Overview

The English have often confessed a certain reluctance to say good-bye to childhood. This curious national trait, baffling to their continental neighbors, 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 Rudyard Kipling’s Stalky & Co. (1899); and the boy’s adventure story, with one undebatable world masterpiece in Robert Louis 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,” 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).

Social historians, 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. They would note the striking creative swing between didacticism and delight. They would detect the sources in ballads, chapbooks, nurses’ rhymes, and street literature that have at critical moments prompted the imagination. What would perhaps interest such historians most is the way in which children’s literature reflects, over more than two centuries, the child’s constantly shifting position in society.

Prehistory (early Middle Ages to 1712)

“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 “encyclopedia” 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.

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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 favorites), 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.

Against this early literature of entertainment stands an early 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 Crusoe nor Gulliver’s Travels was 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; the child’s imagination as something to be shielded; the child’s 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.