9. Children's literature

Children's literature Stories and poems aimed at children have an exceedingly long history: lullabies, for example, were sung in Roman times, and a few nursery games and rhymes are almost as ancient. Yet so far as written-down literature is concerned, while there were stories in print before 1700 that children often seized on when they had the chance, such as translations of Aesop's fables, fairy-stories and popular ballads and romances, these were not aimed at young people in particular. Since the only genuinely child-oriented literature at this time would have been a few instructional works to help with reading and general knowledge, plus the odd Puritanical tract as an aid to morality, the only course for keen child readers was to raid adult literature. This still occurs today, especially with adult thrillers or romances that include more exciting, graphic detail than is normally found in literature for younger readers. For the boy or girl in the early 18th century the equivalent could have been Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress (1678), Defoe's The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719) or Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726). The fact that all these classics soon appeared in simplified form suggests that such popularity among young readers had not been overlooked.

By the middle of the 18th century there were enough eager child readers, and enough parents glad to cater to this interest, for publishers to specialize in children's books whose first aim was pleasure rather than education or morality. In Britain, a London merchant named Thomas Boreham produced Cajanus, The Swedish Giant in 1742, while the more famous John Newbery published A Little Pretty Pocket Book in 1744. Its contents - rhymes, stories, children's games plus a free gift ('A ball and a pincushion') - in many ways anticipated the similar lucky-dip contents of children's annuals this century. It is a tribute to Newbery's flair that he hit upon a winning formula quite so quickly, to be pirated almost immediately in America.

Such pleasing levity was not to last. Influenced by Rousseau, whose Emile (1762) decreed that all books for children save Robinson Crusoe were a dangerous diversion, contemporary critics saw to it that children's literature should be instructive and uplifting. Prominent among such voices was Mrs Sarah Trimmer, whose magazine The Guardian of Education (1802) carried the first regular reviews of children's books. It was she who condemned fairy-tales for their violence and general absurdity; her own stories, Fabulous Histories (1786), described talking animals who were always models of sense and decorum. In less fanciful vein, Mary Sherwood's The History of the Fairchild Family (1818-47) contained dark moral warnings together with regular reference to biblical verses. That her book stayed in print so long is a tribute to her powers as a writer; a famous passage, where the Fairchild father takes his children to see a corpse on a gibbet as a final Awful Warning, had actually to be softened in later editions. Not for the first time, children may have thrilled to this part of the text with its horrific, Gothic overtones rather more wholeheartedly than its author intended. The stories of Captain Frederick Marryat too, such as Masterman Ready (1841) or Children of the New Forest (1847), were popular for more reasons than their lengthy digressions on flora, fauna and British history. They also included passages of exciting action where both reader and writer could temporarily forget about self- improvement.

So the moral story for children was always threatened from within, given the way children have of drawing out entertainment from the sternest moralist. But the greatest blow to the improving children's book was to come from an unlikely source indeed: early 19th-century interest in folklore. Both nursery rhymes, selected by James Orchard Halliwell for a folklore society in 1842, and collections of fairy-stories by the scholarly Grimm brothers, swiftly translated into English in 1823, soon rocketed to popularity with the young, quickly leading to new editions, each one more child-centered than the last. But another folklorist, Sir George Dasent, insisted on keeping his translation of Norse fairy-tales intact, merely suggesting - no doubt unrealistically - that all good children should ignore the two slightly racy examples at the end of the book. Later on, American children also had the chance of enjoying the legends of Robin Hood (1883) and King Arthur (1903) skillfully reworked by Howard Pyle - another revivalist who provided rich fare for children, however occasionally worrying for the puritan conscience.

Those latter-day followers of Rousseau who still battled for 'sensible' stories continued to have a certain success despite the wrath of Charles Dickens in his memorable essay of 1853, 'Frauds on the Fairies'. But by now history was against them: 1846, for example, saw the publication of Edward Lear's Book of Nonsense, as anarchic as any rebellious child could wish, while Thackeray's The Rose and the Ring (1855) and Charles Kingsley's The Water Babies(1863) continued to make an unanswerable case for fantasy and the imagination first, moral lessons second. All it needed was a masterpiece that not only avoided didacticism but actually made fun of it, and two years later this duly arrived with the appearance of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865).

From now on younger children could expect stories written for their particular interest and with the needs of their own limited experience of life kept well to the fore. In Britain, Mrs Juliana Ewing, Mrs Mary Molesworth and Charlotte М. Yonge produced excellent stories aimed at young girl readers in this spirit, and their success was repeated in America by Susan Coolidge in What Katy Did (1872), Kate Douglas Wiggin in Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1903), Eleanor H. Porter in Pollyanna (1913), and by the Canadian writer L. M. Montgomery in Anne of Green Gables (1908). For boys, Thomas Hughes's classic Том Brown's Schooldays (1857) spawned a new generation of school-stories.

But while such books for younger children stood out on their own as the next stage after the large picture-books now available for fortunate infants from homes wealthy enough to afford such fare, older child readers and adults still tended to share each other's principal fare. R. M. Ballantyne's adventure stories were popular with all ages, for example, while Gladstone was an enthusiastic fan of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island (1883), although on hearing this news the ungrateful author merely remarked, 'He would do better to attend to the Imperial affairs of England.' George MacDonald's strange, mystical stories, such as At the Back of the North Wind (1871), also intrigued a wide audience, while Anna Sewell's Black Beauty (1877) was once set as compulsory reading material in prison by way of reform for an adult guilty of animal cruelty.

What eventually determined the reading of older children was often not the availability of special, children's literature as such but access to books that contained characters, such as young people or animals, with whom they could more easily identify, or action, such as exploring or fighting, that made few demands on adult maturity or understanding. Such a list encompassed G. A. Henty's imperialistic adventures or Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans (1826; see Leatherstocking Tales), Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin(1S52), Louisa M. Alcott's Little Women (1868), Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) and Frances Hodgson Burnett's Little Lord Fauntleroy (1885), also greatly admired by Gladstone. Mention must also be made of Dickens's novels, with a poll as late as 1888 still revealing him to be the most popular author with older children by a generous margin.

In time, however, adults themselves moved on to a narrower spectrum of imaginative literature, leaving genres they had once freely enjoyed - such as animal or fairy-stories - to a younger audience. In this way, masterpieces such as Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book (1894), Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows (1908) or Andrew Lang's collection of folk-stories would more often be found on children's than adults' bookshelves. At the same time magazines specifically directed at children sprang up in Britain and America, while a new generation of writers such as E. Nesbit took the children's story into the details of family life, imaginative games and domestic adventures that adults found less relevant to their current interests. In America Frank L. Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) was another determinedly child-centered success, despite its doctrinaire morality, while Australian children could enjoy a comic masterpiece without adult pretensions, Norman Lindsay's The Magic Pudding (1918). In poetry Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses (1885) set a standard unequalled until Walter de la Mare's Peacock Pie (1913). More knockabout fare was provided by Hilaire Belloc's The Bad Child's Book of Beast (1896), only rivalled in popularity years later by the publication of T. S. Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1939). At the same time sentimental verses for and about children, also very popular since the 19th century, finally touched bottom with the saccharine cadences of Rose Fyleman's Fairies and Chimneys (1918).

The inter-war period saw a further consolidation of children's literature as an exclusive empire, a process helped by the growing popularity of children's annuals, children's picture-books and the children's comic, now moving well away from its rougher, penny-dreadful origins towards something far gentler in taste. With books, plots became considerably softened, with the dangers of Kenneth Grahame's Wild Wood or Kipling's jungle giving way to the gentler concerns of A. A. Milne's Ashdown Forest in Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) and Hugh Lofting's amiably eccentric collection of humans and animals in The Story of Doctor Dolittle (1922). In Arthur Ransome's adventure stories young people wrestled with sailing boats rather than with hostile enemies, while in Noel Streatfeild's Ballet Shoes (1936) the chief fear was failing an audition rather than encountering adult ostracism or family ruin. In America, though, Laura Ingalls Wilder's The Little House series (1932-43) described a past that could be tough as well as warm and loving. Picture-books also lost some of the matter-of-fact treatment of danger and death found earlier in Beatrix Potter's stories for small children. Instead, Edward Ardizzone and William Nicholson in Britain or Munro Leaf and later Dr Seuss in America painted a world both safe and ultimately welcoming to all.

The final apotheosis of literary childhood as something to be protected from unpleasant reality came with the arrival in the late 1930s of child-centered bestsellers intent on entertainment at its most escapist. In Britain novelists such as Enid Blyton and Richmal Crompton described children who were always free to have the most unlikely adventures, secure in the knowledge that nothing bad could ever happen to them in the end. The fact that war broke out again during her books' greatest popularity fails to register at all in the self-enclosed world inhabited by Enid Blyton's young characters, and for Richmal Crompton's mischievous creation, William, a country in arms just offers more opportunities for being a nuisance. Reaction against such dream-worlds was inevitable after World War II, coinciding with the growth of paperback sales, children's libraries and a new spirit of moral and social concern. Urged on by committed publishers and progressive librarians, writers slowly began to explore new areas of interest while also shifting the settings of their plots from the middle-class world to which their chiefly adult patrons had always previously belonged. In the realms of fantasy a similar spirit of moral toughness is evident in the stories of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien and later in the stories of Alan Garner and Ursula LeGuin. Picture-books also began to experiment with off-beat stories and characters. Artist-illustrators like Maurice Sendak and Raymond Briggs explored the small child's timeless concern with death and aggression as well as lighter preoccupations.

Critical emphasis, during this development, has been divided. For some the most important task was to rid children's books of the social prejudice and exclusiveness no longer found acceptable. Others concentrated more on the positive achievements of contemporary children's literature, in particular those of British novelists like William Mayne, Leon Garfield, Philippa Pearce, Joan Aiken and Nina Bawden; American novelists like Virginia Hamilton, Paula Fox and Betsy Byars; and Australian novelists like Patricia Wrightson, Ivan Southall and Nan Chauncy. That such writers are now often recommended to the attentions of adult as well as child readers echoes the 19th-century belief that children's literature can be shared by the generations, rather than being a defensive barrier between childhood and the necessary growth towards adult understanding.