exclusively for children has come of age only in the last
hundred-odd years, for some reason books written earlier than 1950 – in fact,
troublingly, all great classics – somehow automatically come under literature
for children, prescribed by schools and libraries. And perhaps this is why,
when I was eight, I was handed a copy of Rebecca,
the macabre 1938 novel by Daphne du Maurier as part of my extracurricular
reading. In these PG-13 days of close policing of content for children, this
seems unthinkable. But those were the days when I cheerfully struggled through Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, both written in 1847, and
simply could not comprehend The Mayor of
Casterbridge (1886). Even Shakespeare – abridged as he was by the Lambs – was
lost on me. I was, thankfully, wise enough to return to them all when I was old
enough to appreciate them.
Other books too, of more ambiguous
classification, regularly find themselves on reading lists. Even though Lewis
Carroll wrote about a child when he
wrote Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
in 1865 and its even more oblique sequel Through
the Looking-Glass in 1871, it often seems that he never intended his books
to be for children. We often mistake
literature about children – and sometimes literature about animals and any
literature that involves any sort of fantasy – to be literature for children.
But books, for example, like Henry James’s What
Maisie Knew (1897), which tells the story of a dysfunctional couple going
through a traumatic divorce from the perspective of their young daughter, or
even, more recently, Yann Martel’s Life
of Pi (2001), which has the distinction of being about a child and about an
animal and has elements of fantasy and
is yet not a book for children, break that mould; even Dickens’s David Copperfield (1850) and Nicholas Nickleby (1838), which are routinely
placed on school syllabi and which both feature young boys growing into men, do
not seem particularly to have been aimed at children. Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), told from
the perspective of a precocious young girl, feels far more relevant to the
adult than the child.
In 1964, Gore Vidal wrote a short,
glowing review of Edith Nesbit’s life and work in the New York Review of Books,
where he bemoaned her lack of popularity in the United States. He wrote: ‘In a recent biography, Magic and the Magician,
Noel Streatfeild remarks that E. Nesbit did not particularly like children,
which may explain why the ones that she created in her books are so entirely
human. They are intelligent, vain, aggressive, humorous, witty, cruel, compassionate…
in fact, they are like adults, except for one difference.’ Nesbit, perhaps,
never really intended to write for children either.
Historians tell us that the idea of childhood is a modern
concept and that before the eighteenth century, children were not considered to
be significantly different from adults and, therefore, were not treated very
differently. John Locke arrived with newfangled notions of the innocence of
childhood and began slowly to propagate the idea that young children were,
perhaps, not just small-sized human beings.
One man, though, started to think like an entrepreneur. John
Newbery, an English publisher who had already published such greats as Samuel
Johnson and Oliver Goldsmith, wrote and published the very first children’s
book that we know of: A Little Pretty
Pocket-Book in 1744. A genre was created and a market that no one knew
existed was uncovered.
Although the Irish and the Indians had been telling folktales
for centuries before Newbery, these were never considered to be exclusively for
children, most often written and told to distract spoilt bratty princelings. Now,
though, the goriest, bloodiest tales of Grimm, Aesop, Andersen, and of the
Panchatantra and the Jataka, are politely repackaged for children, suitably
lined with morals and values.
Maybe the thing to learn, though, from the history of
children’s literature is that twenty-first century notions of age-appropriateness
are a tad misplaced. These miniature adults do just fine reading whatever they
can lay their hands on, even if it’s du Maurier or the Brontes, and although we
should write and publish especially for them, perhaps we should never do them
the disservice of telling them what to read.
Western
children’s literature, especially since the late 1800s, has been through some
interesting phases. From the first children’s books that Newbery wrote and
published, writing for children came a long way in England (and Scotland). Writers
like Dickens and Ballantyne were dubiously classified as writers for children
despite an adult readership, much like the French writers Jules Verne and
Alexandre Dumas. Thomas Hughes wrote Tom
Brown’s Schooldays in 1857 and Charles Kingsley wrote The Water Babies in 1863, but largely the English were floundering
when it came to writing for their youngest readers.
It
was, in fact, in the very same Americas where writers like Edith Nesbit and
George MacDonald were simply not gaining favour (perhaps because of their
tendencies towards religious imagery) that children’s writing suddenly took a
new turn. Louisa May Alcott charged forth into the literary scene with Little Women in 1868, perhaps unwittingly
setting off an entire sisterhood of writing about young girls in North America
coming to terms with their worlds – the very earliest all-American girls. Susan
Coolidge followed with the What Katy Did
series, which began in 1873. L. Frank Baum leapt gloriously into our lives with
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in 1900,
and Frances Hodgson Burnett, a British writer who spent her entire adult life
in the USA, shot to fame with Little Lord
Fauntleroy (1886), A Little Princess
(1905), and The Secret Garden (1909).
Kate
Douglas Wiggins began what came to be a spate of stories about cheery girls,
often orphans, sent to live with strangers when she wrote Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm in 1903. She was followed closely in
theme, plot and content by the Anne of
Green Gables series by Lucy Maud Montgomery in 1908 and Eleanor H. Porter’s
Pollyanna series in 1913. And by
1932, Laura Ingalls Wilder had started writing about the little house in the
prairies. For the all-American boys, Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn arrived on the
pages of Mark Twain. An entire landscape came alive. Wiggins’s Maine, Porter’s
Vermont, Twain’s Missouri, and Wilder’s gorgeous prairies wrote themselves into
literary terrain instantly; Montgomery, in particular, wrote evocatively and
insistently about Prince Edward Island, off the coast of Canada. We weren’t
just in Kansas anymore.
Many
of the young heroines had their readers growing up alongside them. Alcott and
Montgomery took their readers not just all the way up to the adult lives of
their heroines, but up to the adult lives of their children as well. Jo March
became Josephine Bhaer, Anne Shirley became Anne Blythe, and before we knew it
there were little Bhaers and little Blythes growing up into big Bhaers and big
Blythes. Pollyanna and Katy grew into vibrant, interesting women; Wilder took
the trouble to tell us about several generations of the family that lived in
the prairies. These writers weren’t just giving us childhood stories, they were
allowing us to claw right back into childhood even when life wouldn’t permit us
that luxury.
Of course, things were hardly quiet back on the other side of the
pond. By the time the new century arrived, the English had risen once again. In
1902 alone, Kipling gave us Just So
Stories, Nesbit published Five
Children and It, and Beatrix Potter published The Tales of Peter Rabbit. J. M. Barrie arrived in 1904 with the
little boy who wouldn’t grow up – an antidote every Anne, Rebecca and Jo who
did. In Scotland, Kenneth Grahame wrote The
Wind in the Willows in 1908.
Children’s writing was coming
into its own and an epochal moment occurred when A. A. Milne created Winnie the Pooh in 1926. Enid Blyton took up
the baton in 1942 with Five on a Treasure
Island, although it wasn’t her first book. In Sweden, where Johanna Spryi
had already written Heidi (1884),
Astrid Lindgren appeared on the scene with Pippi
Longstocking (1945). And very soon, C. S. Lewis, E. B. White, Dr. Seuss,
and Roald Dahl were upon us, tearing us into the modern world of children’s
literature as we know it. From the 1970s, Judy Blume wrote books about
adolescence and puberty in the kind of language that other writers had not
toyed with as yet. And of course, history was made when Bloomsbury sent Joanne
Rowling a publishing contract.
