Children's Literature

I

Introduction

Children's Literature, writing and illustration designed for children, to be read to them or by them; material for children between 12 and 18 years old is sometimes called “young adult” literature. Children’s literature includes almost every type of writing and illustration—from fiction to picture books, and from the simplest board-books for babies to sophisticated multimedia texts. While there are many commercially produced series, such as animal and pony books, romances, and horror stories, children’s literature is often serious and sometimes features controversial material. It also includes texts no longer thought to be suitable for adults (although they might not actually be suitable for children), such as riddles, fables, legends, myths, and fairy tales. Nursery rhymes, playground songs, and folktales preserve some of the oldest material from the oral tradition.

The history of children’s literature follows a similar pattern all over the world. Before printing develops, children share stories with adults. When printing is introduced, books for children are rare, and at first largely educational; children tend to adopt books written for adults, which are often derived from the culture’s traditional stories. Gradually, books which are predominantly for entertainment emerge, often in conflict with moral and religious educators; finally, children’s books are seen as an important part of the culture, and the market is exploited commercially. In many countries, this process has been strongly influenced by colonialism, and the imposition (notably in Africa) of written culture upon oral cultures.

English-language children’s literature has had a dominant influence across the world: very few books are translated into English, but in countries such as France, up to half of the children’s books published will have been translated from English. In the 18th and 19th centuries, British books strongly influenced the United States; in the late 20th century and early 21st century, the reverse has been the case. Australia (and to a lesser extent New Zealand) has developed a strong, individual, and experimental children’s literature.

In Britain, printed children’s literature began to emerge as an independent and distinct form, specifically marketed for children, only as late as the mid-18th century, and in most European countries it is a 19th-century phenomenon. It has become one of the most important areas of publishing; approximately 7,000 titles were published in Britain in 1997, and there were approximately 35,000 titles in print. It is estimated that over 20,000 English-language children’s books were published in 2000. The cultural influence of children’s books is therefore enormous.

II

Early History

What counts as children’s literature depends upon what we think of as childhood, and how far we think that books must be entertaining rather than instructional. Oral tales, songs, poems, and drama were (and still are in many countries) shared with the whole community, regardless of age. Thus although the first English printer, William Caxton, issued versions of the beast fable Reynard the Fox (1481) and the Fables of Aesop, translated from the French (1484), and his successor, Wynkyn de Worde, issued the Geste of Robyn Hode (c. 1510), these books were not intended specifically for children. Stories of legendary heroes such as King Arthur and Guy of Warwick, and folk-heroes such as Dick Whittington were spread through Britain from the 16th century by chapmen (or pedlars), in the form of 16- or 24-page pamphlets. These were illustrated from wood blocks, and sold for a few pence. Although they were undoubtedly read by children, it was not until the 18th century that such chapbooks were produced specifically for them.

Among the oldest texts associated with children are lullabies and educational writings, surviving on clay tablets, from the Sumerian culture of Mesopotamia, c. 2000 bc. In general, the earliest written texts for children have been educational: Latin lesson-books for use in monastic schools of the 7th and 8th centuries were written by ecclesiastical scholars such as Aldhelm, Alcuin, and Bede. In 1391 Geoffrey Chaucer wrote a scientific book for his son “Littell Lowis”, Tretis of the Astrolabie, and in 1477 Caxton printed the Book of Curtesye, a collection of rhymes that set forth rules of conduct for a “goodly chylde”. The hornbook, a printed page covered by a transparent sheet of horn and mounted on a flat piece of wood with a handle at one end for the child to hold, was used for elementary instruction from the 16th to the 18th centuries. The hornbooks showed such items as upper- and lower-case alphabets, vowels, syllables, and the Lord’s Prayer.

III

The 17th and 18th Centuries

Under the influence of Puritanism in the 17th and 18th centuries, works of moral and religious instruction became more important than any other type of writing for the young. Among the most famous were James Janeway’s very explicitly titled A Token for Children: Being an Exact Account of the Conversion, Holy and Exemplary Lives and Joyful Deaths of Several Young Children (1672), and A Book for Boys and Girls; or, Country Rhymes for Children (1686—later called Divine Emblems) by John Bunyan. Divine Songs Attempted in Easy Language for the Use of Children (1715), by Isaac Watts, included many hymns that survive today, including “Oh God, our Help in Ages Past”. These books were also very influential in the United States: The New England Primer (1690), printed in Boston by the English-born publisher and journalist Benjamin Harris, is typical, and it continued to be published well into the 19th century. The title of another contemporary children’s book, Spiritual Milk for Boston Babes in Either England: Drawn out of the Breasts of Both Testaments for their Souls’ Nourishment (1646) by John Cotton, suggests that the idea of children’s literature—and of the child—differed considerably from that generally held in the 21st century.

The earliest book in which pictures were as important as words, published for children in Britain, was the parallel translation of a book by a Moravian Protestant educational reformer, John Amos Comenius. Orbis Sensualium Pictus (A World of Things Obvious to the Senses, 1659) had been issued in Latin in 1658; it was also translated into most European languages as well as into Arabic, Turkish, Persian, and Mongolian. It covered a wide range of everyday subjects and was extensively illustrated by woodcuts.

Several major books for adults of this period were adapted for children, and have been very influential. These include John Bunyan’s allegory of the conflict between good and evil, The Pilgrim’s Progress (published in two parts, 1678 and 1684) and the first two books of Gulliver’s Travels (1726) by Jonathan Swift. Stripped of its often savage satire on politics and human nature, this story of Gulliver among the tiny people of Lilliput and the giants of Brobdingnag has been the model for thousands of children’s books. Robinson Crusoe (1719) by Daniel Defoe, the story of an ingenious and self-reliant castaway, inspired thousands of imitations (“Robinsonnades”), including The Swiss Family Robinson (1812; trans. 1814) by a Swiss pastor, Johann David Wyss, published by his son Johann Rudolf Wyss. This in turn inspired Captain Marryat to write Masterman Ready (1841-1842), one of the most popular of 19th-century boys’ adventure stories.

Fairy tales were also coming into English with the translation in 1729 of Histoires ou Contes du Temps Passé; avec des Moralités (1697), also known as Contes de ma Mère l’Oie (“Tales of Mother Goose”), by Charles Perrault. The tales included “Sleeping Beauty”, “Cinderella”, “Little Red Riding Hood”, and “Bluebeard”. The name “Mother Goose” became traditionally associated with nursery rhymes in England and the United States.

The rapid expansion of the market for printed matter in Britain in the 18th century saw the beginning of the adult novel and of genuine commercial publishing for children. Mary Cooper’s Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song Book (1744) was probably the first printed collection of nursery rhymes, although no copy survives. A second volume (also 1744) contains versions of “Ba Ba, Black Sheep” and “Who Killed Cock Robin”. One of the most famous books of the period was A Little Pretty Pocket Book (1744), sold—with a ball and a pincushion—by John Newbery; this was an attempt to combine entertainment with instruction. Newbery’s moral precepts were less forbidding than those with which children had been regaled in the previous century. Among his best-known publications is The History of Little Goody Two Shoes (1765), sometimes credited to Oliver Goldsmith. American children’s books were largely reprints or imitations of British publications.

For the next 150 years, children’s literature was broadly divided between the religious educators and commercial entertainers. A major influence was the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who, in his novel Émile (1762), pointed out that the mind of a child is not merely the mind of an adult in miniature but must be considered in its own terms. Authors influenced by this book emphasized the guiding role of the wise and benevolent adult, as in Thomas Day’s The History of Sandford and Merton (3 vols., 1783-1789), in which pampered little Tommy Merton is reformed by the good, rugged Harry Sandford under the wise supervision of a clergyman, Mr Barlow. Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794) by the English artist, poet, and mystic William Blake provide the first example of literature concerned with the essential goodness of children in the spirit of Rousseau’s educational philosophy. Although not intended for children, they were highly influential: he portrayed childhood as a happy and virtuous time and growing up a saddening and complicated process.

Maria Edgeworth, who wrote two collections of short stories for children, The Parent’s Assistant (1796) and Moral Tales (1801), was also influenced by Rousseau in her rationalism and moral tone. She was widely imitated in the United States in the 19th century.

By the end of the 18th century, English-language children’s literature was dominated by writers of religious and moral tracts, notably Anna Laetitia Barbauld, with books such as Lessons for Children (1778, 1794, 1803), Sarah Trimmer with The Guardian of Education (1802-1806), and Hannah More with her best-selling “Cheap Repository Tracts” from 1795.

IV

The 19th Century

Children’s literature tends to be conservative, and the evangelical movement continued to flourish well into the 19th century. There were some signs of liberalization, such as William Roscoe’s The Butterfly’s Ball (1807) and Charles and Mary Lamb’s (see Charles Lamb and see Mary Lamb) Tales from Shakespeare (1807), but these were largely overshadowed by religious and moral educators. Jane and Ann Taylor’s Original Poems for Infant Minds (1804-1805) was characteristic of the “awful warning” school of verse, where disobedient children came to bad (and often horrific) ends. One of the most popular books of the period was Mary Martha Sherwood’s History of the Fairchild Family (1818 and continuations). In this, the idea of strong discipline and parental control was emphasized and firm morals drawn, for example, from a child who is burnt to death after playing with matches. Some relaxation of this severity gradually appeared with books such as Catherine Sinclair’s Holiday House (1839), which shows much more recognizably human children (in 21st-century terms) and more liberal adults.

Children’s literature was only indirectly influenced by the Romantic movement that swept Europe early in the 19th century; children read the novels of Sir Walter Scott, and in the United States Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper wrote about the more recent American past. Irving developed the legends of the Dutch settlers in New York State in The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent (1819-1820), which contains the classics “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”. Cooper wrote about early American frontier life in his “Leatherstocking” series, the most famous of which is The Last of the Mohicans (1826).

Renewed interest in folklore, an aspect of the Romantic movement, led to the collection of German tales by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Kinder- und Hausmärchen, translated into English in 1823 as German Popular Stories. Even these were modified to suit the tastes of the time; the illustrator George Cruikshank produced teetotaller tracts from four of them, provoking Charles Dickens to write a sarcastic rejoinder, “Frauds on the Fairies”. The Grimms’ collections include such tales as “Hansel and Gretel”, “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”, “The Valiant Little Tailor”, and “Rapunzel”. Original tales in the same vein also appeared, notably those of the Danish author Hans Christian Andersen; four different translations of his work appeared in English in 1846, which included “Thumbelina”, “The Little Match-Girl”, “The Red Shoes”, “The Ugly Duckling”, and “The Constant Tin Soldier”.

Although not generally favoured in a utilitarian century, the fairy tale, and its associated genre of fantasy, gradually established itself as legitimate reading for children. Notable examples were The King of the Golden River (1851), an imitation of the Grimms by John Ruskin, and the burlesque The Rose and the Ring (1855) by William Makepeace Thackeray, which is very close to the conventions of the pantomime—by then well established, often using fairy-tale materials. Probably the best-known, and certainly the widest-ranging collection of fairy tales from around the world, was the “colour fairy books” series by Andrew Lang, beginning with The Blue Fairy Book (1889).

The classic myths of Greece were retold in A Wonder Book for Girls and Boys (1852) and Tanglewood Tales for Girls and Boys (1853) by the American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne; these collections provoked Charles Kingsley in England to produce his own version, The Heroes (1856).

In the United States, children’s literature was dominated in the middle of the century by the 7 million copies of more than 150 titles written or edited by Samuel Griswold Goodrich under the name of “Peter Parley”. These were largely non-fiction, and although the tone was relaxed, the moral core remained firm. The books were extensively pirated and imitated in England, and became part of the culture: they also produced a reaction in the form of Sir Henry Cole’s “Home Treasury of Books” (1843-1847), which succeeded in improving the production values of children’s books in general. There was also, in the United States, a tradition of “self-help”; among the best-known books dealing with this theme are those by Horatio Alger, such as Ragged Dick (1867) and From Farm Boy to Senator (1882): their message was that success was achieved through hard work and thrift. Similar was the series of adventure stories “Onward and Upward” by William Taylor Adams, who wrote under the pen name “Oliver Optic”.

The impact of the American Sunday School Union in the United States and the Religious Tract Society in Britain was immense, influencing the two distinct streams that had developed in children’s literature—the boys’ story and the girls’ story. Girls have always read more than boys, and books designed for them were generally domestic tales, stressing the subordinate place of women in society and the virtues of religion and middle-class benevolence. Many were concerned with ministering to the poor, who were thus, implicitly, kept in their place. Notable authors were Maria Louisa Charlesworth, Charlotte Yonge, and Juliana Horatia Ewing, whose book The Brownies and Other Tales (1870) was sufficiently famous to give its name to the junior Girl Guides in 1918.

In the United States, such books were sometimes politically effective, notably the work of Sara Parton (“Fanny Fern”) in criticizing the state of the urban poor. Children’s versions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1850-1852) by Harriet Beecher Stowe increased the influence of her book’s anti-slavery message. Many modern readers find these books, although readable, somewhat over-sentimental. Only with Little Women (1868; Louisa May Alcott) did the spirit of practical, individual children, behaving believably, begin to change the generally rather patronizing and manipulative view of childhood prevalent at the time. Other important books in this genre were What Katy Did (1872; Susan Coolidge), Anne of Green Gables (1908; L. M. Montgomery), and Pollyanna (1913; Eleanor H. Porter). These American books were very popular in Britain, as they portrayed girls enjoying much greater freedom than was commonly the case for their British counterparts.

For British boys, stories were no less moral or evangelical than those for girls, but were more outgoing. Tales of adventure and of the sea (many following The Coral Island, 1858, by R. M. Ballantyne—itself based on an American novel, The Island Home, 1851, by James F. Bowman) merged with stories that proclaimed the virtues of the British and the British Empire. Authors such as G. A. Henty, with titles like With Clive in India (1884), and W. H. G. Kingston, who founded the magazine Union Jack in 1880, produced books that supported straightforward, manly action; however, many now see these books as racist and sexist.

These books built upon (and encouraged) codes of behaviour fostered at boys’ public schools—and the school story became an important genre in its own right (girls’ school stories only emerged towards the end of the century). The most famous are perhaps Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857) by Thomas Hughes and the sentimental and highly moralistic Eric, or Little by Little (1858) by Frederick Farrar. Books of this kind were savagely satirized by Rudyard Kipling in his Stalky and Co (1899); based on his own experiences at the minor public school at Westward Ho!, the book gave a much more realistic picture of boys’ behaviour. In the 20th century, the genre tended towards comedy, with the very popular school stories of Charles Hamilton (also known as Frank Richards). Hamilton, probably the world’s most prolific writer (with an estimated 72 million words), invented around 50 fictional schools, including Greyfriars, with its famous fat boy, Billy Bunter.

As concepts of childhood changed, so levity and fantasy became more acceptable. Heinrich Hoffman’s Struwwelpeter (“Shock-headed Peter”), translated into English in 1848, satirized the “cautionary” verse, while true nonsense came with the limericks of Edward Lear in A Book of Nonsense (1846). Magic was slowly entering British children’s books (Americans tended towards realism), and in the 1860s and 1870s there was a remarkable period when children’s literature appeared to be suddenly liberated from its didactic past. What in fact was happening was that attitudes to childhood were changing; families were getting smaller and the child mortality rate was declining; children were more valued, and, after the British Education acts of 1870, better educated. Children’s literature became a place where writers felt that they could address an important audience without necessarily having to teach anything, and at the same time examine their own childhoods, and their own preoccupations. The whole tone of children’s literature changed.