The Cambridge Companion to Children’s Literature

by M. O. Grenby

  Unlike texts in the academic canon, a children’s classic must also retain an association with children. This association can come from actual young readership, and there are certainly young readers fixed on the idea of reading classics; the cachet of reading certain books is not a phenomenon limited to adult books. Most children, however, are not as concerned with a text’s classic status as their elders are; the test of living, trusted, peer readers or their own experience is far more important than the test of time. C. S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia (1950–6) continues to win numerous readers not merely because of its classic status but because it continues to please a large number of the young people who take the time to read it. This current generation of young people includes countless numbers of adults-to-be who will joyfully transmit those titles to a subsequent generation, supporting the retention of the Narnia books in the family of classics. However, a text can survive for some time on the classics shelf without a large child audience; Little Women, for instance, has a diminished readership these days and also, quite likely, a fairly high put-down percentage, a large number of readers who did not find the book rewarding enough to finish. More important than actual children is the idea of a child audience; as long as adults can remember themselves as children reading that title (or even intending to read that title), a classic has the children’s imprimatur it needs for current status. The break in the chain comes when the young generation that eschewed a classic text grows up and passes on passing it on, leaving formerly popular favourites such as Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s The Story of a Bad Boy (1870) or Mary Mapes Dodge’s Hans Brinker, or the Silver Skates (1865) to turn into quaint relics, recognised vaguely if at all.

  Texts can also have their status heightened or re-energised from external factors, accelerants that fuel the fire of their popularity. Such accelerants may be film versions, televisual incarnations, appearance on book-themed educational television programmes such as the venerable Reading Rainbow, line-extension merchandising in general, and the winning of well-known awards. (It is fascinating to contemplate what might happen should Oprah Winfrey turn to children’s books in her book club, since an Oprah pick is not so much an accelerant as an immediate conflagration.) Accelerants can operate directly on the popular audience – individuals may as a consequence say ‘Oh, now I really want to read that book’ – or such phenomena can operate to enhance availability – an editor with a particular interest can deliberately choose to champion and reprint older texts (as Sharyn November does in her Firebird imprint at the Penguin publishing company), or a series imprimatur such as the Reading Rainbow logo can help keep titles in print. In Britain, the declaration by the bestselling contemporary children’s author Jacqueline Wilson that Eve Garnett’s once-lauded but now rather old-fashioned The Family From One End Street (1937) was one of her favourite books was enough to make Penguin rush it back into print as one of their Puffin Modern Classics. Customer reviews on Amazon.co.uk confirm that this is good business: ‘I bought this book after hearing the author Jacqueline Wilson recommend it on T.V., up till then I’d never heard of it’, writes ‘A Customer’, adding an emphatic ‘Let me tell you I’m so glad that I did!‘5 Accelerants act as a text’s unofficial public relations department.

  Though such enhancements help keep a text alive, they aren’t likely to pull a book from comparative obscurity into classic status; the movies, television series and pop-culture references to Little Women help it retain its status, but Dodie Smith’s The Hundred and One Dalmatians (1956), a charming book inherently very suitable to classic status, wasn’t suddenly catapulted into the canon as a consequence of being the source of two highly popular films, one of them a minor animated classic. Cross-media popularity increases chances of a title’s availability – the films play a key role in keeping Smith’s title in print – but it’s the cinematic Dalmatian wagging the literary tail, with the books operating as a line extension for the movie, complete with covers taken from publicity stills that suggest that Smith’s work is another novelisation of the film. Canonically, accelerants can only perpetuate an already burning fire – Harry Potter books were internationally famous even before the film series became monumentally successful – otherwise their own popularity will consume the very title that sparked them. This fate is particularly likely if, as with One Hundred and One Dalmatians, the accelerant is a film from the Disney studios; Disney’s unstoppable combination of child-appealing storytelling and powerhouse marketing almost invariably results in its version of a text becoming the definitive one to its audiences.

  It is tempting to try to reduce predictions of classic status to a formula: degree of initial critical regard plus degree of initial popularity times nature of contents times x generations of audience plus y accelerants equals likely classic status. Returning to the four sample texts, True Believer would seem to score poorly; despite critical acclaim, it never reached wide general popularity, it has no boosts from other media and its National Book Award hasn’t been enough to keep its profile high; its verse-novel artistry and contemporary themes helped its critical reception but militate against its being taken to the loving bosom of the popular audience. Holes has a better chance; it was widely popular as well as critically regarded, and it was made into a modestly successful film; its quirky and slightly distorted reality gives it a fairy tale quality that may allow it to be embraced despite the serious elements of its story. On the two series, Animorphs generated few respectful reviews but tremendous popularity, including a spin-off television show; it lost considerable interest, however, upon the cessation of its publication, and its mass-market status makes its embrace unlikely. Harry Potter, on the other hand, has scored well in awards, reviews, popularity and film accelerants; if the sentimental canon continues to adopt members as it has in the past, Rowling’s series is the likeliest not just of these texts, but of all contemporary texts, to achieve classic status.

  Changing times

  Even if such a formula could be created to explain the category’s current inclusions, however, it may fail in predicting future additions. Since the sentimental canon’s main tendencies are retrospective and static, change is not a common occurrence; nor does there seem to be much serious interest in an activist approach on the front lines or championing particular titles for broad acceptance as classics. (The recent changes on one bookstore’s classic shelves were the inclusion of Robert McCloskey’s Homer Price (1943) and Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series (1932–43), both of those well-loved and high-profile favourites.) Cultural transformation, however, comes not so much from individuals changing their ideas as from the changing of the cultural guard as generations that held particular ideas die off, retire, stop publishing, become technologically obsolescent, to be replaced by those with different approaches. So it will be with children’s literature. There have been changes in the collection of classics, both deletions and additions, and the creation of an academic canon for children’s literature is in itself a change. What the future seems likeliest to bring, however, is not future additions to the category of ‘classic’ but instead the creation of new categories; the changes in the way we interact with information and text will change the approach to the family of classics and to academic canons as well.

  The number of children’s books produced is substantial; while numbers vary depending on how measurements are taken (and few are exact), there are easily over 4,000 new trade books published for young people in the USA each year, and recent reports suggest British numbers may be even higher. The overwhelming number of children’s texts leaves consumers of the literature burdened with what social theorist Barry Schwartz calls ‘the paradox of choice’, a situation where the multitude of options means more work for, possibly, no more reward on the part of the consumer.6 The popularity of children’s literature and the establishment of the internet as a mouthpiece as well as marketplace also means that there are more people publicly interacting with and commenting on the literature, more places to turn to for critical
judgment.

  Even in the old established reviewing journals for practitioners, pluralism has become the norm. Unsigned reviews, formerly the rule, are now a rarity in review periodicals, so individual critical voices are known; it is also unusual for a publication to have one sole vehicle for communicating with readers, with most journals possessing both websites and a number of specialised publications with original content. What is more, critical assessments are increasingly licensed into compilations and databases, so review consumers may encounter a journal’s reviews on Amazon.com, in the Children’s Literature Comprehensive Database, or in the electronic academic-journal service Project Muse in addition to the source journal. Awards too are increasingly pluralistic; the American Library Association, which bestows the most prestigious awards in American literature for young people, now gives awards not only for the best book, but for best book in various categories (picture book, informational book, the best African-American titles of several types, and the best Latino titles). Such recognition is, as always, a double-edged sword, bringing titles to prominence but enhancing the separatism of the literary strands and emphasising the marginalisation of those topics and subgenres not featured in any such awards. Yet increasingly such foci provide a useful entry point for audiences seeking excellence in a particular area of children’s literature: for, to be blunt, the readers and parents of readers untempted by the consistent middle-class whiteness of the popular pantheon and who seek a different kind of prospective classic. At the same time, children’s literature continues to broaden as an academic subject in fields such as cultural studies, area studies, sociology and history; if univocality of academic opinion ever existed, it is certainly gone now. Even syllabi are frequently turning to a more pluralistic approach, opting for a choose-your-own-title syllabus within each of several specified subgenres and emphasising the impact and significance of the genre rather than the importance of individual titles, a practice that militates against the creation or support of a canon.

  This diversification is part of a larger cultural trend whose impact on books is still in its infancy. New technology for information ranging from the internet to the iPod are triumphs not only of breadth but of pluralism, diversification but on a global scale. As a consequence, specialisation can paradoxically occur in larger and more viable groups, or ‘mega-niches’, as Clay Shirky discusses in Wired Magazine; Chris Anderson writes of ‘The Long Tail’, the increasing viability of small-audience merchandise in a world where physical costs and limitations are eroding, and the consequent disappearance of truly common culture.7 Specialised audiences are no longer the small groups of pre-internet days, since the ability to reach audiences globally and instantaneously means that a specialised niche that might formerly have included only a handful of people can contain millions of people. Issues of translation, of convention (both cultural and linguistic) and of marketing mean that children’s literature currently still falters at true cultural internationalism, but it too is increasingly able to support what might be considered to be niche audiences because the global connections allow for broader knowledge and availability. One early demonstration of the global effect was the American release of the second Harry Potter title, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (1999), which lagged sufficiently behind the British publication for eager North American readers simply to place web orders in the UK and receive their copy prior to US publication. This trend further complicates the notion of literary authority; ratings of trust for reviewers on websites create and define authorities on the most specialised topics, and lists provided by such experts are gratefully received and referred to with respect.

  Another change is the appearance of new literary categories that allow for the celebration of additional titles without requiring any change in the definition of a classic. We are seeing the development of the concept of ‘modern classics’, for instance, a term that appears in the title of two different reprint series (Oxford University Press and Puffin), which both feature a number of books written by still-living authors. Bookstores have prominent sections labelled ‘award books’, a category that centralises the location for celebrated but not-yet-ready-for-true-classic-status titles. Series books are subject to reconsideration as well (in fact, those very classics shelves are teeming with series, many of them mass-market); the visual cues differentiating mass-market series from respectable trade series are beginning to lose their reliable meaning, and the contemporary celebration of popular culture is beginning to allow less highbrow pleasures into the family of cherished literature. The Nancy Drew mystery series has re-emerged in a number of forms, for example, with retrospective catalogues offering a facsimile of her first adventure, The Secret of the Old Clock (1930), for sale alongside the nostalgic lures of Nut Goodies, old-fashioned candy and hot-dog roasting skewers. Nancy has her own titled section in some bookstores, with reprints of her 1970s classics (considered upstart additions in their day) right alongside the 1990s paperback series and the brand new adventures of eight-year-old Nancy. In the true tradition of the classics section, it is the idea rather than the edition that matters, with the various incarnations of Nancy all allomorphs of the Nancy Drew morpheme.

  Ultimately, the future seems to promise a chorus of canons: old classics hanging on where they are still cherished, new family classics satisfying a wider variety of families – not all of them white or straight – and a variety of texts that reach the top of the standard for their particular section of the children’s literature audience. Similarly, academic children’s literature canons will move more towards a pluralistic approach to representation rather than identification of touchstone texts. It is a long way from Sarah Trimmer, but she would recognise the work of adults determinedly mixed-up in children’s business and irretrievably entangled with children’s literature.

  Notes

  1. Richard Steele, The Tatler, 95 (15–17 November 1709) (2 vols., London: H. Hills, 1710), vol. I, p. 533.

  2. Trimmer, The Guardian of Education (5 vols., London: J. Hatchard, 1802–6), vol. I (1802), pp. 65 and 62. See M. O. Grenby, ‘“A Conservative Woman Doing Radical Things”: Sarah Trimmer and the Guardian of Education’, in Culturing the Child 1690–1914: Essays in Memory of Mitzi Myers, ed. Donelle Ruwe (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2005), pp. 137–61.

  3. Richard L. Darling, The Rise of Children’s Book Reviewing in America, 1865–1881 (New York: Bowker, 1968), p. 19.

  4. Isaac Bashevis Singer, ‘I See the Child as a Last Refuge’, The New York Times Book Review, Children’s Book Section (9 November 1969), pp. 1 and 66, reprinted in Robert Bator, ed., Signposts to Criticism of Children’s Literature (Chicago: American Library Association, 1983), p. 50.

  5. On-line at www.amazon.co.uk (accessed 22 February 2008).

  6. Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less (New York: Ecco, 2004).

  7. Clay Shirky, ‘Tiny Slice, Big Market’, Wired 14.11, on-line at www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.11/meganiche_pr.html (accessed 22 February 2008); Chris Anderson, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More (New York: Hyperion, 2006).

  Part II Audiences

  8 Learning to be literate

  Lissa Paul

  In all of children’s literature, the character with the surest sense of the vital importance of being literate is the spider Charlotte from E. B. White’s classic 1952 novel, Charlotte’s Web. Charlotte knows, as does everyone else on the farm, that pigs like her friend Wilbur are slated from birth for violent, unnatural deaths. In order to save his life Charlotte must take heroic measures. Her plan of attack? A war of words.

  In the context of the life-and-death seriousness of the situation, it may seem odd that the first words Charlotte chooses to write in her web, ‘Some Pig’, are colloquial, rural, grammatically dubious and puzzling. Yet the phrase invites speculation. After reading Charlotte’s carefully woven sign, the likely wielders of the knife, the farmer Zuckerman and his henchman Lurvy, discuss their pig seriously. They try to fig
ure out why Wilbur is not just any old pig. They wonder what makes him ‘Some Pig’. That’s what saves him. If, instead of ‘Some Pig’, Charlotte had written the clichéd commandment ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill’ into her web, would it have had the same effect? Not likely.

  In using her words to save Wilbur from the Christmas slaughter, Charlotte participates in the historical tradition that equates reading with intellectual accomplishment and the ability to save a life. In early modern Britain, convicted felons sentenced to death by hanging could claim what was called ‘benefit of the clergy’. If they could read ‘the neck verse’, the beginning of Psalm 51, they would be reprieved. They usually did not escape completely, but might be branded: ‘M’ for murder and ‘T’ for theft. Reading could not save them a second time. Though the sense of life itself being at stake in learning to read has long since receded, the legacy of literacy as fundamental to civility and humanity remains – despite even the disturbing twenty-first-century fashion for oppressive, large-scale, high-stakes literacy testing.

  In order to tell the long and often twisted history of literacy education I take my direction from Charlotte’s author, E. B. White. Besides being a writer of children’s books, White (1899–1985) was a New Yorker essayist and a consummate prose stylist. In 1958, he also revised and rewrote a major guide to composition, William Strunk’s Elements of Style (1918), in which he makes the case for the vital importance of good writing – and the dangers of the bad. ‘Muddiness’, he cautions, ‘is not merely a disturber of prose, it is also a destroyer of life, of hope’. White was a defender of good style and good prose. Above all, as he emphatically put it, he championed ‘Clarity. Clarity. Clarity.’1