The Cambridge Companion to Children’s Literature

by M. O. Grenby

  Yet that division remains highly arbitrary. Children, after all, learn to identify different levels of reality quite early in their mental development. And they soon recognise different systems of representation as part of the same process that enables them to acquire language. Moreover, their awareness that representation is a mode distinct from reality soon allows them to find a vicarious pleasure in safely acting out situations that can be probable or ‘realistic’ as well as improbable or ‘fantastic’ (the humorous ‘nonsense’ of nursery rhymes is, of course, predicated on just this principle). The child’s sophisticated way of responding to representations thus parallels the operation of language itself, which, like fiction, functions as a coherent and elaborated system of analogies to the material world.

  Thus ‘wonder’, a word all too often deliberately deployed to encourage young readers to plunge into imaginary landscapes (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys, Granny’s Wonderful Chair, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz) can just as easily be applied to any youthful discovery of startlingly new, yet real experiences. Edgeworth herself vividly captures the ‘distinctive’ excitement of her alter ego Rosamond, the little girl whose ‘bewildered immersion in London’s plethora of sights and sounds’ becomes a necessary prolegomenon for mastering the art of discrimination in ‘The Purple Jar’.4 And Edgeworth fully endorses the allure of a natural or practical magic in ‘Wonders’, a story in which Rosamond discovers that an ordinary insect like the flea is, when magnified under a microscope, as extraordinary as the most fantastic of imaginary creatures. Rosamond’s wonder at the microscope’s marvellous capability to transform the flea’s appearance also awakens her curiosity and sparks her desire to learn more about the true nature of things. Her wonder is hardly uncritical, but rather stems from a laudable passion for the transformative powers of knowledge.

  Conversely, texts considered to be fantastic quite frequently offer highly useful, ‘didactic’ information. Far from being dry, the scientific facts disseminated in Kingsley’s The Water-Babies (1863), the retellings of British history in Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906) or the mathematical problems that must be solved to break the spells in Nesbit’s ‘The Island of the Nine Whirlpools’ (1899) and ‘Melisande; or Long and Short Division’ (1901) are certainly wondrous in their own right. Technology, too, is hardly incompatible with the fantastic. The eponymous ‘Old Thing’ in Susan Cooper’s 1993 The Boggart indulges his love of mischief by wreaking havoc with the electricity running through a television set, a theatre’s light board, and the wires controlling the signals of a busy Toronto intersection. The intricate operations of all those ‘reassembled and specially modified’ devices that dethrone Manny Rat in Russell Hoban’s 1967 fantasy about two wind-up toy mice who hope to become self-winding have been lovingly worked out by an author who clearly relishes such mechanical contraptions.5 Although the balloon designed by the Wizard of Oz may be of questionable use in a world ruled by powerful witches, it allows him to return to Kansas without having to resort to the magical slippers on which Dorothy must rely. And in Diana Wynne Jones’ The Dark Lord of Derkholm (1998), the griffin-children of Wizard Derk and the sorceress Mara are the miraculous results of their father’s experiments in genetic engineering.

  But in the 1790s Edgeworth’s preference of ‘useful knowledge’ over the kind of learning that can be imparted through ‘fantastic visions’ may have been directed as much at the seventeenth-century religious allegory that would continue to loom as large as fairy tales in children’s reading through the end of the Victorian period. In 1684, when John Bunyan published the second part of The Pilgrim’s Progress from this World to That Which Is to Come, Delivered under the Similitude of a Dream, he proudly noted that his ‘holy Pilgrim’ had already become as popular with children as with adults. In ‘The Author’s Way of Sending Forth His Second Part of the “Pilgrim”’, Bunyan adduced the enthusiastic testimonials of juvenile readers to overcome the lingering resistance of educated adults. His young audience had transcended their elders’ divisions of class. For not only had ‘Young Ladies, and young Gentlewomen’ eagerly taken his pilgrim to ‘Their Cabinets, their Bosoms, and their Hearts’, but so had their less affluent counterparts:

  The very Children that do walk the street,

  If they do but my holy Pilgrim meet,

  Salute him will, will wish him well, and say,

  He is the only Stripling of the Day.6

  Bunyan here welcomes the approval of children as a testimonial that disarms all those who may still protest that his fantasy’s metaphoric texture is too removed from the ‘Solidity’ of their surroundings. If children find his narrative accessible and his allegory easy to decode, how then can any adult claim to be baffled? (‘Some say his Words and Stories are so dark, / They know not how by them to find his mark.’) Whereas in Part 1 of The Pilgrim’s Progress, Christian was compelled to forsake his children, in Part 2, they and the offspring of others can join their parents in a pilgrimage towards a higher reality. Not only does Christiana now travel with her sons, but Mr Dispondency is also accompanied by a young daughter who, at the end, joyously goes ‘through the River singing’, although ‘none could understand what she says’. If a child’s ability to discern veiled truths makes it a better reader than a sceptical grown-up ‘Carper’ who professes to be impeded by Bunyan’s ‘darker lines’, that same credulity can also empower the story’s child pilgrims. Thought difficult to translate into words, intuited truths are themselves fresh, ever-young, preserved in their own ‘Swaddling-clouts’.7

  Bunyan’s sketch of a daughter whose song her elders cannot ‘understand’ curiously resembles George MacDonald’s fuller portrait of his own cryptic river-crosser, little Diamond in At the Back of the North Wind (1868–9). Diamond’s mother, bound by the sequential logic of her everyday world, cannot appreciate the illogic of an endless poem about a river that fascinates Diamond after his brief return from the other-worldly realm to which he had been taken by the gigantic North Wind. Puzzled by 200 lines ‘of euphonious, unpunctuated, repetitious yet ever-varying combinations of a limited number of words’, the boy’s mother offers to find him a better poem.8 But he identifies the rhymed verses with the ‘tune’ sung by the river he watched in a realm in which he and his fellow-pilgrims had silently communicated and automatically understood ‘everything’.

  When major Victorian fantasists such as MacDonald and Charles Kingsley chose to write for children, they were as deeply indebted to Bunyan’s allegorical seventeenth-century text as C. S. Lewis (MacDonald’s self-avowed disciple) would become in the twentieth century. Although the theologies behind MacDonald’s and Kingsley’s book-length and socially conscious fantasies are certainly far more idiosyncratic and unorthodox than the Puritan allegory promoted by The Pilgrim’s Progress, the child pilgrims featured in The Water-Babies and At the Back of the North Wind are, like Bunyan’s salvation-seekers, souls in search of a higher order of reality. Preceded not only by Kingsley’s 1860 preface to a new edition of Bunyan’s book but also by his own study of marine biology in the 1857 Glaucus, or, the Wonders of the Shore, Kingsley’s 1863 The Water-Babies can be read as a curious amalgam of these separate incursions into ‘real’ and unreal realms. MacDonald’s own first book-length work for children also is an amalgam of sorts, since At the Back of the North Wind not only harks back to his 1858 Phantastes: A Faerie Romance for Men and Women, a novel about a young dreamer who wants to ‘translate’ his visionary adventures among symbolic landscapes into the ordinary life of humans, but also reflects his own deep investment in Pilgrim’s Progress, a book held in such high esteem in the MacDonald household that this former clergyman and his family repeatedly acted out its plot in private and public theatricals.

  Kingsley’s orphaned chimney-sweep, little Tom, and MacDonald’s little Diamond, a coachman’s son, will not reach adulthood: Tom sheds his soiled and undernourished body when he drowns, but instantly acquires a new form as an amphibious, imm
ortal water-baby who is joined in his piscatory adventures by Ellie, an upper-class, yet similarly transformed, girl. Diamond, on the other hand, grows up sheltered in the warm, manger-like, stable where he is soon visited as an elect by the apparition of a female North Wind. Though nurtured by his working-class family, lionised by his genteel admirers, and tutored by North Wind, the boy spends most of his short life facing the hardships of his Dickensian present. His constant awareness of a higher reality, however, is re-inforced by his sojourn in the limbo to which North Wind takes him and by his vivid dreams about a pre-natal world of fellow-angels. Diamond thus acts as an inarticulate witness of events that MacDonald’s self-conscious narrator finds difficult to translate. Like Tom, Diamond is given a girl partner. But unlike Tom’s alliance with Ellie, Diamond’s investment in ‘poor’ Nanny the street-sweeper, a Tom-like waif, is one-sided. Nanny regards her benefactor with the same scepticism that led Bunyan’s worldly wise Pliable to distrust Christian’s holy zeal.

  Still, despite their indebtedness to Bunyan, both Kingsley and MacDonald markedly differ from his precedent by persistently interrogating his single-minded, unitary point of view. Fantasy, as Rosemary Jackson points out, became increasingly dialogical, ‘with the result that the “real” is a notion which [came] under constant interrogation’.9 Whereas, for Bunyan, the trappings of the everyday world were a falsifying delusion that his pilgrim souls could willingly shed, the ‘solidity’ of Diamond’s London and even the workings of Tom’s fluid marine world retain weightier ballasts. The concrete and highly particularised realities that both of these boy pilgrims must process cannot be easily dissolved by sheer metaphor or allegory. Both Diamond and Tom must therefore be instructed by symbolic agents who, unlike Bunyan’s Evangelist, are cast as limited mediators who are themselves involved in a dialogic tug-of-war between contrary realities.

  Edgeworth did not live to read texts which, like The Water-Babies and At the Back of the North Wind, aspire to harmonise the laws of the natural world with the higher metaphysical laws of a world adumbrated by the imagination. But one suspects that she might have noticed that friction and juxtaposition seem far more dominant than reconciliation in ambitious constructs that enlist the child as seeker and seer, and yet remain profoundly didactic. It seems significant, in this respect, that towards the end of his career, in an essay called ‘The Fantastic Imagination’ (1893), George MacDonald should confirm the importance of children as readers and protagonists of fantastic narratives. Assuming the persona of an elliptical expositor, MacDonald casts his essay as a dialogue in which he addresses a parent who wants to know how to decode the elusive ‘meanings’ of such enigmatic texts. Children, MacDonald assures his worried interlocutor, ‘are not likely to trouble you about meaning. They find what they are capable of finding, and more would be too much. For my part, I do not write for children, but for the childlike, whether of five, or fifty, or seventy-five.’10 MacDonald here updates Bunyan’s own privileging of the child as an ideal interpreter of visionary fantasies.

  Domestic disturbances

  In a chapter exclusively devoted to her work, Manlove rightly highlights E. Nesbit’s exploitation of ‘comic incongruities’.11 Nesbit’s delight in creating frictions between incongruous realities even extends to her deformation of earlier fantasy-texts. That intertextual playfulness is evident in The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904), which features the five children who also appear in Five Children and It (1902) and The Story of the Amulet (1906). Given tickets to a musical play at the Garrick Theatre, the children are informed by their mother ‘that you’re going to see “The Water-Babies” all by your happy selves’. She does not know, of course, that her children will share this performance with another spectator, namely, the ancient Phoenix whom they have secretly hatched. Since this resurrected golden bird possesses a full memory of its previous life-cycles, it pedantically inquires about the nature of the spectacle to which he will be taken: ‘What is the show at the theatre to-night? Wrestlers? Gladiators? A combat of cameleopards and unicorns?’12

  This visitor from a mythological past is disappointed to hear that it will be introduced to a musical adaptation of a book about ‘chimney-sweeps and professors, and a lobster and an otter and a salmon, and children living in the water’. The fire-bird shivers at such a ‘chilly’ prospect, but is reassured when told that theatres are ‘warm and pretty, with a lot of gold and lamps’. Once there, the egotistical Phoenix mistakes the theatre for a shrine devoted to its exclusive worship: ‘“This is indeed my temple,” it said again and again. “What radiant rites! And all to do honour to me!”’ But when it flaps its wings and addresses the actors as its ‘servants’ and complains about the lack of a fiery ‘altar’ and drops sparks that become little flames that ‘opened like flower-buds’, the Phoenix does not only shatter the stage-illusion created by the acting of Little Tom and of the lobster whose ‘gem of a song’ it has so rudely interrupted, but actually sets the theatre on fire. The chapter ends with the children whispering to each other, ‘We must get rid of that Phoenix.’13

  The Phoenix creates anarchic disruptions in the everyday world of his youthful hosts. Concealed from parents and servants, he and the Psammead of The Five Children and It may well stimulate the imagination of their excited child partners. But the troubles these visitors cause also become increasingly dangerous. If the Phoenix merely sets fire to a theatre, the wish-granting Psammead, who places the children in search of the intact Amulet on a vast historical stage, exposes them to the perils posed by aggressive armies, suicidal sailors and cataclysmic tsunamis. As a result, the exit of such secret guests always makes the return to domesticity a decided relief. After the exorcism of the sorcerer’s troublesome spirit in Penelope Lively’s The Ghost of Thomas Kempe (1973), James quietly walks home, marvelling at the stillness of the beautiful summer evening, ‘his head full of confused but agreeable thoughts, hungry and a little tired, but content’.14

  Relief can also come in the form of an agreement to obliterate the child’s memory of its chance contact with representatives of fantastic ‘otherness’. In Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill, the fairy who introduces Una and Dan to resuscitated visitors from England’s past prevents the two children from telling adults about their various encounters. Puck gives them three leaves to chew – one of Oak, one of Ash and one of Thorn: ‘“Bite these,” said he. “Otherwise you might be talking at home of what you’ve seen and heard, and – if I know human beings – they’d send for the doctor. Bite!”’ When her father asks Una why she is ‘chewing leaves’ just for ‘fun’, the little girl only knows that it was ‘for something’ she no longer can ‘azactly remember’.15

  Even a work like Jean Ingelow’s 1869 Mopsa the Fairy, a novel in which the boy Jack agrees to take some tiny English fairies to their own fantastic homeland, ends on a regressive note of domestic oblivion. When he returns home, Jack forgets the fairy queen who has surpassed him in her growth. Asked ‘no questions’ by the parents he dutifully kisses before he is sent to bed, the little boy is delighted ‘to find all the house just as usual’, says his prayers, and ‘comfortably’ falls asleep in his ‘little white bed’.16 Will he, on waking up, remember the wonders that had marked his journey? Or will the white bed-sheets blank out what may, after all, have been as much of a daydream as that of Lewis Carroll’s Alice? Wonderland’s child-dreamer at least left her older sister to process adventures she had relinquished. But when Ingelow’s book ends with a laconic ‘That’s all’, that two-word sentence dismisses the reader, along with Jack, to run off to play now that the story is over. It is as if the teller expects that the memory of those fantastic encounters, delightful as they were, will simply vanish without leaving a trace.

  Worlds upside down

  If Nesbit’s Amulet children or Lively’s James forgo – and gladly forget – the notoriety briefly conferred on them through their chance acquaintance with unpredictable and powerful magical creatures, other fictional children – or child-like adults –
relish the unexpected acquisition of a pre-eminence denied to them in real life. Charles Dickens created a perky child author, ‘Miss Nettie Ashford’, aged ‘half-past six’ in A Holiday Romance (1868), who sets her story of ‘Mrs. Orange and Mrs. Lemon’ in a utopia for children that turns into a dystopia for the subjugated parents under their total control. Nettie begins by describing this fantasy-land: ‘There is a country which I will show you when I get into maps, where the children have everything their own way. It is a most delightful country to live in. The grown-up people are obliged to obey the children, and are never allowed to sit up to supper except on their birthdays.’17 Written for what would now be called a ‘cross-over’ audience, Dickens intended A Holiday Romance to amuse both parents and children: it first appeared in Our Young Folks in America and All the Year Round in Britain, both family magazines meant to be read aloud and enjoyed by all generations.

  Nettie’s story not only feeds a child’s fantasy of what it may be like to be an adult but also invites adults to indulge a yearning for departed childhood freedoms. This double inversion operates in comic fantasies such as F. Anstey’s Vice Versa, or, A Lesson to Fathers (1882) and Mary Rodgers’ twentieth-century updating, Freaky Friday (1972). Though published nearly ninety years apart, these narratives with body-swapping plots, in which Anstey’s boy thrives as a prosperous businessman while his father goes back to school and Rodgers’ girl runs the household while her mother becomes an irresponsible teenager, hold an identical appeal for their young and grown-up readers.

  The popularity of texts such as A. A. Milne’s The House at Pooh Corner (1928), however, suggests that no such transpositions are needed to give fantasies of child-power a cross-generational appeal. Christopher Robin recognises his imminent loss of agency when he tells Pooh, ‘What I like doing best is Nothing’, before reluctantly announcing, ‘I’m not going to do Nothing any more.’ When the perplexed Pooh demands, ‘Never again?’, the boy responds: ‘well, not so much. They don’t let you.’ Milne’s suggestion that Christopher’s world is about to be sundered is somewhat softened by the consolatory hint that childhood enchantments are renewable. Christopher’s final exchanges with the bear he has animated remain tentative and inconclusive until the voice of an adult author intervenes with a wishful closure: