University of Strathclyde

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CHILDREN’S LITERATURE: Lecture One: Introduction

1. What is children's literature?

1.1 What do we mean by 'children'? Division of children's literature into age ranges – including 'young adults'. History of childhood.

1.2 Who writes, selects, promotes, judges children's books? (NB Amazon, Cool-Read, and Smarties Prize); S.E. Hinton, The Outsiders (1967); Tobias Druitt, Corydon and the Island of Monsters (2005).

2. Children's literature: literature written for children or literature read by children? Has there always been literature written for children?

2.1 Warren W. Wooden, Children's Literature of the English Renaissance (University Press of Kentucky, 1986), argues that children's literature in English begins with William Caxton's Fables of Aesop (1483), John Foxe's Book of Martyrs (1563) and the English translation of Comenius's Orbis Pictus Sensualium ('TheWorld of Sensible Things Drawn') (1658), which he calls 'cardinal texts in the early development of illustrated books for children in England' (p.2).

2.2 Class web pages 'More Children's Books' have short section on pre-C17: most not written for but given to/read by children:

The History of Reynard the Fox: first tr. William Caxton in 1481.

Aesop's Fables: first tr.William Caxton (1484); adapted for children by William Godwin in Fables Ancient and Modern (1805).

Plutarch’s Lives (originally in a translation by Thomas North, 1579).

'Jack the Giant Killer', 'Robin Hood', 'Children in the Wood', etc, in popular chapbooks (cheap pamphlets sold by peddlers or chapmen from C16 to C19).

The Bible (after Reformation); also, in England and America, John Foxe's Book of Martyrs (C16)!

James Janeway, A Token for Children (1671/1672) – lives of thirteen child martyrs designed 'to awaken his readers' hearts, to bring them to a sense of their total depravity, and thus to the "early piety" which was the supreme aim of the responsible Calvinist preacher or parent' (Children’s Literature, ed Peter Hunt (OUP, 1995), p.21).

John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678): Puritan classic; see Little Women.

John Bunyan, A Book for Boys and Girls (1686); book of verses for children - e.g.:

When Adam was deceived,/I was of life bereaved;/Of late (too) I perceived,/I was in sin conceived .../When other Children prayed,/That work I then delayed, /Ran up and down and played;/And thus from God have strayed ('The Awakened Child's Lamentation', stanzas 1, 9).

3. Implications of these books/verses?

4. History of Childhood/Children's Reading: is childhood biological category or cultural construct?

4.1 Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life (1960), tr. Robert Baldick (Jonathan Cape, 1962) - childhood a relatively recent construct; no real concept of childhood in Middle Ages. But a

powerful riposte to Ariès’s conclusion ... comes from the inheritance of Graeco-Roman discourse on the subject. Medieval Latin adopted the Hippocratic tradition of dividing childhood into three stages: infantia from birth to age 7; pueritia from age 7 to 12 for girls and 7 to 14 for boys; and adolescentia from 12 or 14 to 21. (Colin Heywood, A History of Childhood (Polity, 2001), p.14)

4.2 Plato, The Republic (c.380B.C.): includes discussion of education (for ruling class); Socrates says:

you know that we begin by telling children stories. These are, in general, fiction, though they contain some truth ... [Thus] it seems that our first business is to supervise the production of stories, and choose only those we think suitable, and reject the rest. ... Children cannot distinguish between what is allegory and what isn't, and opinions formed at that age are usually difficult to eradicate or change; it is therefore of the utmost importance that the first stories they hear shall aim at producing the right moral effect. (Plato, The Republic, tr. H.D.P Lee (Penguin, 1955), pp.114-16)

4.3 New Testament: Jesus says 'Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven' (Matthew, 18:3).

4.4 Christian Church, influenced by Augustine (354-430), held that human beings were born in sin: 'If anyone were offered the choice of suffering death or becoming a child again, who would not recoil from the second alternative and choose to die? Our infancy, indeed, by which we begin this life not with laughter but with tears, seems unknowingly to prophesy the evils upon which we are entering' (City of God, tr. R.W. Dyson (Cambridge University Press, 1998), p.1072).

4.5 'He that spareth his rod hateth his son' (Proverbs, 13:24) - see Tom Sawyer.

4.6 But St Anselm (C11), replying to an abbot who complained that the boys in his cloister were getting worse and worse despite being beaten night and day, 'pointed out the advantages of kindness in upbringing, suggesting ... that, like a goldsmith who moulds his leaf with gentle, careful, pressure rather than with blows, [the abbot] should form the boys' characters by cheerful encouragement and loving forbearance' (Heywood, p.100).

4.7 Protestantism (Luther, Calvin) inherited Augustine's gloomy account of human sin/childhood and need for salvation; dominated C17 (Bunyan, et al); see Luther's Small Catechism (1529) and Westminster Confession of Faith (the 'Shorter Confession') of 1647.

4.8 James Janeway's 'A Token for Children'.

5. Enlightenment: e.g., John Locke's Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693): shifts attention from sin/salvation to psychological/character development via experience and education: assumes children are initially blank sheets; children's natural impulses used to develop reason and moral virtue.

5.1 'I consider them as Children, who must be tenderly used, who must play, and have Play-things'; 'the chief Art is, to make all that they have to do, Sport and Play too' (Some Thoughts Concerning Education, ed John W. and Jean S. Yolton (OUP, 2000), pp.108, 120).

5.2 'When by these gentle ways he begins to be able to read, some easy pleasant Book suited to his Capacity, should be put into his Hands, wherein the entertainment, that he finds, might draw him on, and reward his Pains in Reading, and yet not such as should fill his Head with perfectly useless trumpery, or lay the principles of Vice and Folly. To this purpose, I think Æsop's Fables the best, which being Stories apt to delight and entertain a Child, yet may afford useful Reflections to a grown Man. ... Reynard the Fox, is another Book, I think, may be made use of to the same purpose. ... What other Books there are in English of the kind of those above-mentioned, fit to engage the liking of Children, and tempt them to read, I do not know' (pp.211-13) (NB: not Bible, except stories like David and Goliath).

6. Aesop's Fables (ancient Greece, 6th century B.C., tr. by Caxton in 1484) – e.g.:

A tortoise begged an eagle to teach him to fly. The eagled pointed out that he was not made to fly – far from it! But the tortoise only pleaded with him even more. So the eagle took him in his talons, flew up into the air and then let him go. The tortoise fell onto the rocks and was smashed to pieces. This fable shows that often, in wanting to compete with others in spite of wiser council, we can do ourselves harm. (The Complete Fables, tr. Olivia and Robert Temple (Penguin, 1998), p.257)

7. Reynard the Fox: medieval beast-epic deriving from number of oral stories in various European countries (see Victor Watson, ed, The Cambridge Guide to Children's Books in English (CUP, 2001), p.607); translated from Dutch book by William Caxton in 1481 (see Caxton, The History of Reynard the Fox, edited by N.F. Blake (Oxford University Press, 1970)).

8. Fairy tales not encouraged by Puritans or by Locke ('perfectly useless trumpery'?): 'be sure to preserve his tender Mind from all Impressions and Notions of Sprites and Goblins, or any fearful Apprehensions in the dark. This he will be in danger of from the indiscretion of Servants...' (p.196); how do fairy tales differ from Aesop's Fables (or Reynard the Fox)?

9. Fairy tales not originally intended for children; fairy tales are

Traditional narratives deriving mostly from oral cultures that probably had their roots in the Middle Ages, or even earlier. ... Fairy tales are centuries old. They are feudal and rural in their setting, and hierarchical in their social structures ... They existed in thousands of constantly changing oral versions and some have analogues in the folklore of other continents. Collections of fairy tales appeared in print for the first time during the 16th century [in Italy and France] ... But Britain seems to have been slow to respond to the new taste, partly because of a deep Protestant distrust of magic and fancy. ... [translations of Perrault, et al, in early decades of C18]. After about 1770, printers began to produce fairy-tale chapbooks specifically for children ... [the Grimms' first collection of German folktales published in 1812] When he realised the stories were being read by children, Wilhelm Grimm adapted subsequent editions to make them more suitable for young readers and, in doing so, confirmed the notion that fairy tales were for children [Grimms' stories first translated in 1823] (Watson, pp.246-7).

9.1 Formal features and layers of meaning that both stimulate children's imagination and suggest disturbing, 'adult' implications:

Though they are prose fictions, fairy tales have little in common with novels. There is no slow accumulation of inner and outer detail, no gradual involvement in the intricacies of subjectivity. ... Fairy tales rarely stop to reflect, preach or analyse. They are 'naked narratives' composed only of imagery, protagonists, landscape and action. They are irreducibly implicit. ... Some adult readers are troubled by the fact that many of them hint at 'forbidden' meanings which have to do with sexuality, violence, greed, and poisonous rivalry between parent (or step-parent) and child. ... In the face of their complexity and suggestivity, it is unwise to think of fairy tales as 'teaching' anything. ... It would be a fool's game to read fairy tales to children in order to teach them not to break promises or indulge in reckless wishing (Watson, pp.248-9).

Reading for Seminar: the various versions of 'Little Red Riding Hood', in Maria Tatar, ed, The Classic Fairy Tales, pp.3-24.

Reading for next lecture: Sarah Fielding, The Governess (if there are not enough copies in the bookshop, try Amazon).

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