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Historical sketches of the major literatures
The English have often confessed a certain reluctance to say good-bye to childhood. This curious national trait, baffling to their continental neighbours, 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 Kipling's Stalky & Co. (1899); and the boy's adventure story, with one undebatable world masterpiece in 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," often trash but 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).
The social historian, 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. He would note the striking creative swing between didacticism and delight. He would detect the sources in ballads, chapbooks, nurses' rhymes, and street literature that have at critical moments prompted the imagination. What would perhaps interest him 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 "encyclopaedia" 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.
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 favourites), 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 primitive literature of entertainment stands a primitive 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; his imagination as something to be shielded; his 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.
From "T.W." to "Alice" (1712?–1865)
Napoleon called the English a "nation of shopkeepers," and in England art may owe much to trade. Children's literature in England got its start from merchants such as Thomas Boreman, of whom little is known, and especially John Newbery, of whom a great deal more is known. Research has established that at least as early as 1730 Boreman began publishing for children (largely educational works) and that in 1742 he produced what sounds like a recreational story, Cajanus, the Swedish Giant. Beginnings of English children's literature might be dated from the first decade of the 18th century, when a tiny 12-page, undated book called A Little Book for Little Children by "T.W." appeared. It is instructional but, as the critic Percy Muir says, important as the earliest publication in English "to approach the problem from the point of view of the child rather than the adult." In sum, without detracting from the significance of Newbery, it may be said that he was merely the first great success in a field that had already undergone a certain amount of exploitation.
The elevation of the publisher-bookseller-editor Newbery (who also sold patent medicines) to the position of patron saint is an excusable piece of sentiment. Perhaps it originated with one of his back writers who doubled as a man of genius. In Chapter XVIII of The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), Oliver Goldsmith lauds his employer as "the philanthropic bookseller of St. Paul's Churchyard, who has written so many books for children, calling himself their friend, but who was the friend of all mankind." There is no reason to believe that Newbery was anything but an alert businessman who discovered and shrewdly exploited a new market: middle class children, or rather their parents. Nevertheless this was a creative act. In 1744 he published A Little Pretty Pocket-Book. Its ragbag of contents—pictures of children's games, jingles, fables, "an agreeable Letter to read from Jack the Giant Killer," plus a bonus in the form of "a Ball and a Pincushion"—are of interest only because, addressing itself single-mindedly to a child audience, it aimed primarily at diversion. Thus children's literature clearly emerged into the light of day.
The climate of Newbery's era was nevertheless more suited to a literature of didacticism than to one of diversion. John Locke's Some Thoughts concerning Education (1693) is often cited as an early Enlightenment emancipatory influence. But close inspection of this manual for the mental conditioning of gentlemen reveals a strong English stress on character building and practical learning. Locke thinks little of the natural youthful inclination to poetry: "It is seldom seen that anyone discovers mines of Gold or Silver in Parnassus." He does endorse, as a daring idea, the notion that a child should read for pleasure, and he recommends Aesop. But the decisive influence was not Locke's. It came from across the Channel with Rousseau's best-seller Émile (1762). What is positive in Rousseau—his recognition that the child should not be too soon forced into the straitjacket of adulthood—was more or less ignored. Other of his doctrines had a greater effect on children's literature. For all his talk of freedom, he provided his young Émile with an amiable tyrant for a teacher, severely restricting his reading to one book Robinson Crusoe. It was his didactic strain, exemplified in the moral French children's literature of Arnaud Berquin and Madame de Genlis, that attracted the English.
They took more easily to Rousseau's emphasis on virtuous conduct and instruction via "nature" than they did to his advocacy of the liberation of personality. Some writers, such as Thomas Day, with his long-lived Sandford and Merton, were avowedly Rousseauist. Others took from him what appealed to them. Sarah Kirby Trimmer, whose Fabulous Histories specialized in piety, opposed the presumably free-thinking Rousseau on religious grounds but was in other respects strongly influenced by him. The same is true of Anna Laetitia Barbauld, with her characteristically titled Lessons for Children. But Mary Martha Sherwood could hardly have sympathized with Rousseau's notion of the natural innocence of children; the author of The History of the Fairchild Family (1818–47) based her family chronicle on the proposition (which she later softened) that "all children are by nature evil." Of all the members of the flourishing Rousseauist or quasi-Rousseauist school of the moral tale, only one was a true writer. Maria Edgeworth may still be read.
Though the tone varies from Miss Edgeworth's often sympathetic feeling for children to Mrs. Sherwood's Savonarolan severities, one idea dominates: a special literature for the child must be manufactured in order to improve or reform him. The reigning mythology is that of reason, a mythology difficult to sell to the young.
Yet during the period from John Newbery's Little Pretty Pocket-Book to Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, children's literature also showed signs of antisolemnity. In verse there was first of all William Blake. His Songs of Innocence (1789) was not written for children, perhaps indeed not written for anyone. But its fresh, anti-restrictive sensibility, flowing from a deep love for the very young, decisively influenced all English verse for children. Yet the poetry the young really read or listened to at the opening of the 19th century was not Blake but Original Poems for Infant Minds (1804), by "Several Young Persons," including Ann and Jane Taylor. The Taylor sisters, though adequately moral, struck a new note of sweetness, of humour, at any rate of nonpriggishness. Their "Twinkle, twinkle, little star," included in Rhymes for the Nursery (1806), has not only been memorized but actually liked by many generations of small children. No longer read, but in its way similarly revolutionary, was The Butterfly's Ball and the Grasshopper's Feast (1807), by William Roscoe, a learned member of Parliament and writer on statistics. The gay and fanciful nonsense of this rhymed satiric social skit enjoyed, despite the seeming dominance of the moral Barbaulds and Trimmers, a roaring success. Great nonsense verse, however, had to await the coming of a genius, Edward Lear, whose Book of Nonsense (1846) was partly the product of an emergent and not easily explainable Victorian feeling for levity and partly the issue of a fruitfully neurotic personality, finding relief for its frustrations in the noncontingent world of the absurd and the free laughter of children.
In prose may be noted, toward the end of the period under discussion, the dawn of romantic historical fiction, with Frederick Marryat's Children of the New Forest (1847), a story of the English Civil War; and of the manly open-air school novel, with Thomas Hughes's Tom Brown's School Days (1857). A prominent milestone in the career of the "realistic" children's family novel is Holiday House (1839), by Catherine Sinclair, in which at last there are children who are noisy, even naughty, yet not destined for purgatory. Though Miss Sinclair's book does conclude with a standard deathbed scene, the overall atmosphere is one of gaiety. The victories in the field of children's literature may seem small, but they can be decisive. It was a small, decisive victory to have introduced in Holiday House an Uncle David, whose parting admonition to his nieces and nephews is: "Now children! I have only one piece of serious, important advice to give you all, so attend to me!—Never crack nuts with your teeth!"
A similar note was struck by Henry (later Sir Henry) Cole with his Home Treasury series, featuring traditional fairy tales, ballads, and rhymes. The fairy tale then began to come into its own, perhaps as a natural reaction to the moral tale. John Ruskin's King of the Golden River (1851) and William Makepeace Thackeray's "fireside pantomime" The Rose and the Ring (1855) were signs of a changing climate, even though the Grimm-like directness of the first is partly neutralized by Ruskin's moralistic bent and the gaiety of the second is spoiled by a laborious, parodic slyness. More important than these fairy tales, however, was the aid supplied by continental allies: the English publication in 1823–26 of the Grimms' Fairy Tales; in 1846 of Andersen's utterly personal fairy tales and folktales; in the '40s and '50s of other importations from the country of fancy, notably Sir George Dasent's version of the stirring Popular Tales from the Norse (1859), collected by Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and J.E. Moe. Though the literature of improvement continued to maintain its vigour, England was readying itself for Lewis Carroll.
Coming of age (1865–1945)
In 1863 there appeared The Water-Babies by Charles Kingsley. In this fascinating, yet repulsive, "Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby," an unctuous cleric and a fanciful poet, uneasily inhabiting one body, collaborated. The Water-Babies may stand as a rough symbol of the bumpy passage from the moral tale to a lighter, airier world. Only two years later that passage was achieved in a masterpiece by an Oxford mathematical don, the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll). Alice's Adventures in Wonderland improved none, delighted all. It opened what from a limited perspective seems the Golden Age of English children's literature, a literature in fair part created by Scotsmen: George Macdonald, Andrew Lang, Robert Louis Stevenson, Kenneth Grahame, James Barrie.
The age is characterized by a literary level decisively higher than that previously achieved; the creation of characters now permanent dwellers in the child's imagination (from Alice herself to Mary Poppins, and including Long John Silver, Mowgli, intelligent Mr. Toad, and—if Hugh Lofting, despite his American residence, be accepted as English—Dr. Dolittle); the exaltation of the imagination in the work of Carroll, Macdonald, Stevenson, E. Nesbit, Grahame, Barrie, Hudson, Lofting, Travers, and the early Tolkien (The Hobbit [1938]); the establishment of the art fairy tale (Jean Ingelow with Mopsa the Fairy [1869]; Dinah Maria Mulock Craik with The Little Lame Prince [1875]; Mrs. Ewing with Old Fashioned Fairy Tales [1882]; Barrie's Peter Pan [1904]; and the exquisite artifices of Oscar Wilde in The Happy Prince, and Other Tales [1888]); the transmutation and popularization, by Andrew Lang, Joseph Jacobs, and others, of traditional fairy tales from all sources; the development of a quasi-realistic school in the fiction of Charlotte M. Yonge (Countess Kate); Mrs. Ewing (Jan of the Windmill); and Mrs. Molesworth; and, furthering this trend, a growing literary population of real, or at least more real, children (by E. Nesbit and Ransome).
It is further characterized by the rapid evolution of a dozen now-basic genres, including the school story, the historical novel, the vacation story, the "group" or "gang" novel, the boy's adventure tale, the girl's domestic novel, the animal tale, the career novel (Noel Streatfeild's Ballet Shoes, 1936), the work of pure whimsy (A.A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh, 1926); the solution, a brilliant one by Beatrix Potter and a charming one by L. Leslie Brooke, of the problem of creating literature for pre-readers and beginning readers; and the growth of an impressive body of children's verse: the lyric delicacy of Christina Rossetti in Sing-Song (1872), the accurate reflection of the child's world in Stevenson's Child's Garden of Verses, the satirical nonsense of Hilaire Belloc in his The Bad Child's Book of Beasts (1896), the incantatory, other-worldly magic of Walter de la Mare with his Songs of Childhood (1902) and Peacock Pie (1913), the fertile gay invention of Eleanor Farjeon, and the irresistible charm of Milne in When We Were Very Young (1924).
Finally it is characterized by the dominance in children's fiction of middle and upper middle class mores; the appearance, in the late 1930s, with Eve Garnett's The Family from One End Street, of stories showing a sympathetic concern with the lives of slum children; the reflection, also in the 30s, of a serious interest, influenced by modern psychology, in the structure of the child's vision of the world; the rise, efflorescence, and decline of the children's magazine: Boy's Own Magazine (1855–74), Good Words for the Young (1867–77), Aunt Judy's Magazine (1866–85), and—famous for its outstanding contributors—The Boy's Own Paper (1879–1912); the beginning, with F.J.H. Darton and other scholars, of an important critical-historical literature; institutionalization, commercialization, standardization—the popularity, for example, of the "series"; and the dominating influence of the better English work on the reading taste of American, Continental, and Oriental children.
During these 80 years a vast amount of trash and treacle was produced. What will be remembered is the work of a few dozen creative writers who applied to literature for children standards as high as those ordinarily applied to mainstream literature.
Contemporary times
If the contemporary wood cannot be seen for the trees, it is in part because the number of trees has grown so great. The profusion of English, as of children's books in general, makes judgment difficult. Livelier merchandising techniques (the spread of children's bookshops, for example), the availability of cheap paperbacks, improved library services, serious and even distinguished reviewing—these are among the post-World War II institutional trends helping to place more books in the hands of more children. Slick transformation formulas facilitate the rebirth of books in other guises: radio, television, records, films, digests, cartoon versions. Such processes may also create new child audiences, but that these readers are undergoing a literary experience is open to doubt.
Among the genres that fell in favour, the old moral tale, if not a corpse, surely became obsolescent but raised the question whether it was being replaced by a subtler form of didactic literature, preaching racial, class, and international understanding. The standard adventure story too seemed to be dying out, though excellent examples, such as The Cave (U.S. title, Five Boys in a Cave [1950]), by Richard Church, continued to appear. The boy's school story suffered a similar fate, despite the remarkable work of William Mayne in A Swarm in May (1955). Children's vese by Ian Serraillier, Ted Hughes, James Reeves, and the later Eleanor Farjeon, excellent though it was, did not speak with the master tones of a de la Mare or the precise simplicity of a Stevenson. In science fiction one would have expected more of a boom; yet nothing appeared comparable to Jules Verne.
Conversely, there was a genuine boom in fact books: biographical series, manuals of all sorts, popularized history, junior encyclopaedias. Preschool and easy-to-read beginners' books, often magnificently produced, multiplied. So did specially prepared decoys for the reluctant reader. After the discovery of the child came that of the postchild: conscientiously composed teen-age and "young adult" novels were issued in quantity, though the quality still left something to be desired. A 19th-century phenomenon—experimentation in the juvenile field by those who normally write for grown-ups—took on a second life after World War II. Naomi Mitchison, Richard Church, P.H. Newby, Richard Graves, Eric Linklater, Norman Collins, Roy Fuller, C. Day Lewis, and Ian Fleming, with his headlong pop extravaganza Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1964), come to mind.
A post-World War II stress on building bridges of understanding was reflected both in an increase in translations and in the publication of books, whether fiction or nonfiction, dealing responsibly and unsentimentally with the sufferings of a war-wounded world. One example among many was Serraillier's Silver Sword (1958), recounting the trans-European adventures that befell four Polish children after the German occupation. The Silver Sword was a specialized instance of a general trend toward the interpretation for children of a postwar world of social incoherence, race and class conflict, urban poverty, and even mental pathology. Such novels as John Rowe Townsend's Gumble's Yard (1961); Widdershins Crescent (1965); Pirate's Island (1968); Eve Garnett's Further Adventures of the Family from One End Street (1956); and Leila Berg's Box for Benny (1958) represented a new realistic school, restrained in England, less so in the United States, but manifest in the children's literature of much of the world. It failed to produce a masterpiece, perhaps because the form of the realistic novel must be moderately distorted to make it suitable for children.
In two fields, however, English postwar children's literature set new records. These were the historical novel and that cloudy area comprising fantasy, freshly wrought myth, and indeed any fiction not rooted in the here and now.
Historical fiction
There was fair reason to consider Rosemary Sutcliff not only the finest writer of historical fiction for children but quite unconditionally among the best historical novelists using English. A sound scholar and beautiful stylist, she made few concessions to the presumably simple child's mind and enlarged junior historical fiction with a long series of powerful novels about England's remote past, especially that dim period stretching from pre-Roman times to the coming of Christianity. Among her best works are The Eagle of the Ninth (1954), The Shield Ring (1956), The Silver Branch (1957), The Lantern Bearers (1959), and especially Warrior Scarlet (1958).
Not as finished in style, but bolder in the interpretation of history in terms "reflecting the changed values of the age," was the pioneering Geoffrey Trease. He also produced excellent work in other juvenile fields. Typical of his highest energies is the exciting Hills of Varna (1948), a story of the Italian Renaissance in which Erasmus and the great printer Aldus Manutius figure prominently. Henry Treece, whose gifts were directed to depicting violent action and vigorous, barbaric characters, produced a memorable series of Viking novels of which Swords from the North (1967) is typical.
This new English school, stressing conscientious scholarship, realism, honesty, social awareness, and general disdain for mere swash and buckle, produced work that completely eclipsed the rusty tradition of Marryat and George Alfred Henty. Some of its foremost representatives were Cynthia Harnett, Serraillier, Barbara Leonie Picard, Ronald Welch (pseudonym of Ronald O. Felton), C. Walter Hodges, Hester Burton, Mary Ray, Naomi Mitchison, and K.M. Peyton, whose "Flambards" series is a kind of Edwardian historical family chronicle. Leon Garfield, though not working with historical characters, created strange picaresque tales that gave children a thrilling, often chilling insight into the 18th-century England of Smollett and Fielding.
In the realm of imagination England not only retained but enhanced its supremacy with such classics as Tom's Midnight Garden (1958), by Ann Philippa Pearce, a haunting, perfectly constructed story in which the present and Victoria's age blend into one. There is the equally haunting Green Knowe series, by Lucy M. Boston, the first of which, The Children of Greene Knowe, appeared when the author was 62. The impingement of a world of legend and ancient, unsleeping magic upon the real world is the basic theme of the remarkable novels of Alan Garner. Complex, melodramatic, stronger in action than in characterization, they appeal to imaginative, "literary" children. Garner's rather nightmarish narrative The Owl Service (1967) is perhaps the most subtle.
The creation of worlds
Finally there is a trio of masters, each the architect of a complete secondary world. The vast Middle Earth epic The Lord of the Rings (1954–55), by the Anglo-Saxon and Middle English language scholar J.R.R. Tolkien, was not written with children in mind. But they have made it their own. It reworks many of the motives of traditional romance and fantasy, including the Quest, but is essentially a structure, conceivably but not inevitably allegorical, of sheer invention on a staggering scale. It is also a sociocultural phenomenon, selling more than 50 million copies in some 25 languages by the late 1990s and functioning, for a certain class of American teenagers, as a semisacred cult object.
Tolkien's fellow scholar, C.S. Lewis, created his own otherworld of Narnia. It is more derivative than Tolkien's (he owes something, for example, to Nesbit), more clearly Christian-allegorical, more carefully adapted to the tastes of children. Though uneven, the seven volumes of the cycle, published through the years 1950 to 1956, are exciting, often humorous, inventive, and, in the final scenes of The Last Battle, deeply moving.
The third of these classic secondary worlds is in a sense not a creation of fantasy. The four volumes (1952–61) about the Borrowers, with their brief pendant, Poor Stainless (1971), ask the reader to accept only a single impossibility, that in a quiet country house, under the grandfather clock, live the tiny Clock family: Pod, Homily, and their daughter Arrietty. All that follows from this premise is logical, precisely pictured, and carries absolute conviction. Many critics believe that this miniature world so lovingly, so patiently fashioned by Mary Norton will last as long as those located at the bottom of the rabbit hole and through the looking glass.
United States
Compared with England, the United States has fewer peaks. In Huckleberry Finn, of course, it possesses a world masterpiece matched in the children's literature of no other country. Little Women, revolutionary in its day, radiates a century later a special warmth and may still be the most beloved "family story" ever written. Though The Wonderful Wizard of Oz has been recklessly compared with Alice, it lacks Carroll's brilliance, subtlety, and humour. Nonetheless, its story and characters apparently carry, like Pinocchio, an enduring, near-universal appeal for children. To these older titles might be added Stuart Little (1945) and Charlotte's Web (1952), by E.B. White, two completely original works that appear to have become classics. To this brief list of high points few can be added, though, on the level just below the top, the United States bears comparison with England and therefore any other country.
The "law" of belated development applies in a special way. From Jamestown to the end of the Civil War, American children's literature virtually depended on currents in England. In the adult field Cooper and Washington Irving may stand for a true declaration of independence. But it was not until the 1860s and '70s, with Mary Mapes Dodge's Hans Brinker, Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, Lucretia Hale's Peterkin Papers, Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer, and St. Nicholas magazine, that children's literature finally severed its attachment to the mother country. In the marketplace, however, a uniquely American note was sounded much earlier, the first of the Peter Parley series of Samuel Goodrich having appeared in 1827.
In certain important fields, the United States pioneered. These include everyday-life books for younger readers; the non-class-based small-town story such as The Moffats by Eleanor Estes; the Americanized fairy tale and folktale such as Uncle Remus (1880), not originally meant for children, and Carl Sandburg's Rootabaga Stories (1922); beginners' books such as Dr. Seuss's The Cat in the Hat (1957); and the "new realism." One might maintain that American children's literature, particularly that since World War II, is bolder, more experimental, more willing to try and fail, than England's. Moreover, it set new standards of institutionalization, "packaging," merchandising, and publicity, as well as mere production, especially of fact books and "subject series."
Prehistory (1646?–1865)
The prehistoric annals are short and simple. Dominated by England, native creativity—to refer only to books with even the thinnest claim to literary quality—amounted to little. The Puritan view of the unredeemable child obtained almost into the era of Andrew Jackson. Jonathan Edwards put it neatly: unrepentant children were "young vipers and infinitely more hateful than vipers." More moderate notions also existed. Imported English ballads and tales, even a few "shockers," were enjoyed by the young vipers. But in general, from John Cotton's Spiritual Milk for Boston Babes (1646) through the Civil War, the admonitory and exemplary tract and the schoolmaster's pointer prevailed. Occasionally there is the cheerful note of non-improvement, as in Clement Moore's "Visit from St. Nicholas" (1823), sounding against the successful lesson-cum-moral tales of Peter Parley (Goodrich) and the didactic "Rollo" series of Jacob Abbott. The latter's Franconia Stories (1850–53), however, showing traces of Rousseau and Johann Pestalozzi, is the remote ancestor of those wholesome, humorous pictures of small-town child life in which American writers excelled after World War I. Affectionately based on the author's own memories, they occasionally reveal children rather than improvable miniatures of men.
The children's magazines of the early 19th century did their best to amuse as well as instruct the young. Sara Josepha Hale's "Mary Had a Little Lamb" appeared in The Juvenile Miscellany (1826–34). The atmosphere was further lightened by Grandfather's Chair (1841) and its sequels, retellings of stories from New England history by Nathaniel Hawthorne. These were followed in 1852–53 by his redactions, rather unacceptable today, of Greek legends in The Wonder Book for Girls and Boys and Tanglewood Tales for Girls and Boys. Hawthorne's death date (1864) coincided roughly with a qualified subsidence of the literature of the didactic.
Peaks and plateaus (1865–1940)
During the period from the close of the Civil War to the turn of the century an Americanized white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, Victorian gentility dominated as the official, though not necessarily real, culture. At first glance such a climate hardly seems to favour the growth of a children's literature. But counterforces were at work: a vigorous upsurge of interest, influenced by European thinkers, in the education and nurture of children; the dying-out of the old Puritanism; and the accumulation of enough national history to stimulate the imagination. To these forces must be added the appearance in Louisa May Alcott of a minor genius and in Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) of a major one.
American materialism (and also its optimism) expressed itself in the success myth of Horatio Alger, while a softened didacticism, further modified by a mild talent for lively narrative, was reflected in the 116 novels of Oliver Optic (William Taylor Adams). But a quartet of books appearing from 1865 to 1880—heralded a happier day. These were Mary Mapes Dodge's Hans Brinker, or the Silver Skates (1865), which for all its Sunday-school tone, revealed to American children an interesting foreign culture and told a story that still has charm; Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (1868; vol. ii, 1869; and its March family sequels), which lives by virtue of the imaginative power that comes from childhood truly and vividly recalled; Lucretia Hale's Peterkin Papers (1880), just as funny today as a century ago, perfect nonsense produced in a non-nonsensical era; and Thomas Bailey Aldrich's Story of a Bad Boy (1870). This, it is often forgotten, preceded Tom Sawyer by seven years, offered a model for many later stories of small-town bad boys, and is a fair example of the second-class classic. But it took Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn to change the course of American writing and give the first deeply felt vision of boyhood in juvenile literature.
To these names should be added Frank Stockton (whose Ting-a-Ling Tales [1870] showed the possibilities inherent in the invented fairy tale) and especially the writer-illustrator Howard Pyle. His reworkings of legend (The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, 1883; the King Arthur stories, 1903–1910, and his novels of the Middle Ages [Otto of the Silver Hand, 1888; and Men of Iron, 1892]) exemplify perfectly the romantic feeling of his time, as does the picture of Shakespeare's England drawn by John Bennett in Master Skylark (1897).
The sentimentality that is sometimes an unconscious compensatory gesture in a time of ruthless materialism expressed itself in the idyllic Poems of Childhood (1896), by Eugene Field, and the rural dialect Rhymes of Childhood (1891), by James Whitcomb Riley. These poems can hardly speak to the children of the second half of the 20th century. But it is not clear that the same is true of the equally sentimental novels of Frances Hodgson Burnett. It is easy to smile over Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886) or her later and superior novels, A Little Princess (1905) and The Secret Garden (1911). Back of the absurd sentimentality, however, lies an extraordinary narrative skill, as well as an ability to satisfy the perennial desire felt by children at a certain age for life to arrange itself as a fairy tale.
The development of a junior literature from 1865 to about 1920 is ascribable less to published books than to two remarkable children's magazines: The Youth's Companion (1827–1929, when it merged with The American Boy) and the relatively nondidactic St. Nicholas magazine (1873–1939), which exerted a powerful influence on its exclusively respectable child readers. (It is surely needless to point out that up to the 1960s children's literature has been by and for the middle class). These magazines published the best material they could get, from England as well as the United States. For all their gentility, standards, including that of illustration, were high. The contributors' names in many cases became part of the canon of world literature. To the children of the last quarter of the 19th and first quarter of the 20th century, the periodical delivery of these magazines presumably meant something that film and television cannot mean to today's children. The magazines were not "media." They were friends.
Appropriately the new century opened with a novelty: a successful American fairy tale. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) is vulnerable to attacks on its prose style, incarnating mediocrity. But there is something in it, for all its doctrinaire moralism, that lends it permanent appeal: a prairie freshness, a joy in sheer invention, the simple, satisfying characterization of Dorothy and her three old, lovable companions. Several of the sequels—but only those bearing L. Frank Baum's name—are not greatly inferior.
The century underwent for the next two decades a rather baffling decline. Some institutional progress was made in library development, professional education, and the reviewing of children's books. Much useful work was also accomplished in the field of fairy-tale and folktale collections. But original literature did not flourish. There were Pyle and Mrs. Burnett and the topflight nonsense verses of Laura E. Richards, whose collected rhymes in Tirra Lirra (1932) will almost bear comparison with those of Edward Lear. Less memorable are the works of Lucy Fitch Perkins, Joseph Altsheler, Ralph Henry Barbour, Kate Douglas Wiggin, Eliza Orne White, and the two Burgesses—Thornton and Gelett. During these decades, de la Mare, Miss Potter, Kipling, Barrie, Grahame, and E. Nesbit were at work in England.
During the period between world wars new trails were blazed in nonfiction with van Loon's Story of Mankind and V.M. Hillyer's Child's History of the World (1922). The Here and Now Story Book, by Lucy Sprague Mitchell, published in the 1920s, was the first real example of the "direct experience" school of writing, but it is more properly part of the chronicle of pedagogy than of literature. The small child was far better served by a dozen talented writer-illustrators, such as Wanda Gág, with her classic Millions of Cats (1928) and other delightful books; and Ludwig Bemelmans, with Madeline (1939) and its sequels. Other distinguished names in the important and growing picture-book field were Marjorie Flack, Hardie Gramatky, James Daugherty, the d'Aulaires, and Virginia Lee Burton.
In the field of comic verse and pictures for children of almost all ages, Dr. Seuss (Theodore Geisel), starting with And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street (1937), continued to lead, turning out so many books that one tended to take him for granted. His talent is of a very high order.
The 1920s and '30s produced many well-written historical novels, striking a new note of authority and realism, such as Drums (1925, transformed in 1928 into a boy's book with N.C. Wyeth's illustrations), by James Boyd, and The Trumpeter of Kracow (1928), by Eric Kelly. The "junior novel" came to the fore in the following decade, together with an increase in books about foreign lands, minority groups, and a boom in elaborate picture books. Children's verse was well served by such able practitioners as Dorothy Aldis and Rosemary and Stephen Vincent Benét, with their stirring, hearty ballad-like poems collected in A Book of Americans (1933). But the only verse comparable to that of Stevenson or de la Mare was the exquisite Under the Tree (1922), by the novelist Elizabeth Madox Roberts, a treasure that should never be forgotten.
At least three other writers produced work of high and entirely original quality. Two of them—Florence and Richard Atwater—worked as a pair. Their isolated effort, Mr. Popper's Penguins (1938), will last as a masterpiece of deadpan humour that few children or adults can resist. The third writer is Laura Ingalls Wilder. Her Little House books, nine in all, started in 1932 with The Little House in the Big Woods. The entire series, painting an unforgettable picture of pioneer life, is a masterpiece of sensitive recollection and clean, effortless prose.
Work of quality was contributed during these two lively decades by authors too numerous to list. Among the best of them are Will James, with his horse story Smoky (1926); Rachel Field, whose Hitty (1929) is one of the best doll stories in the language; Elizabeth Coatsworth, with her fine New England tale Away Goes Sally (1934); and the well-loved story of a New York tomboy in the 1890s, Roller Skates (1936), by the famous oral storyteller Ruth Sawyer.
Contemporary times
Since the 1930s the quality and weight of American children's literature were sharply affected by the business of publishing, as well as by the social pressures to which children, like adults, were subjected. Intensified commercialization and broad-front expansion had some good effects and some bad ones as well.
For any book of interest to adults, publishers constructed a corresponding one scaled to child size. The practice of automatic miniaturization stimulated a pullulation of fact books—termed by an unsympathetic observer "the information trap"—marked by a flood of subject series and simplified technology. Paperbacks and cheap reprints of juvenile favourites enlarged the youthful reading public, just as the multiplication of translations widened its horizon. More science fiction was published, a field in which the stories of Robert Heinlein and A Wrinkle in Time (1962), by Madeleine L'Engle, stood out. An increase was also noticeable in books for the disadvantaged child and in work of increasingly high quality by and for blacks. In the early 1950s, children's book clubs flourished, though they appeared to be on the wane little more than a decade later. Simple narration using "scientifically determined vocabulary" also seemed to decrease in popularity. There was a marked tendency to orient titles, fiction and nonfiction, to the requirements of the school curriculum. Another trend was toward collaborative "international" publishing. This had the double effect of cutting colour-plate costs and promoting blandness, since it was important that no country's readers be offended or surprised by anything in text or illustration. Still another alteration took place in the conventional notion of age and grade levels. Teenagers reached out for adult books; younger children read junior novels.
The most striking development was the growth of the "realists," most of them as earnest as Maria Edgeworth, a few of them lighter fingered, with a fringe of far-outers. The latter were fairly represented by Nat Hentoff in Jazz Country (1965), for example, and Maria Wojciechowska in The Rotten Years (1971). Teenage fiction as well as nonfiction dealt mercilessly with ethnic exploitation, poverty, broken homes, desertion, unemployment, adult hypocrisy, drug addiction, sex (including homosexuality), and death. A whole new "problem" literature became available, with no sure proof that it was warmly welcomed. The aesthetic dilemmas posed by this literature are still to be faced and resolved. The new social realist story often had the look of an updated moral tale: the dire consequences of nondiligence were replaced by those of pot smoking.
Nevertheless such original works as Harriet the Spy (1964) and The Long Secret (1965), by Louise Fitzhugh, showed how a writer adequately equipped with humour and understanding could incorporate into books for 11-year-olds subjects—even menstruation—ordinarily reserved for adult fiction. Similarly trailblazing were the semidocumentary novels of Joseph Krumgold: . . . And Now Miguel (1953), Onion John (1958), and Henry 3 (1967), the last about a boy with an I.Q. of 154 trying to get along in a society antagonistic to brains. The candid suburban studies of E.L. Konigsburg introduced a new sophistication. Her 1968 Newbery Medal winner, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, was original in its tone and humour.
As for the more traditional genres, a cheering number of high-quality titles rose above the plain of mediocrity. The nonfantastic animal story Lassie Come Home (1940), by Eric Knight, survived adaptation to film and television. In the convention of the talking animal, authentic work was produced by Ben Lucien Burman, with his wonderful "Catfish Bend" tales (1952–67). The American-style, wholesome, humorous family story was more than competently developed by Eleanor Estes, with her "Moffat" series (1941–43) and Ginger Pye (1951); Elizabeth Enright, with her Melendy family (1941–44); and Robert McCloskey, with Homer Price (1943)—to name only three unfailingly popular writers. Text-and-picture books for the very young posed an obdurate challenge: to create literature out of absolutely simple materials. That challenge, first successfully met by Beatrix Potter, attracted Americans. The modern period produced many enchanting examples of this tricky genre: The Happy Lion (1954) and its sequels, the joint work of the writer Louise Fatio and her artist husband, Roger Duvoisin; the "Little Bear" books, words by Else Holmelund Minarik, pictures by Maurice Sendak; and several zany tours de force by Dr. Seuss, including his one-syllable revolution The Cat in the Hat (1957). The picture books of Sendak, perhaps one of the few original geniuses in his restricted field, were assailed by many adults as frightening or abnormal. The children did not seem to mind.
Fiction about foreign lands boasted at least one modern American master in Meindert De Jong, whose most sensitive work was drawn from recollections of his Dutch early childhood. A Hans Christian Andersen and Newbery winner, he is best savoured in The Wheel on the School (1954), and especially in the intuitive Journey from Peppermint Street (1968). The historical novel fared less well in America than in England. Johnny Tremain (1943), by Esther Forbes, a beautifully written, richly detailed story of the Revolution, stood out as one of the few high points, as did The Innocent Wayfaring (1943), a tale of Chaucer's England by the equally scholarly Marchette Chute. Poetry for children had at least two talented representatives. One was the eminent poet-critic John Ciardi, the other David McCord, a veteran maker of nonsense and acrobat of language.
In fantasy, the farcical note was struck with agreeable preposterousness by Oliver Butterworth in The Enormous Egg (1956) and The Trouble with Jenny's Ear (1960). The prolific writer-illustrator William Pène Du Bois has given children nothing more uproariously delightful than The Twenty-one Balloons (1947), merging some of the appeals of Jules Verne with those of Samuel Butler's Erewhon and adding a sly humour all his own. Two renowned New Yorker writers, James Thurber and E.B. White, developed into successful fantasists, Thurber with an elaborate series of ambiguous literary fairy tales such as The Thirteen Clocks, White with his pair of animal stories Stuart Little and Charlotte's Web that for their humanity and uninsistent humour stand alone. The vein of "high fantasy" of the more traditional variety, involving magic and the construction of a legendary secondary world, was represented by the five highly praised volumes of the Prydain cycle (1964–68) by Newbery Medal winner Lloyd Alexander.
Two other works of pure imagination gave the 1960s some claim to special notice. The first was The Phantom Tollbooth (1961) by Norton Juster, a fantasy about a boy "who didn't know what to do with himself." Not entirely unjustly, it has been compared to Alice. The second received less attention but is more remarkable: The Mouse and His Child (1969), by Russell Hoban, who had been a successful writer of gentle tales for small children. But here was a different affair altogether: a flawlessly written, densely plotted story with quiet philosophical overtones. It involved a clockwork mouse, his attached son, and an unforgettable assortment of terribly real, humanized animals. Like Alice and The Borrowers—indeed like all major children's literature—it offered as much to the grown-up as to the young reader. With this moving, intellectually demanding fantasy the decade ended on a satisfactory note.
Germany and Austria
A. Merget's Geschichte der deutschen Jugendliteratur ("History of German Children's Literature") appeared in 1867, some years before the Germans had much children's literature to consider, a demonstration of Teutonic thoroughness. By two criteria—degree of awareness of the child's identity and level of institutional development—Germany leads the world. It has built a vast structure of history, criticism, analysis, and controversy devoted to a subject the chief property of which would appear to be its charm rather than its obscurity. One estimate has it that in West Germany alone there are over 300 associations dedicated to the study and promotion of children's literature. Such conscientiousness, nowhere else matched, such a serious desire to relate the child's reading to his nurture, education, and Weltanschauung, has an admirable aspect. But by attaching juvenile books too closely to the theory and demands of pedagogy, it may have constricted a marked native genius.
The dominant historical influences roughly coincide with those that have affected German mainstream literature, though, as expected, they were exerted more slowly. The Reformation, stressing the Bible, the catechism, and the hymnbook, bent the literature of childhood toward the didactic, the monitory, and the pious. The Enlightenment, however, did something to help toward the identification of the child as an independent being. With this insight are associated the educational theories of J.B. Basedow, J.F. Herbart, and Friedrich Froebel. One fruit of the movement was Robinson der Jüngere (1779; "The Young Robinson"), by Joachim Heinrich Campe, who adapted Defoe along Rousseauist lines, his eye sharply fixed on what he considered to be the natural interests of the child. Interchapters of useful moral conversations between the author and his pupils were a feature of the book. Campe's widespread activities on behalf of children, though less commercially motivated, recall Newbery's.
Heritage and fairy tales
Rationalism, piety, and the German partiality for disciplined conduct were modified by the influence of two crucial works, not intended for children but soon taken over by them. Both are part of the Romantic movement that swept Germany and much of the Continent during the early 19th century. Des Knaben Wunderhorn (1805–08; "The Youth's Magic Horn"), a collection of old German songs and folk verse, included many children's songs, or songs that were so denominated by the editors, Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano. The effect of the book was to retrieve for Germany much of its rich folk heritage, to promote a new emotional sensibility, and to draw attention to the link, as the Romantics thought, binding folk feeling to the child's vision of the world. Des Knaben Wunderhorn became a part of German childhood, as La Fontaine's Fables in France and Mother Goose in England had become a part of growing up in those countries. It helped inspire several excellent writers of verse for children: A.H. Hoffmann von Fallersleben; August Kopisch; the writer-illustrator Count Franz Pocci, the first German to write nonsense verse for the young; F.W. Güll; and later poets such as Paula and Richard Dehmel.
Just as Des Knaben Wunderhorn became a source of poetry, so the epochal folktale collection of the brothers Grimm helped to develop a school of prose fairy-tale writers. Not all of these Romantics wrote with children in mind. But some of the simplest of their tales have become part of the German child's inheritance. In today's presumably practical era, they are once more in favour. Among these masters of the "art" Märchen are E.T.A. Hoffmann; C.M. Brentano; Ludwig Tieck; de la Motte Fouqué, author of Undine; and Wilhelm Hauff, whose talents are most nearly adapted to the tastes of children.
Two curious half-geniuses of comic verse and illustration wrote and drew for the hitherto neglected small child. Struwwelpeter ("Shock-headed Peter"), by the premature surrealist Heinrich Hoffmann, aroused cries of glee in children across the continent. Wilhelm Busch created the slapstick buffoonery of Max and Moritz, the ancestors of the Katzenjammer Kids and indeed of many aspects of the comic strip.
The second half of the 19th century saw an increase in commercialized sentimentality and sensation and a corresponding decline in quality. The bogus Indian and Wild West tales of Karl May stand out luridly in the history of German children's literature. Up to about 1940, 7,500,000 of his books had been sold to German readers alone. (Emilio Salgari in Italy, G.A. Henty in England, and "Ned Buntline" in the United States, who were contemporaneously satisfying the same hunger for the suspenseful, did not approach's May's talent for fabrication without the slightest root in reality.)
It may have been May and others like him who roused an educator, Heinrich Wolgast, to publish in 1896 his explosive Das Elend unserer Jugendliteratur ("The Sad State of Our Children's Literature"). The event was an important one. It advanced for the first time the express thesis that "Creative children's literature must be a work of art"; Wolgast resolutely decried nationalistic and didactic deformations. He precipitated a controversy the echoes of which are still audible. On the whole his somewhat excessive zeal had a wholesome effect.
Two post-Wolgast poets of childhood worthy of mention are Christian Morgenstern, whose macabre, pre-Dada poetry for adults later came into vogue, and the lesser-gifted Joachim Ringelnatz. The nondidactic note they sounded in modern times was strengthened by a whole school of children's poets. No other country produced work in this difficult field superior to the finest verse of the multitalented James Krüss, and especially Josef Guggenmos, whose lyric simplicity at times recalls Blake. Guggenmos also has to his credit a translation of A Child's Garden of Verses, in itself an original work of art.
War and beyond
Between the world wars, prose showed few high points and, after the advent of Hitler, many low ones. Der Kampf der Tertia (1927; "The Third-Form Struggle"), by Wilhelm Speyer, was Germany's excellent contribution to the genre of the school story. Erich Kästner's Emil and the Detectives (1929) ranked not only as a work of art, presenting city boys with humour and sympathy, but as an immediate classic in an entirely new field, the juvenile detective story (Mark Twain's awkward Tom Sawyer, Detective [1896] may be ignored). Kästner, the dean of German writers for children, won an international audience with a long series of stories of which the thesis-fable Die Konferenz der Tiere (1949; Eng. trans. The Animals' Conference, 1949) is perhaps the funniest as well as the most serious.
Post-World War II literature, recovering from the Nazi blight, was strong in several fields. In realistic fantasy there is Vevi (1955), by the Austrian Erica Lillegg, an extraordinary tale of split personality, odd, exciting, even profound. Michael Ende's Jim Knopf und Lucas der Lokomotivführer (1961; Eng. trans., Jim Button and Luke the Engine Driver, 1963) has more than a touch of Oz; and both Kästner and Krüss have made agreeable additions to the realm of fantasy.
In the domain of the historical novel, Hans Baumann is a distinguished name. Lacking the narrative craft of Miss Sutcliff, whose story lines are always clean and clear, he matched her as a scholar and mounted scenes of great intensity in such novels as Die Barke der Brüder (1956; Eng. trans., The Barque of the Brothers, 1958) and especially Steppensöhne (1954; Eng. trans., Sons of the Steppe, 1958), a tale about two grandsons of Genghis Khan. His narrative history of some exciting archaeological discoveries, Die Höhlen der grossen Jäger (1953; Eng. trans., The Caves of the Great Hunters, 1954; rev. ed., 1962), is a minor classic. Mention should be made of Fritz Mühlenweg, a veteran of the Sven Hedin expedition of 1928–32 to Inner Mongolia and the author of Grosser-Tiger und Kompass-Berg (1950; Eng. trans., Big Tiger and Christian, 1952). A long, richly coloured narrative of a journey made by two boys, Chinese and European, through the Gobi Desert, it should stand as one of the finest adventure stories of the postwar years.
One general conclusion regarding West German children's literature after 1945 was that the native genius, which had been impeded by pedagogical theory and nationalist dogma, again appeared to be in free flow.
In East Germany, production was conditioned by the association with the Soviet Union, and it appeared to be recapitulating the developments in children's literature that had occurred in the Soviet Union after 1917. Socialist Realism was the basic food offered to the literary appetites of young East Germans.
Scandinavia, but especially Sweden, inevitably suggests a question as to why a group of small, sparsely populated countries ranks directly after England and the United States for the variety, vigour, and even genius of its children's literature. Hazard's north–south theory describes; it does not explain. A few possible factors may be listed: the inspiration of the master Andersen—yet he does not seem greatly to have inspired his homeland; the appearance in 1900 of the Swedish Ellen Key's two-volume Barnets århundrede (Eng. trans., The Century of the Child, 1909), pivotal in the history of the discovery that children really exist; a general modern atmosphere of social enlightenment; welfare statism tempered by regard for the individual; a school and library system, notably in Sweden, of extraordinary humanity and efficiency; perhaps even the long, lively career of the Stockholm Children's Theatre, a centre of creative activity. Yet the mystery persists. Since the first half of the 19th century, Scandinavia produced Andersen, Zacharias Topelius, Jørgen Moe, Henrik Wergeland, Helena Nyblom, Selma Lagerlöf, Elsa Beskow, Astrid Lindgren, Tove Jansson, Maria Gripe, Anna Lisa Warnlöf, Lennart Hellsing, Karin Anckarsvärd, Inger Sandberg, plus a school of critics and historians second only to that of Germany, plus many talented illustrators.
Children's literature in Sweden for centuries reflected that of Germany, of which Sweden was a cultural province during the Reformation and even through the Enlightenment period. The historian Göte Klingberg traced some kind of religious-instructive reading for children back to 1600. There is a record, though the manuscripts have vanished, of children's plays produced at the country manors during the 1700s and into the following century. The tradition of children's theatre has always been stronger in Sweden than elsewhere in Europe.
National and modern literature
A true native literature is usually dated from 1751-53, when the tutor Count Carl Tessin wrote his "Old Man's Letters to a Young Prince" (Gustav III), in which instruction was tempered by the first fairy tales written for Swedish children. The German influence, however, persisted until about the middle of the 19th century, when Fredrika Bremer, traveller and feminist, tried to stimulate the work of indigenous children's writers. The dominant influence of the Finnish-born but basically Swedish Topelius, of Hans Christian Andersen, and of the romantic spirit in general was felt at this time. Later in the century two followers of Andersen—Helena Nyblom and Anna Wahlenberg—enriched the tradition of the fairy tale. The former's Sagokrans (1903; Eng. trans., The Witch of the Woods, 1968), preserves a rare charm.
The great landmark, however, is Miss Lagerlöf's world classic Nils Holgerssons underbara resa genom Sverige, 2 vol. (1906–07; Eng. trans., The Wonderful Adventures of Nils, 1907; Further Adventures of Nils, 1911). Written (at the request of the state ministry of education) as a school geography, it is the rare example of an officially commissioned book that turned out to be a work of art. Nils, for all its burden of instruction, is a fantasy. At the same time, a realistic breakthrough was achieved by Laura Fitinghoff, whose historical novel about the famine of the 1860s, Barnen från Frostmofjället (1907; Eng. trans., Children of the Moor, 1927), ranks as a classic.
According to the historian Eva von Zweigbergk, didacticism ("diligence, obedience, and moderation") obtained up to the 1920s, though she also views the period 1890–1915 as Sweden's Golden Age. It included not only Nils but the emergence of a school of creators of picture books for small children headed by Elsa Beskow, whose work in pictures and text, extending over the years from 1897 to 1952, was decisive in its influence. This pre-modern period also saw many good writers for grown-ups devoting their talents to juvenile fiction. The sailing story Mälarpirater (1911; "The Pirates of Lake Mälaren"), by the novelist Sigfrid Siwertz, is a still-remembered example.
The period from 1940 on has called forth a bewildering array of talented writers and artist-writers. In the field of humour and nonsense there are Åke Holmberg, with his parodic Ture Sventon detective series; the outstanding poet Lennart Hellsing, with Daniel Doppsko (1959); Astrid Lindgren, successful in a half dozen genres but perhaps best known as the creator of the supergirl Pippi Longstocking; Gösta Knutsson, with her well-liked Pelle svanslös (1939; Eng. trans., The Adventures of the Cat Who Had No Tail). The psychological realistic novel, delving deeply into the inner lives of children, has been developed by Maria Gripe, whose Hugo and Josephine trilogy may become classic; Gunnel Linde's Tacka vet jag Skorstensgränd (1959; Eng. trans., Chimney-Top Lane, 1965); and Anna Lisa Warnlöf, writing under the pseudonym of "Claque," whose two series about Pella and Fredrika show an intuitive understanding of lonely and misunderstood children.
Harry Kullman and Martha Sandwall-Bergström are among the few Swedish writers who have used working class industrial backgrounds successfully. Kullman is also a historical novelist. The prolific Edith Unnerstad has written charming family stories, with a touch of fantasy, as has Karin Anckarsvärd, whose Doktorns pojk' (1963; Eng. trans., Doctor's Boy, 1965) is a quietly moving tale of small-town life in the horse-and-buggy days. The Sandbergs, Inger and Lasse, have advanced the Beskow tradition in a series of lovely picture books. Fantasy has been well served by Lindgren, Edith Unnerstad, Holmberg, Hellsing, and others. Children's poetry is a lively contemporary art, one distinguished poet being Britt G. Hallqvist.
By most criteria of development the Swedes rank high among those creating a children's literature that is both broad and deep.
Norway cannot boast a genius of worldwide fame. But, beginning with the 1830s when a new literary language, based on spoken Norwegian, was forged, Norway has possessed an identifiable children's literature. From 1837 to 1844 Asbjørnsen and Moe, the Grimms of Norway, published their remarkable collection of folk stories, and thus created not only a literary base on which the future could build but a needed sense of national identity. Moe also wrote specifically for children. His poems are part of Norwegian childhood, and his nature fantasy I brønden og i tjernet ("In the Well and the Lake," 1851) made Viggo and his little sister Beate familiar for more than a century. Equally enduring are the fairy tales and children's verse of Norway's greatest poet Henrik Wergeland.
The Norwegian critic Jo Tenfjord believes that the 30 years from 1890 to 1920 represented a golden age. With this period are associated Dikken Zwilgmeyer, author of the "Inger Johanne" series about a small-town little girl; Barbra Ring, creator of the popular "Peik" stories and of a play The Princess and the Fiddler, which was produced yearly at the National Theatre in Oslo; Gabriel Scott; and the fairy-tale writer Johan Falkberget.
Among the more prominent and well-loved moderns are Halvor Floden, whose most famous work, centred on a gypsy waif, is Gjenta fra lands vegen ("The Girl from the Road"); the nonsense versifier Zinken Hopp; the poet Jan-Magnus Bruheim, three of whose collections have won state prizes; Finn Havrevold, whose toughminded boys' teenage novel Han Var Min Ven became available in English translation as Undertow in 1968, and who also wrote successfully for girls; Leif Hamre, specializing in air force adventures; the prolific, widely translated Aimée Sommerfelt, whose works range from "puberty novels" to faraway stories set in Mexico City and northern India; Thorbjørn Egner, who is the author of, among other books, a tiny droll fantasy, Karius and Baktus (1958; Eng. trans. 1962), which will actually persuade small children to brush their teeth; and Alf Prøysen, creator of Mrs. Pepperpot, a delightful little old lady who never knows when she is going to shrink to pepperpot size. Fantasy of this kind seems less characteristic of contemporary Norway than does the realistic novel, especially that designed for older children.
Without Hans Christian Andersen, Danish children's literature might have fared better. It is not that his countrymen deify him, as much as it is that the outside world does. Indeed, because modernized versions of his tales do not exist, his now rather antiquated Danish tends to outmode him. Yet his gigantic shadow must have intimidated his literary descendants, just as Dante and Cervantes intimidated theirs. Doubtless other forces also account for the sparseness and relative conventionality of Danish children's literature.
The earliest books were written for the children of the nobility. Not till the passage of the Education Act of 1814 did the poorer ones have access to any suitable reading matter, and this, obedient to the prevailing European fashion, was dour in tone. The climate, of course, relaxed when Andersen appeared with his phenomenal series, still the finest of their kind, of invented or reworked fantastic tales. In 1884 H.V. Kaalund published a picture book of "Fables for Children" based on the popular verse narratives (1833) of a Thüringian pastor, Wilhelm Hey. Three years later an unidentified Danish humorist added three cautionary tales to a translation of six Struwwelpeter stories. Though it does not seem to have appeared as a picture book until 1900, Christian Winther in 1830 wrote a pleasing trifle, with an unusual fantastic touch, called "Flugten til Amerika" ("Flight to America"). It is still ranked as a classic. Such are some of the 19th-century oases.
Denmark's general tendency has been to over-rely on translations or adaptations, drawn especially from its neighbour Germany. As against this, it can point to an excellent original tradition of nursery and nonsense rhymes. The first such collection, made as early as 1843, stimulated not only Andersen but such other 19th-century figures as Johan Krohn, whose "Peter's Christmas" remains a standard seasonal delight. The tradition is relayed to the 20th century by Halfdan Rasmussen, whose collected Bjørnerim ("Verse for Children") won the 1964 Danish Children's Book Prize, and Ib Spang Olsen, with his nonsense picture book The Boy in the Moon (1962). As for the complementary prose tradition of fireside tales, Denmark had to wait (Andersen was artist, not scholar) for its Grimm until 1884, when a collection made by Svend Grundtvig, the son of N.F.S. Grundtvig, a great bishop-educator, was posthumously published.
As compared with other Scandinavian countries, post-World War II developments lagged. Picture books exhibited much more originality than did teenage literature. Jytte Lyngbirk's girls' novels, notably the love story "Two Days in November," however, are well reputed, as are the realistic fictions, laid against an industrial background, of Tove Ditlevsen. Perhaps Denmark's boldest original talent is Anne Holm, who aroused healthy controversy with her (to some) shocking narrative of a displaced boy's journey to Denmark, the novel David (1963; Eng. trans., North to Freedom, 1965).
Some informed observers ascribe Denmark's only moderate performance to domination by the teaching profession, to the lingering influence of conventional didacticism, and to the lack of the economic-social forces that stimulate professional writers. As late as 1966 the Minister of Culture commented on the scarcity of Danish juvenile authors, and this at a time when the rest of Scandinavia was, as it remained, in the full flood of the modern movement.
Although its language and people are not of European origin, Finland is loosely conceived as part of the Scandinavian bloc. Only since December 6, 1917, has it been formally independent. During much of its history Swedish was the language of the educated class. Thus its two outstanding premodern children's writers, the father figure Zacharias Topelius and Anni Swan, wrote their fairy tales and folktales primarily for a Swedish-reading audience. Their works however were promptly translated into Finnish and became part of the native heritage. The same is true of the contemporary Tove Jansson, 1966 Andersen Medal winner, whose series of novels about the fantastic self-contained world of Moomintrolls, though less successful with English-reading children, enchants young readers throughout northern and central Europe.
The labours of Topelius in the children's field and of Elias Lönnrot (compiler of the great Finnish epic-miscellany the Kalevala, 1835) in the field of national folklore constituted the soil from which Finnish children's literature was eventually to derive nutriment. But that literature emerged as an identifiable whole only after World War I. It is largely folktale rooted. Indeed this small country became an international focus of folklore research. One student has said that it probably possesses the largest number of folktales in existence, some 30,000 of them. In the early 1960s a fairy tale competition yielded 795 manuscripts, a phenomenal statistic in view of Finland's sparse population.
Finland, despite the fact that its language tends to limit its audience, is part of the main current of children's literature, even though only Jansson has won anything like an international reputation. Two children's poets, Aila Meriluoto and Kirsi Kunnas, have achieved renown.
The French themselves are not happy with their record. Writing in the late 1940s, critic Jean de Trigon, in Histoire de la littérature enfantine, de ma Mère l'Oye au Roi Babar (Paris, Librairie Hachette, 1950) said: "The French have created little children's literature. They have received more than they have given, but they have assimilated, adapted, transformed. The two are not the same thing, for one must love childhood in general if one is to please children other than one's own." In 1923 Marie-Thérèse Latzarus tolled the passing bell in La littérature enfantine en France dans la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle (Paris; Les Presses Universitaires de France): "Children's literature, more's the pity, is dying." And in 1937, in their introduction to Beaux livres, belles histoires, the compilers Marguerite Gruny and Mathilde Leriche wrote: "Children's literature in France is still poor, despite the earnest efforts of the last decade."
Surely Trigon was too severe. Even more surely Mlle Latzarus has proved a false Cassandra. As for the compilers, the very decade they scorned saw at least three magnificent achievements. The first was Jean de Brunhoff's. Equally talented as author and artist, in 1931 he gave the world that enlightened monarch Babar the Elephant, one of the dozen or so immortal characters in children's literature. The next year saw the start of Paul Faucher's admirable Père Castor series, imaginatively conceived, beautifully designed educational picture books for the very young—not literature, perhaps, but historically comparable to Comenius. Finally, in 1934 appeared the first of Marcel Aymé's miraculous stories about two little girls and the talking animals whose adventures they shared. These grave-comic fantasies were later collected as Les Contes du chat perché (1939; Eng. trans., The Wonderful Farm, 1951; Return to the Wonderful Farm, 1954), and, along with de Brunhoff and Faucher, were enough to make the decade great.
But there are no other decades to match it. There does exist a disproportion between French literary genius as a whole and the children's literature it has been able to produce. The explanation is uncertain. Mme Le Prince de Beaumont, an adventurous 18th-century lady who wrote over 70 volumes for the young, thought that children's stories should be pervaded by "the spirit of geometry." It is possible that the blame for France's showing might in part be laid on a persistent Cartesian spirit, reinforced by rationalist and positivist philosophies. The Cartesian does not readily surrender to fancy, especially of the more wayward variety. And so, even counting Charles Perrault, the later Charles Nodier, and the contemporary Simone Ratel and Maurice Vauthier, a dearth of first-rate fairy tales may be noted. Cartesians would tend to be weak also in children's verse, in nonsense of any sort, in humour (despite Babar), even in the more imaginative kind of historical novel exemplified by Hans Baumann in Germany and Rosemary Sutcliff in England. Perhaps French children's literature has been restrained by a Catholicism or by a Protestantism that continued to insist on the edifying when mainstream literature had already freed itself from explicit moralism. It may not even be true, as Trigon thinks, that the French have fruitfully assimilated the children's literature of foreign countries. Alice has more or less bewildered them; Huckleberry Finn has never been digested. The child's cause was not much aided by the triumph of a post-Napoleonic bourgeois cast of thought—or by the wave of post-1871 nationalism.
It is a complicated problem. But perhaps the heart of it lies in the value the French set on maturity. For them childhood at times has seemed less a normal human condition than a handicap. The children themselves have often seemed to feel the pressure, which may account for the fact that they absorb French adult books precociously. The French came much later than did many other countries to the discovery of the child as a figure worthy of the most sensitive understanding; that is what makes Père Castor so important. One is not surprised to note the comparatively recent date (1931) of a study by Aimé Dupuy, translatable as The Child: A New Character in the French Novel.
If one skips Jean de La Fontaine, whose Fables (1668; 1678–79; and 1693), though read by the young, were not meant for them, French children's literature from one point of view begins with the classic fairy tales of Charles Perrault. These were probably intended for the salon rather than the nursery, but their narrative speed and lucidity commended them at once to children. The fairy tales of his contemporary Mme d'Aulnoy, like many others produced in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, are hardly the real thing. With a Watteau-like charm, they taste of the court, as does the Télémaque of François Fénelon, a fictionalized lecture on education.
Rousseau, as has been noted, did make a difference. Émile at least drew attention to what education might be. But the effect on children's literature was not truly liberating. His disciple, Mme de Genlis, set a stern face against make-believe of any sort; all marvels must be explained rationally. Her stories taught children more than they wanted to know, a circumstance that endeared her to a certain type of parent. Sainte-Beuve, to be fair, called her "the most gracious and gallant of pedagogues." One of her qualities, priggishness, was energetically developed by Arnaud Berquin in his Ami des enfants. Berquin created the French equivalent of the concurrent English bourgeois morality. In effect, he unconsciously manufactured an adult literature for the young, loading the dice in favour of the values held by parents to be proper for children. Yet one must beware of judging Berquin or his equally moralistic successor Jean-Nicolas Bouilly by today's standards. Children accepted them because they were the best reading available; and Anatole France's tribute in Le Petit Pierre (1918) shows that they must have exerted some charm.
The didactic strain, if less marked than in England or Germany, persisted throughout most of the 19th century. To it, Mme de Ségur, in her enormously popular novels, added sentimentality, class snobbery, but also some liveliness and occasional fidelity to child nature. Her "Sophie" series (1850s and 60s), frowned on by modern critics, is still loved by obstinate little French girls. Sans Famille (1878), by Hector Malot, a minor classic of the "unhappy child" school, also continues to be read and is indeed a well-told story. But the century's real writer of genius is of course Jules Verne, whose first book, Un Voyage en ballon, was originally published in 1851 in a children's magazine, Le Musée des Familles.
The period was lively enough. Production was vast. Children's magazines flourished, particularly the remarkable Magasin d'Éducation et de Récréation, brilliantly edited by Jules Hetzel. Writers of the stature of George Sand, Alphonse Daudet, and Alexandre Dumas père were not too proud to write for children. Much worthy, though transient, work was produced along with a mass of mediocrity, as was the case also in England and the United States. But on the whole, as the century drew to a close, French children might have been better served, even though one critic sees the apogee as occurring between 1860 and 1900.
The 20th century
From the turn of the century to the close of World War II, a number of superior works were produced. The books of de Brunhoff and Faucher have already been cited. A remarkable picture of prehistoric life by J.-H. Rosny (pseudonym of J.-H.-H. Boex) appeared in 1911 and has proved so durable that in 1967 an English translation, The Quest for Fire, appeared. Patapoufs et filifers, by André Maurois, a gentle satire on war, has lasted (Eng. trans. Pattypuffs and Thinifers, 1948; reissued 1968). His fantastic Le Pays des 36,000 volontés is almost as popular. The famous dramatist Charles Vildrac has done much to advance the cause of French children's literature. Two pleasant stories of his, remotely descended from Robinson Crusoe, L'Isle rose and its sequel La Colonie, appeared in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1951 his now-classic comic animal tale Les Lunettes du lion won immediate success (Eng. trans., The Lion's Eyeglasses, 1969). On a high literary level, not accessible to all children, was Le Petit Prince (1943, both French and English, The Little Prince) by the famous aviator-author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. The very vagueness of this mystical parable has lent it a certain magnetism. Finally, it is necessary to mention a field in which the French proved incomparable: the comic strip combining action and satire, conceived on a plane of considerable sophistication. Hergé's Tintin started in the 1930s and sold over 25,000,000 copies. Also successful was the later and even more unconventional Astérix series.
Production after 1945 so multiplied that to single out names is bound to involve some injustice. A few, however, by reason either of the originality of their talent or the scope of their achievement, stand out. One is Maurice Druon, whose Tistou of the Green Fingers (1957; Eng. trans. 1958), a kind of children's Candide, demonstrated how the moral tale, given sufficient sensitivity and humour, can be transmuted into art. Perhaps the most original temperament was that of Henri Bosco, author of four eerie, haunting Provençal novels about the boy Pascalet and his strange involvements with a gypsy companion, a fox, and a dog in a shifting, legend-shrouded natural world. It may be that time will rate these books, like those of the English writer Walter de la Mare, among the finest of their kind. Bosco's L'Enfant et la rivière (1955; Eng. trans., The Boy and the River, 1956), Le Renard dans l'île (1956; Eng. trans., The Fox in the Island, 1958), and Barboche (1957; Eng. trans. 1959) are notable.
Sound, realistic novels, almost free of excess moralism, were written by at least a dozen reputable authors. Among them Colette Vivier (The House of the Four Winds), Paul-Jacques Bonzon (The Orphans of Simitra), and Étienne Cattin (Night Express!) were distinguished. The domain of the imaginative tale was well represented by Maurice Vauthier, especially by his Ecoute, petit loup. Among those noted for their prolific output as well as the high level of their art two names emerged. One is Paul Berna, who has worked in half a dozen genres, including detective stories and science fiction. His Cheval sans tête (1955) was published in England as A Hundred Million Francs and in the United States as The Horse Without a Head and was made into a successful Disney film. A "gang" story, using a hard, unemotional tone that recalls Simenon, it may be the best of its kind since Emil and the Detectives.
The death of René Guillot removed a deeply conscientious and responsible artist. Guillot, though probably not of the first rank, was not far below it. He left more than 50 widely translated novels for the young and about 10 nonfiction works. For his entire body of work, he received in 1964 the Andersen Prize. His finest achievements in the adventure novel, based on his experiences in Africa, include The White Shadow (1948) and Riders of the Wind (1953).
Children's verse has at least one delightful practitioner in Pierre Gamarra. His Mandarine et le Mandarin contains Fontainesque fables of notable drollery and high technical skill. The Belgian author Maurice Carême also has some repute as a children's poet. In summary, contemporary French activity seems a bit lacking in colour and versatility. But one solid achievement must be registered: the 19th century's legacy was decisively rejected, and at last a natural child prevailed in the imaginative work of the best French contemporaries.
Russia/Soviet Union
Here history breaks cleanly into two periods: pre-1917 and post-1917. In pre-Revolutionary Russia may be observed a most dramatic illustration of the disproportion that may exist between a children's and a mainstream literature. Beyond question the latter is one of the greatest of the modern world. But Russia's pre-1917 children's literature is anemic. It does include the fables of Ivan Krylov; a great treasury of Russian folktales (skazki) assembled by A.N. Afanasyev; the epic tales (byliny) sung or told to children; the classic by Pyotr Yrshov, Konyok gorbunok (1834; English adaption by Ireene Wicker, The Little Hunchback Horse, 1942); and other stories and poems enjoyed by young Russians but not originally designed for them. To this folk material should be added the McGuffeyish moral tales that Tolstoy wrote for a series of graded readers. There is also the poet-translator Vasily Zhukovsky, praised by the respected critic Vissarion Belinsky as one of the few poets of the century, part of whose work was dedicated to children.
On the whole, however, pre-Revolutionary Russia could make only a few feeble gestures toward the creation of an independent children's literature. The submerged peasantry relied on the fireside tale teller. The middle class, while far stronger than is generally recognized, was in no position to stimulate or support a literature for its children. The privileged class looked to the West: the children read Mme de Genlis. Thus it came about that the child was recognized later in Russia than in other parts of western Europe. The critic and children's writer Korney Chukovsky speaks of the "indifference" with which "early childhood was regarded in the past." He then points out that attitudes have changed, so that now the child is "an adored hero."
The Revolution was the watershed. After 1917 Soviet children's literature developed more or less in accord with the necessities of the state. This is not to say that it became identical with Soviet propaganda. Indeed one of the finest teenage novels, Vadim Frolov's Chto k chemu (Eng. trans., What It's All About, 1965), is quite untouched by dogma of any kind. Soviet children's literature, and especially its vast body of popularized science and technology for the young, however, was in general governed by the ideals of socialist realism, the idolization of the "new Soviet man" (as in the widely read works of Boris Zhitkov and Arkady Gaydar), the exaltation of the machine over the irresponsible furniture of fairyland, and especially a revised version of the pre-18th-century miniature adult view of the child: he now had become a potential Soviet citizen and architect of the Communist future.
Juvenile fiction and biography naturally tended to cue themselves into the crucial episodes of Soviet history. But the theory underlying this basically nationalist literature (suggesting similar developments in Italy and England in the latter half of the 19th century) is by no means clear-cut. The most influential thinker was Maxim Gorky, who during the 1920s called for "creative fantasy," for children's stories "which make out of the human being, instead of a will-less creature or an indifferent workman, a free and active artist, creator of a new culture." He asked for books that would encourage the child to become "a knight of the spirit." Gorky's essays are a curious, endearing mixture of Marxist doctrine (with a utopian slant) and quite standard Western humanistic ideas. It is in Korney Chukovsky's remarkable book Malenkiye deti (1925) or Ot dvukh do pyati (Eng. trans., From Two to Five, 1963), however, that the opposition of two familiar forces, entertainment and instruction, can be sensed most clearly. The tension is typically expressed in Chukovsky's account of the Soviet war over the fairy tale, the opposition to which reached its high point in the 1920s and '30s. "We propose," wrote one journalist in a Moscow magazine in 1924, "to replace the unrealistic folktales and fantasies with simple realistic stories taken from the world of reality and from nature." Chukovsky, himself a writer full of humour and invention, opposed this view, as had Gorky before him.
Though rich in folklore drawn from its many peoples and languages, Soviet culture remained weak in the realm of fantasy. A fairy play such as Marshak's Krugly god (Eng. trans., The Month Brothers, 1967) seems (at least in English) fatally heavy-handed. That Soviet children's literature was vigorous, varied, and motivated by a genuine concern for the child is undoubted. However, there certainly existed no Soviet "Narnia" series, a Soviet Borrowers.
It is not difficult to see that contemporary children's literature in Russia is lively, copious, and probably enjoyed. It is much more difficult for those who have no Russian to judge its value. Occasionally in translation one will come across something as superb as the beautiful nature and animal tales in Arcturus the Hunting Hound and Other Stories (1968) by Yury Kazakov. But one can only record, without judging, the vast production of such popular children's writers as Samuil Marshak, Sergey Mikhalkov, Lev Kassil, and N. Nosov. Especially notable is the popularity of poetry, whether it be the work of such past generation writers as Vladimir Mayakovsky or that of the contemporary Agniya Barto. Apparently Russian children read poetry with more passion and understanding than do English-speaking children. The mind of the Russian child is carefully looked after. He is provided with books, often beautifully illustrated, which many Western countries may find hard to match. "Demand from them as much as possible, respect them as much as possible," says Anton Makarenko, the theorist of children's literature.Clifton Fadiman
Learn More in these related Britannica articles:
encyclopaedia: Children's encyclopaediasBefore the 19th century, only Johann Wagenseil had produced an encyclopaedia for children—the
Pera Librorum Juvenilium(1695; "Collection of Juvenile Books"). Larousse issued Petite Encyclopédie du jeune âge("Small Children's Encyclopaedia") in 1853, but the next, Encyclopédie Larousse des enfants("Larousse Encyclopaedia for…
dramatic literature: Audience expectations… have always been associated with children both as performers and as spectators. These plays tend to be fanciful in conception, broad in characterization, and moralistic in intention. Nevertheless, probably the most famous of children's plays, James Barrie's
Peter Pan(1904), implied that the young are no fools, and it celebrated…
fable, parable, and allegory: Influence of Jean de La Fontaine…of literature written specifically for children, in whom fable found a new audience. Among the most celebrated authors who wrote for them are Lewis Carroll, Charles Kingsley, Rudyard Kipling, Kenneth Grahame, Hilaire Belloc, and Beatrix Potter. There is no clear division between such authors and the "adult" fabulist, such as…
Robert Louis Stevenson: Romantic novels…the emotions and sensations of childhood; there is nothing else quite like them in English literature. In
Kidnappedthe fruit of his researches into 18th-century Scottish history and of his feeling for Scottish landscape, history, character, and local atmosphere mutually illuminate one another. But it was Dr. Jekyll—both moral allegory…
Lewis Carroll: Origins and publication of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland…of some of the best children's stories of the period. Macdonald took it home to be read to his children, and his son Greville, aged six, declared that he "wished there were 60,000 volumes of it."…
More About Children's literature21 references found in Britannica articles
Assorted References
- encyclopaedias for children
- relation to dramatic literature
- significance of "Black Beauty"
- In Black Beauty
contribution by
- Alcott
- In March family
- Boston
- In Lucy Boston
- Brown
- Carroll
- Chukovsky
- Dr. Seuss
- du Bois


text:
One girl's twistedly fantastic interpretation of what the hell is really going on in those tribes.
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
Francesca: Hold The Mayo
Today we meet Francesca Hogi. Besides being named after a sandwich, she's 36 and hails from my neck of the woods - Washington D.C.. According to Ms. Hogi, her personal claim to fame is assembling the most amazing group of friends. Really? That's it? My personal claim to fame is getting a satyr to hang upside down from my chandelier while chugging a bottle of Tanqueray, but, hey, to each her own.
Francesca is an attorney which by definition means she thinks she knows everything. Let's check out her video and see if I'm right.
Oh Christ. She's a proud bully and puts her hands on her hips as she announces "I'm an impatient person." Likable! *eye roll*
My favorite part is when she says she's good at perceiving how others see her. Hey Francesca, what finger am I holding up right now?
I get this feeling from Francesca that she's not only a lot of talk and little action, but probably very difficult to please and high maintenance. I'm going to go out on a limb and say she won't last very long at all. She could kick ass in the challenges, but I think the personality clashes will be her downfall. She reminds me of that chick on America's Next Top Model who got pissy waiting around for the photo shoot to start. In the end, that chick got her head shaved and was quickly kicked to the curb. Well Francesca, you're halfway there!
7 comments:
She pisses me off too. Just before she spoke I knew I may not like her, then when she did, well that was it then. I think she believes she is something she is not. Hopefully she'll go to Redemption Island early and have to face a challenge and get her ass kicked.ReplyDelete
Hate her already. Dont see that changing.ReplyDelete
Like Rob said in the comment before mine, I got the impression right off the bat that she was not being herself. We'll have to wait until the 16th to see and meet the real Francesca.ReplyDelete
Whoa... you watch ANTM but don't blog about it? Please start. I will buy you gin made from unicorn joy-tears, and the purest Aspen snow-glitter.ReplyDelete
So this is what Chad Ochocinco is doing in the off season? When did he get breast implants?ReplyDelete
You know why sharks don't bite lawyers? Professional courtesy.
- DiabolicalFebruary 12, 2011 at 10:45 PM
Yeah, everybody loves a trash talker *rolls eyes*ReplyDelete
I mean, don't get me wrong...I love the trash. It's what keeps me coming back to LaLa's fine blog season after season...but we're not in a game against a handful of people competing for a million bucks! How dumb can you be?
Hate her already. Dont see that changing.ReplyDelete

subset: commoncrawl


text:
French newspaper La Tribune reports that an evacuation plan for 200,000 French citizens currently living in Israel has been devised.
French diplomatic sources told the newspaper that the plan was launched due to the rising risk of a conflict with Iran. The aim is to not be caught "off guard" if Israel is attacked by missiles launched by Iranian forces or Hezbollah.
A few dozen Frenchmen and women have been designated as planners for an evacuation, which would use smaller boats to get the citizens to French navy boats docked in Jaffa, near Tel Aviv.
Despite warnings about a conflict from American officials, Israeli officials have made a number of statements about Iran's nuclear program that some believe indicate a military conflict will happen soon. A former Mossad chief, Efraim Halevy, told the New York Times last week, "If I were Iranian, I'd be fearful of the next 12 weeks."