The Cambridge Companion to Children’s Literature

by M. O. Grenby

  Methinks that little Boy looks as if he had a mind to learn good things. Methinks I hear one say, well, I will never tell a lye more, I will never keep any naughty Boy company more, they will teach me to swear, and they will speak naughty words, they do not love God. I’le [sic] learn my Catechism, and get my Mother to teach me to pray, and I will go to weep and cry to Christ, and will not be quiet till the Lord hath given me Grace. O that’s my brave Child indeed!2

  In Janeway’s popular work, life-stories of pious children – ‘just like you’! – and their inevitable deaths create a persuasive rhetoric of the pleasures of repentance and conversion.

  More secular works, such as John Locke’s comprehensive and generally humane Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) aimed at an adult readership looking for guidance in child-rearing, similarly adopted the stance that children must be encouraged to ‘convert’ from lawless and ignorant childish ways to embrace properly civilised adult modes of behaviour and knowledge. In discussing such varied topics as health and nutrition, play, right and wrong conduct, discipline, social relations and character flaws, as well as curriculum and educational theory and practice, Locke stresses the rational nature of the child as the key to successful education in its broadest sense. By appealing to reason adapted to the child’s abilities at different ages, Locke argues, the parent may unlock or ‘turn’ his child to good effect: ‘[Children] understand [reasoning] as early as they do language; and, if I misobserve not, they love to be treated as rational creatures sooner than is imagined. ’Tis a pride should be cherished in them and, as much as can be, made the great instrument to turn them by.’3 The treatise’s best-known idea, of the child as white paper or formless wax, makes the adult the agent of inscribing or moulding the child, or ‘converting’ childhood to adulthood.

  Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s theories about child-rearing are also intelligible only if viewed through the lens of difference. In Émile: or On Education (1762), Rousseau argues that a truly healthy, moral, vigorous and dutiful man can be raised only in isolation from the corruption of society and under the firm guidance of an authoritarian tutor who will eventually lead him to enter civil society. Rousseau bases his influential treatise on the premise that differences between adult and child are innate and should be respected. To act otherwise is to encourage social disorder: ‘Nature wants children to be children before being men. If we want to pervert this order, we shall produce precious fruits which will be immature and insipid and will not be long in rotting . . . Childhood has its ways of seeing, thinking, and feeling which are proper to it.’4 Yet, the repeated argument that children ought not to be treated as junior adults – indeed, Rousseau vehemently disagrees with Locke’s maxim that the child be reasoned with from an early age – must be read in conjunction with the overall purposes of his work: a diagnosis of modern society and psychology by way of an educational experiment designed to produce the ideal Man from the incomplete – even if organically so – child.

  Inspired by both Locke and Rousseau, as well as by the practical experience she gained in helping to raise her many younger siblings, Maria Edgeworth’s works for children emphasise the natural faults to which children fall prey – laziness, love of attention, frivolousness and selfishness – and either the means by which these faults can be overcome or the devastating consequences of indulging them. For example, Edgeworth uses dialogue between the lively child Rosamond and her parents both to underscore Rosamond’s childish misunderstandings about character, conduct and self-control and to highlight her parents’ exemplary opinions to which she should aspire. The resolution of these misunderstandings by each tale’s end demonstrates her growing maturity. ‘The Birth-day Present’, a moral tale in The Parent’s Assistant (1796), opens with a dialogue between Rosamond and her (to modern readers) rather preternaturally even-tempered and rational mother. Rosamond wishes to know why her birthday is not celebrated as is her cousin Bell’s. Rosamond’s honest question comes from her child’s heart, yet the training she requires necessitates that the ‘right’ answer be given from her mother’s head, as she mimics Rosamond’s speech pattern and emphasises dispassionate thinking:

  ‘And will you, Rosamond – not now, but when you have time to think about it – tell me why I should make any difference between your birth-day and any other day?’

  Rosamond thought – but she could not find out any reason.5

  Government by reason, however, does not preclude affection. Rosamond’s parents, while unsentimental, demonstrate their deep regard for their daughters through attentiveness and compliments when deserved. Although Rosamond is often set upon the path in search of rational behaviour and parental approval through such conversations with her elders and betters, Edgeworth’s moral tales demonstrate that lessons are best learned through experience rather than lecture. Rosamond remains inexperienced – inherently so – but her stories ably show how a child can be gradually socialised and educated in logical reasoning within a loving family (as opposed to Rousseau’s child of nature, Émile, who is raised in isolation from society), and become, by her actions or through observation and conversation, more adult-like and worthy of respect.

  For influential authors such as Janeway, Locke, Rousseau, Edgeworth and their inheritors, differences between adult and child are both noted as natural and found to be intolerable. As I have suggested, the reliance upon difference as philosophical, biological and ideological underpinnings to the construction of the child, and the concomitant desire to mitigate and mediate those differences in literature, parenting manuals and moral tales, result in texts that stress the importance of leading the child out of vulnerable childhood and into productive citizenship. This conversion narrative, a genre I have been gesturing towards in this history of a certain fixation found in Anglo-American children’s literature, was especially skilfully adapted by nineteenth-century Evangelical writers for children through inversion of the typical roles of adult and child. Accessing Romantic-era ideologies about the exceptional wisdom of childhood in addition to scriptural (that is, New Testament) messages about the special nature of childhood, child characters in the sentimental religious novels of popular and prolific authors such as Hesba Stretton function as innocent and saintly correctives to the fallen adults around them, converting them from some of the weaknesses of adulthood – worldliness, greed, self-consciousness and rigidity – to a childish acceptance of God’s love. In her hunger and rags, Stretton’s ‘street arab’ Jessica, in Jessica’s First Prayer (1867) may at first appear to be an unlikely child hero. However, Jessica’s suffering and deep yearning to learn about God make her an ideal ambassador for the text’s messages about Christian charity, selflessness and true faith, both for characters within the text (such as the minister’s daughters and Mr Daniel, the somewhat miserly and status-conscious coffee-stall owner and chapel-keeper) and for the child readers outside of the text. In making her first prayer asking God to send money to repay for donated coffee as well as to learn about Him, Jessica reveals her profound innocence: both in misunderstanding the nature of God’s bounty and in embodying the spiritual ideal of a penitent empty vessel before God. This ill-favoured child’s prayer helps to deepen the faith of her listeners – especially the adults, Mr Daniel and the minister – who are all moved by Jessica’s sincere and selfless supplication to God.

  Jessica’s First Prayer and other works for children by popular authors such as George MacDonald and Frances Hodgson Burnett build upon powerful, Romantic-era notions of childhood innocence and influence. However, these sentimental reflections of the superlative qualities of the child in relation to the fallen adult give way, in part, to literary representations of adult conceptions of the (middle-class) carefree and protected child’s world. The child characters in ‘children’s world’ fiction, among them some of the most beloved creations in children’s fiction – Tom Sawyer, Pippi Longstocking, E. Nesbit’s Bastables, Arthur Ransome’s Blacketts and Walkers and so on – reflect an ideology of difference that reco
gnises the child as valuable as such, rather than only when measured against adults.

  A comparison between a late Victorian example of a sentimentally elevated child character whose ‘exotic’ nature and extreme difference from flawed adulthood is emphasised – Lewis Carroll’s Bruno in Sylvie and Bruno (1889) – and the mutually respectful adult and child characters (though idealised in another way) in Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons (1930) helps to demonstrate both the patronising nature of childhood ‘innocence’ as a dominant construction of childhood and the growing emphasis within children’s literature on an appreciation of childhood interdependence and independence from adults. Although quite different in form and purpose, both Sylvie and Bruno and Swallows and Amazons represent essentially utopic visions of a childhood set apart from adulthood. In the preface to Sylvie and Bruno, Carroll specifically states his particular view of the nature of childhood as hours composed of ‘innocent merriment’. Sylvie and Bruno, he went on:

  is written, not for money, and not for fame, but in the hope of supplying, for the children whom I love, some thoughts that may suit those hours of which are the very life of Childhood; and also in the hope of suggesting, to them and to others, some thoughts that may prove, I would fain hope, not wholly out of harmony with the graver cadences of Life.6

  Sylvie and Bruno is a complicated and chaotic dream-vision that, through the experiences of an ailing adult narrator who steps in and out of ‘real’ life into another world, confronts issues of death, suffering, religious faith and the nature of childhood. The superlative purity, simplicity, frailty and beauty of Carroll’s child characters cannot be contained in ordinary childhood – the children are fairies, dream-presences idealised into concentrated and miniaturised representations of Innocence. Carroll’s baby-talking Bruno and sweetness-and-light Sylvie may grate on modern ears, yet the interactions between adult and child characters offer a good look at the patronising attitude of this ideology of innocence. During one of the narrator’s dream-visions, he joins the fairy Sylvie just as she rushes to comfort a distraught Bruno, whose indignation at a bee sting and a stubbed toe cause Sylvie to kiss away his tears and the narrator to defend Bruno’s innocence in the onslaught:

  ‘That Bee should be ashamed of itself!’ I said severely, and Sylvie hugged and kissed the wounded hero till all tears were dried.

  ‘My finger’s quite unstung now!’ said Bruno. ‘Why doos there be stones? Mister Sir, does oo know?’

  ‘They’re good for something,’ I said: ‘even if we don’t know what.’7

  For the nostalgic Carroll, Sylvie (especially, since for Carroll the female retains a connection to innocence unavailable to males) and Bruno do not in the least require conversion to adulthood; indeed, adulthood can represent corruption, worldliness and loss of faith. Their eternal childhood, supplied by their fairy nature, safely protects them from adult corruption. The narrator’s hastening journey to another status and sphere – presumably, death and Heaven – is eased by the interaction with child figures that represent childhood writ large, closer, by far, to God. While no actual children act or speak as do Carroll’s creations, realism is not his object.

  For Arthur Ransome, however, who based his child characters on actual children, the childhood idyll does not rely upon fairyland or sentimentalised portraits of childhood to make the distinction between childhood’s freedoms and adulthood’s cares. The two British writers share a nostalgia for the past, to be sure, and a belief in the importance of childhood, yet for Ransome childhood’s past can be located in the imagination of ordinary and more realistic child characters.

  The Blackett and Walker children of the first book in Ransome’s popular Swallows and Amazons series (1930–47) together create an idyllic summer’s world of seafaring adventure complete with pirates, natives and ‘savages’ (various adults). The four Swallows (the Walker children) make a treaty with the two Amazons (the Blackett girls) in order to unite against a common enemy, the Blacketts’ Uncle Jim, renamed Captain Flint, who has banished the children from his houseboat in an effort to complete a book manuscript without distraction. Though adult and child are seemingly set against each other, the game is good fun for all parties as the adults participate in the game the children construct. Most importantly, the children camp alone on an island and work together as a team. Within the child-centred social world they create, although the older children wield greater authority, each child plays an important role and, ultimately, pirate and seaman / adult and child unite in the search for Captain Flint’s stolen treasure (his typewriter, diaries and manuscript). At the conclusion of the novel, after a great storm that the brave and practical children successfully ride out alone, all of the anxious adults converge upon the children’s camp but ultimately let them return to ordinary life in their own time:

  After they were gone the Swallows and Amazons looked at each other. They were rather glum.

  ‘It’s the natives,’ said Nancy. ‘Too many of them. They turn everything into a picnic.’

  ‘Mother doesn’t,’ said Titty.

  ‘Nor does ours when she’s alone,’ said Nancy.

  ‘And Captain Flint’s not a bit like a native when he’s by himself,’ said Titty.

  ‘It’s when they all get together,’ said Nancy. ‘They can’t help themselves, poor things.’8

  For the children, the nature of adulthood is found to be, not surprisingly, limited and even a bit disappointingly ‘childlike’. The view that children are ‘better’ – cleverer, more sophisticated – than adults is a mainstay of contemporary popular culture (including, especially, television and film comedies in which the wise-cracking kids outsmart the dim-witted or preoccupied parents). Many late twentieth- and twenty-first-century children’s books feature comic and cynical views of the failures of adulthood in nurturing, educating or even conversing with contemporary youth. In these books the difference between adult and child favours the child not because of any greater intrinsic worth of childhood so much as because the adult values depicted are limited to consumerism, competition and social-climbing.

  As this quick sketch has shown, children’s literature emerged from perceived differences between adult and child that developed over time, in conjunction with changing constructions of childhood. When difference reads as ‘problematic’, the focus becomes helping the child character (and child-reader) convert from childhood to adulthood. Or the belief in the child’s special status as innocent and wise results in a nostalgic view encouraging adults to fantasise about childhood and, in so doing, become themselves more open to childlikeness. The self-conscious and adventuresome child characters of later fiction tend to remain apart from the adult, and the idyllic child world represents a coherent choice in favour of separation and independence. But these ‘macro’ level differences between adult and child (or wondrous childishness in competition with its opposite, stultifying and rigid ‘adultness’) fail to tell the whole story: on the ‘micro’ level, multiple differences – in social class, ability, race, gender or sexual preference, for example – between children or youth may also create plot lines and problems to be solved within the text. In ‘resistant’ narratives, the universal child becomes the particular child – raced, classed, gendered and so on.

  A quick look at the representation of race and class in two influential children’s books of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries – Thomas Day’s The History of Sandford and Merton (1783–9) and Mary Martha Sherwood’s The History of the Fairchild Family (Part 1, 1818) – both supports and interrupts the conversion narrative that I have been discussing. The target child character (usually a faulty child of the middle or upper class) is instructed in piety and selflessness, industry and manliness, through the actions of a lower-class or ‘foreign’ character. This type of relationship is most clearly seen in terms of class: in both Sandford and Merton and The Fairchild Family, lower-class children function as exemplars of higher-class religious, social and behavioural codes. For example, li
ttle Henry Fairchild learns the value of Christian submission, gratitude and patience in conversation with young Charles Trueman whose physical circumstances are dire: he is both poverty-stricken and in failing health. Yet Charles’ ‘good death’ – he is eager to die and does so surrounded by friends and family – functions especially effectively because his faith sustains him even in the face of his extreme poverty and privation. Charles’ goodness sets the stage for Henry, whose life is much easier, to become a more charitable, helpful and conscientious gentleman’s son. Like Jessica, in Jessica’s First Prayer, the poor child acts as an agent of social and religious conversion within a narrow compass that does not affect the political or social strata at all.

  Thomas Day bases his didactic work Sandford and Merton on the idea that the hard-working, sober and steady farming class, represented by his ideal boy, Harry Sandford, offers a virtuous model for the middle and upper classes to follow, and in this he underscores a discourse of conversion. Young Tommy Merton, indulged, ignorant and inflated by self-importance, learns much from Harry, the unsophisticated yet noble rustic companion of his youth. Tommy’s ultimate gratitude towards Harry makes the book’s lesson explicit: ‘You have taught me how much better it is to be useful than rich or fine; how much more amiable to be good than to be great.’9 Yet Day goes further in exploring class difference than this concluding comment might suggest. Harry questions the validity of a system that would seem to prefer the idle over the industrious and the sophisticated over the sensible:

  Surely . . . there cannot be so much difference between one human being and another; or if there is, I should think that part of them the most valuable, which cultivates the ground and provides necessaries for all the rest: not those, who understand nothing but dress, walking with their toes out, staring modest people out of countenance, and jabbering a few words of a foreign language.10