The Cambridge Companion to Children’s Literature

by M. O. Grenby

  5. Maria Edgeworth, The Parent’s Assistant; or, Stories for Children, Part II (3 vols., London: J. Johnson, 1796), vol. II, p. 5.

  6. Lewis Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno (London: Macmillan and Company, 1889), p. xiii.

  7. Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno, pp. 308–9.

  8. Arthur Ransome, Swallows and Amazons (1930; Harmondsworth: Puffin, 1962), pp. 354–5.

  9. Thomas Day, The History of Sandford and Merton (3 vols., London: John Stockdale, 1783–9), vol. III, p. 308.

  10. Day, History of Sandford and Merton, vol. II, p. 261.

  11. Day, History of Sandford and Merton, vol. III, pp. 277–8.

  12. Louisa May Alcott, Little Women (1868; London: Puffin, 1994), p. 4.

  13. Raymond Briggs, The Man (London: Red Fox, 1992), unpaginated.

  14. Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘To Any Reader’, in A Child’s Garden of Verses (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1885), p. 101.

  Part III Forms and Themes

  12 Changing families in children’s fiction

  Kimberley Reynolds

  Families, like schools – and for many of the same reasons – have been a constant presence in children’s literature, but the way they have been represented has changed considerably over time in line with shifts in cultural needs and expectations about both families and children. The following discussion traces these changes by examining the way the nuclear family is introduced in early children’s fiction, consolidated and repositioned during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, falls into disrepute in the mid to late twentieth century, and is tested for obsolescence at the start of the new millennium.

  Meet the family: families and children in early children’s literature

  Other contributors to this volume discuss parent–child relationships before the eighteenth century, providing glimpses of the way families were organised in the pre-modern period. In Centuries of Childhood (1960), the French historian Philippe Ariès describes this as a movement from the communal model, in which the ‘family’ incorporated networks of dependants who were not always linked by blood, which prevailed from the Middle Ages to the end of the seventeenth century, to the small, intimate nuclear family familiar today.

  The movement towards more intimate family groups gathered speed in the eighteenth century, at about the same time as commercial publishing for children was taking off. Some of these early children’s books register this transition by focusing on child characters’ relationships within families that consist only of parents and siblings. However, the attitudes to such families that these books convey vary considerably, reflecting conflicting views both about how children should behave and about what kind of training they needed in order to become effective adults. This pattern is typical of the way the family is thereafter treated in children’s books: there is a tenacious loyalty to the idea of the nuclear family on the one hand, but a series of challenges and adjustments to it on the other. Early children’s books, for instance, include both tales that point to the importance of cultivating independence and entrepreneurial skills in the young by depriving them of their families (so families are viewed as dispensable and potentially enfeebling), and those that stress the importance not only of having a family, but also of high levels of parental intervention intended to create self-controlled individuals dedicated to the principles of ratiocination and self-improvement.

  The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes, published by John Newbery in 1765, typifies stories about children who thrive despite losing their families. It tells the story of Margery Meanwell, whose parents die, leaving her and her younger brother Tommy ‘to the wide World’ with ‘nothing, poor Things, to support them . . . but what they picked from the Hedges, or got from the poor People’. Readers might expect this to signal that their lives will be tragic and short; in fact, Tommy is sent off to sea and returns a rich man while Margery – soon to acquire her better-known soubriquet ‘Goody Two-Shoes’ – rapidly rises from ragged child to respected teacher to woman of fortune. Goody Two-Shoes, then, is among the first children’s books to take up the fairy tale motif of the child whose deprivation of or separation from the family initiates a series of adventures that culminates in success of various kinds.

  Goody Two-Shoes inaugurated a rags-to-riches structure that became the stock-in-trade of self-help stories such as those of the influential nineteenth-century American writer, Horatio Alger Jr. Beginning with Ragged Dick; or, Street Life in New York (1867), his stories generally feature destitute boys who achieve financial security and respectability through their own efforts and abilities. Not all stories about children who grow up outside families focus on financial success, however. In Children of the New Forest (1847), for instance, Captain Marryat has the Beverley children learn survival skills in the forest against the backdrop of the English Civil War, while Kipling’s Kimball O’Hara (Kim, 1901) learns both about himself and how to play the ‘Great Game’ (spying for the British Secret Service) while moving between the worlds of white and native India. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, orphan girls acquire loving surrogate families and learn to become admirable women through the vicissitudes of their family-less childhoods. This pattern is typified by L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables (1908) in which the orphan Anne Shirley arrives at the farm of aging brother and sister Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert full of potential but lacking in love and self-control. By the end of the first book in the series she has become a much-loved daughter-figure, supporting Marilla after her brother’s death and achieving academic and social success in the community.

  The tradition of children who succeed outside conventional families continues to the present day in bestselling series such as Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy (1995–2000), J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels (1997–2007) and Anthony Horowitz’ books about Alex Rider (2000– ). A notable change is that many of these new stories about lone children focus on messianic figures: children charged not with learning to survive and become responsible citizens but with saving the world, whether this be from the faulty philosophy and totalitarian machinations of the ‘Magisterium’ (Pullman), Armageddon (Rowling) or super-villains wanting world dominance (Horowitz).

  Although heroic family-less children are plentiful in writing for children, more common by far are stories in which the family makes up the child’s world. The first books for children show families that are loving and committed to caring for their offspring, but they do not assume that this is a natural state of affairs or that parents invariably know what is best for their individual progeny. Many of the best-known writers and books of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries contain instructions for parents about how to raise and teach their children, alongside lessons to children about the proper way to behave, learn and think. The implication that parenting of this kind is a relatively new art can be seen as evidence that the nuclear family is a recent concept and that ideas about parenting and childhood are in transition.

  A good example of such a work is Maria Edgeworth’s The Parent’s Assistant, first published in 1796. It begins with a preface outlining the aims and responsibilities that parents should keep in mind when educating their children. There follows a series of stories in which child characters find themselves in difficult practical and ethical situations. While the focus is on the children’s responses, that they do learn is shown to be a result of good parenting – a task which Edgeworth views as being fraught with ‘dangers and difficulties’.1

  Edgeworth’s model parents are vigilant – always looking for concrete ways of encouraging their children to learn from their experiences, even if these result in uncomfortable or embarrassing mistakes in the short term. One of her best-known stories is ‘The Purple Jar’, about seven-year-old Rosamond, whose mother gives her the opportunity to choose between a pair of shoes that she needs and a beautiful purple jar she has seen in a shop window. At the beginning of the story her mother had set an example by not being tempted to purchase pretty things of which she had
no need, but Rosamond chooses the seductive jar, only to find when it is delivered to her home that the colour she had admired came from a liquid that was not part of the purchase. Meanwhile, her shoes are so worn that she cannot walk comfortably in them and her father will not be seen in public while she is wearing them so she misses an outing to a place she had particularly wanted to visit. In this way Rosamond learns to be more judicious in her decision-making.

  During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, good parents and successful families are frequently contrasted to those in which children are spoiled through indulgence, neglect, bad servants, unhealthy lifestyles and lack of education in all its forms. For instance, in the anonymous ‘Francis Fearful’, one of the Entertaining Memoirs of Little Personages, or, Moral Amusements for Young Gentlemen (c. 1775), the parents of the eponymous Francis have paid insufficient attention to his upbringing, leaving him to the care of servants before he is of school age. Because of this, Francis’ head is full of superstitions and misinformation that incapacitate him with fearful fantasies about all kinds of creatures and phenomena. By contrast, in Mary Martha Sherwood’s The History of the Fairchild Family (1818), Mr and Mrs Fairchild take great pains in raising their children, in one instance by telling them in some detail about the death of Augusta Noble, daughter of the local gentry. Augusta, whose parents have left her upbringing to inadequate servants, dies horribly when she uses a forbidden candle (indicating that she has not been taught obedience) to look at herself in the mirror (she has not learned about the sin of vanity) while her parents are away playing cards (highly disapproved of). As these examples show, the inference in many of the best-known early works for children is that creating a successful family is an acquired skill: parents must be taught to parent effectively and must be prepared to work at it tirelessly.

  The force with which this message is driven home is probably not unrelated to the fact that it helped create and sustain two branches of publishing that flourish to this day: books containing advice for parents and books that teach children about acceptable and unacceptable behaviour. The family being understood as a fundamentally bourgeois social unit (even if the royal family increasingly presented its most conspicuous model), the increased emphasis in early children’s literature on the child’s place in the family may also have been bound up with attempts by the middle classes to exert greater ideological influence on society. But children’s books did not simply reflect social changes; they were clearly involved in advancing new ideas about how the family, and society more generally, should function.2

  The child in the family

  While the first books for children tended to emphasise the responsibilities of parents as educators and role models, by the middle decades of the nineteenth century attention began to shift to the role of the child in the family and the need to pay attention to children’s emotional needs and social potential. Middle-class bias is still evident in that exemplary families tend to be middle-class even if, as in the case of Louisa May Alcott’s March family (Little Women, 1868), they live in reduced financial circumstances. Problem parents belong either to the upper classes who fail to value their children, or to the dissolute poor. Typical examples include the widowed Member of Parliament in Florence Montgomery’s tragic novel Misunderstood (1869), who fails to realise that his sturdy older son is deeply grieving the loss of his mother until the boy is fatally injured while attempting to save his frail little brother, with whom his father has been preoccupied. Montgomery is at pains to highlight the father’s inadequacies, especially the fact that he is unaware of the boy’s inner world and feelings, reading only the outward appearance. Montgomery gives this erring parent a chance to learn from his faults and let his son know he is loved before he dies. The alcoholic actress mother in Hesba Stretton’s Jessica’s First Prayer (1867) is not so fortunate. Jessica is given a new home and a new start in life before, as the text would have it, she is contaminated by her defective biological parent.

  Not all penurious parents are vilified in Victorian children’s books. Jessica’s First Prayer belongs to the genre of waif stories that came to prominence in mid to late nineteenth-century Britain. Concerned with the trials and tribulations of children who are orphaned, abandoned, abused, neglected or separated from their parents or entire families, waif tales take quite a different view of the lone and destitute child from that found in The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes. Set against the Victorian ethos of the loving family, they were intended to rouse pity for the many poor children who were living precariously in Britain’s metropolises, sometimes with ne’er-do-well parents, sometimes on their own after losing their parents. Their authors hoped to stimulate the levels of concern needed to create the organisations, agencies and social reforms necessary to provide for them. A popular example in which poor parents are also shown as loving and trying to do well by their children is Froggy’s Little Brother (1875), by ‘Brenda’ (Mrs G. Castle Smith), in which two young boys are orphaned after their mother succumbs to a wasting illness and their father is run over by a wealthy group who are driving their carriage recklessly after drinking too much at the races. Because they have been well raised, the little boys are kind, courteous and moral; the older brother, Froggy, struggles to support young Benny by sweeping crossings but eventually Benny dies and Froggy is taken into care. The book ends with an exhortation for readers to send ‘pennies and shillings to help schools, and Homes, and Kindergartens’ and ‘respon[d] liberally to . . . appeals’ to help poor children.3 This appeal for money underscores one of the principal roles of the family: to support its members financially.

  It is important not to overlook the pressures exerted by economic forces on the family unit, both in life and on the page. In Postmodernism: or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), the critic and theorist Fredric Jameson identifies three distinct phases in capitalism to date, and these phases map very neatly onto changes in the way families are represented in children’s literature. He begins with what he calls ‘market capitalism’, characteristic of the late eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries, when commercial publishing for children was in its infancy. Market capitalism he sees as being driven by the Industrial Revolution in tandem with Romantic philosophy and aesthetics – precisely the forces at work in the depiction of family life by early writers for children like Edgeworth and her contemporaries. These texts assume an audience of ‘masters’ – the class who will run the government and own/manage the workplaces. Central to this agenda is the avoidance of social unrest: the stories carefully instil principles of justice, democracy and noblesse oblige.

  While many of the first children’s books foreground the importance of the everyday life of families living together at home in moulding good men and women for the future, it has to be said that the family life depicted is deeply controlling and, despite occasional sensational incidents (one of the best-known stories in The Fairchild Family, for instance, is when the children are taken to see two corpses on a gibbet), far from exciting. It is not surprising, then, that once the idea of the nuclear family was well established, books in which families are put to more dramatic and exotic tests achieved great popularity. Just as Goody Two-Shoes ushered in the tale of the child who thrives without a family, so the Swiss pastor and author Johann Wyss’ 1814 Robinsonnade, The Swiss Family Robinson, was the progenitor of tales about families who undertake adventures together.

  The Swiss Family Robinson is typical of market capitalism in that it shows the central family as tightly bound by economic necessity, which resulted in many families travelling long distances to work or to take up new opportunities, sometimes migrating permanently as the Robinson family do, though in this case the land they reach is a remote island where they are shipwrecked and forced to survive. The Swiss Family Robinson shows how firmly entrenched ideas about the nuclear family had become in the nearly two decades that separate it from The Parent’s Assistant. It takes for granted that the family will function well, including by looking t
o their future economic security, whatever the circumstances.

  The Robinsons are indeed a very able and adaptable unit in which each member contributes to the family’s survival and comfort, though always learning to do better and praise God for their successes under the omniscient gaze and ever-ready guidance of father Robinson. Wyss is more overt than Edgeworth in the parallels he draws between children, family and the state. For instance, the father, whose journal purportedly forms the basis of the novel, has a clear idea of the role of the family in rearing the kind of children needed by a nation and seeks to draw readers into the family project: ‘[M]y great wish is that young people who read this record of our lives and adventures should learn from it how admirably suited is the perfect, industrious, and pious life of a cheerful, united family to the formation of strong, pure, and manly character’.4 That he refers exclusively to the ‘manly’ character reflects both the fact that the Robinsons have only sons and that, at the time, exploring and conquering new lands was considered the prerogative of the male. Wyss does, however, recognise the need for and contributions of the female helpmeets, without which no family of the time was complete, in the form of the boys’ mother and, latterly, Jenny, the castaway discovered on a nearby island, who marries the eldest son and returns with him to England (or Europe or Switzerland, depending on the version) at the end of the book.

  Significantly, while the original family is dispersed at the end of the novel, Mr and Mrs Robinson and two of their children stay behind to await the arrival of new colonists, with whose help they plan to build a new outpost of Switzerland. In this way the novel shows the family as central to the work of the nation or, as Robinson-pater writes, ‘None takes a better place in the national family, none is happier or more beloved than he who goes forth from such a home to fulfil new duties, and to gather fresh interests around him.’5