by Alex Palmer
By the time Dorian Gray was published, novelists no longer had to hold their heads low. “The rage for novels” did not decrease, but expanded significantly throughout the nineteenth century, until novels were ubiquitous, essentially the only type of literary work read by the masses.
In order to make a living, most intelligent writers learned to work in this new format, whether they had a natural inclination for it or not. With this movement toward novels, even the highbrow reader was compelled to shift to these works. Courses on the novel were added to college curricula, critics began discussing the works without having to offer a disclaimer to readers, and the works of George Eliot, the Brontës, and Jane Austen were incorporated into the canon of English literature.
Women on Top
A study by Lulu.com found that women’s share of the bestseller list is growing. Looking at the books that made it to #1 on The New York Times bestseller list over the fifty years from 1955 to 2008, the researchers found that while women’s books only made up 17.8 percent of these for the first decade of the study (1955–1964), they were up to 46 percent for the last decade in the study (1995–2004). This is thanks in large part to the big sales of J. K. Rowling and Danielle Steel.
WHEN DOES BOOK BURNING ACTUALLY HELP FREE SPEECH?
The follies of censorship and its backlash
Book burning has a long, traumatic, hysterical, history. As long as books have been written, groups and governments have taken it upon themselves to limit the public’s intake of material deemed unsavory. But the sad legacy of ritualized censorship has actually had some positive, if unintended, effects on the present state of free speech.
The earliest recorded occurrence of book burning took place in 213 BC in Ancient China, where the “burning of the books and burial of the scholars” saw the first emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang, try to “unify” the thoughts and opinions of his people by burning all histories except those written by his own historians. He not only burned books but also buried people, ordering more than 450 alchemists buried alive.
Hardy Retort
Copies of Thomas Hardy’s novel Jude the Obscure (1895) were burned by the Bishop of Wakefield because of the novel’s frank descriptions of Jude’s sexual relationships. In a 1912 postscript, Hardy wrote, “After these verdicts from the press its next misfortune was to be burnt by a bishop—probably in his despair at not being able to burn me.”
Throughout the centuries similar purgings have occurred when leaders or societies found ideas inconvenient; authority figures have targeted everything from agnostic Greek philosophy, Roman history books, Hebrew Bibles, Mayan sacred texts, and Christian writings.
Boccaccio’s Decameron, with its raunchy tales about European life, is one of the earliest works of fiction (rather than religious or historical texts) to be burned. It was attacked during sermons in Italy during the fifteenth century and expurgated at various times during subsequent decades. In 1497, the Italian priest Girolamo Savonarola ordered that the work, as well as anything by Ovid, be tossed into the flames. This event, in which pornography, cosmetics, and gaming tables were also incinerated, became known as the “bonfire of the vanities.”
John Milton took up the issue after England passed the Licensing Order of 1643. In his pamphlet Areopagitica (1644), he lays out a case against censorship from a deeply religious perspective, urging that information and ideas should be disseminated freely if individuals are to make genuine choices (also major themes of Paradise Lost). He writes such bold defenses of free speech as, “who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye.”
Did You Know?
Louisa May Alcott led an early charge to have The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn banned for its crude language, writing, “If Mr. Clemens cannot think of anything better to tell our pure-minded lads and lassies, he had better stop writing for them.” After it was published in 1885, she worked to get it banned in her home state of Massachusetts. Naturally, sales quickly increased threefold.
Anthony Comstock, America’s self-appointed censor-in-chief of the nineteenth century, called himself a “weeder in God’s garden.” He was a dedicated hunter of allegedly obscene works, beginning with his objections over the profanity used by his fellow soldiers whom he fought alongside in the Civil War. Serving as United States Postal Inspector, he was influential enough to push through the Comstock Act in 1873, which made it illegal to send “obscene, lewd, and/or lascivious” materials through the mail.
Comstock used his power to arrest those who distributed the offending material, which included journal articles about public scandals, information about contraceptives, sexually explicit marriage manuals, and even anatomy books. He eventually founded the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice (which actually features book burning on its seal), helping him to further his aims. Comstock’s campaigns resulted in the destruction of fifteen tons of books and 284,000 pounds of plates for printing books. He boasted that his crusades had been responsible for 4,000 arrests and fifteen suicides (as a result of the humiliation felt by those caught with illegal material).
Did You Know?
When Comstock led the New York police commissioner to expurgate the promptbook before a performance of George Bernard Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession (1893) because of its discussion of prostitution, Shaw commented, “Comstockery is the world’s standing joke at the expense of the United States. Europe likes to hear of such things. It confirms the deep-seated conviction of the Old World that America is a provincial place, a second-rate country-town civilization after all.”
German writer Heinrich Heine wrote in his play Almansor (1821), “Where they burn books, so too will they in the end burn human beings.” Heine’s own works were among those burned by the Nazis a century later among the many Jewish, anti-Nazi, and “degenerate” books burned in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s. The director of libraries in the German city of Essen determined some 18,000 works that disagreed with Nazi ideology, and which were incinerated.
The Nazi efforts culminated on May 10, 1933, an ominous day that presaged further state control of thought and language, as Nazi youth groups marched across the country playing music and singing joyous songs as they burned tens of thousands of books considered “un-German,” including ones by Helen Keller, Thomas Mann, Sigmund Freud, H. G. Wells, and Albert Einstein. Dubbed a “bibliocaust” by the media, the burnings received local and international coverage and became emblematic of the dangers of censorship.
Voluntary Burning
Before he died, Franz Kafka wrote to his friend Max Brod to request that any diaries, manuscripts, letters, or sketches he left behind be burned. Brod refused, to the benefit of literature. Had he carried out the request, virtually all of Kafka’s work, except for a handful of short stories he published while living, would have been destroyed.
The impact of Nazi book burnings was revealed for good when Senator Joseph McCarthy pressured President Dwight Eisenhower to have books by allegedly communist authors removed from State Department libraries throughout Europe. While the president initially supported this purging, he turned on McCarthy in a speech at Dartmouth College, urging the students, “Don’t join the book burners. Don’t think you’re going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don’t be afraid to go in your library and read every book.”
Did You Know?
Despite the title of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, books actually burn at 450° Celsius. Bradbury felt “Fahrenheit” had a better sound when he devised the title of his novel about a book-burning dystopia. Intended as a critique of the issues he had with American society at the time, Bradbury wrote, “It follows then that when Hitler burned a book I felt it as keenly, please forgive me, as his killing a human, for in the long sum of history they are one and the same flesh.”
A more recent series of book burnings took place in 1989, when a fatwa was placed on Salman Rush
die for writing The Satanic Verses (1988). Due to what was perceived as a negative depiction of the prophet Muhammad, Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini offered a bounty for Rushdie’s execution. Violent demonstrations followed, including burnings of the book in the United Kingdom and the firebombing of bookstores in the U.K. and in Berkeley, California.
The book was banned in many countries with sizable Muslim populations, and Rushdie remained in hiding for years afterward. Not only Rushdie felt the force of this uproar. The Japanese translator of the work was stabbed to death, the Italian translator was stabbed but survived, and the Norwegian publisher was shot in the back.
Did You Know?
When the fatwa was placed on Rushdie, his friend and fellow author Ian McEwan provided him refuge in McEwan’s Cotswolds cottage.
All the drama surrounding The Satanic Verses helped fuel huge sales. It had only middling sales when first published, but flew off the shelves after the fatwa, eventually becoming the sixth bestselling book of 1989.
These days, an effort to ban or burn a specific book or other type of work is likely to draw more protesters than supporters. The reactionary history of book burnings has turned many reflexively against the practice. This has been highlighted in recent years as some churches have protested that the Harry Potter series is “attached to the occult.” Book burnings sponsored by a church in Alamogordo, New Mexico, in 2001, and one in Greenville, Michigan, in 2003 received massive publicity, most of it negative or mocking. The outsized coverage and protests of the events arguably did more to promote free speech and the Harry Potter books than to protect the youth from his wizardly ways.
WHAT DID CHILDREN READ BEFORE THERE WAS CHILDREN’S LITERATURE?
The battle for fun in kids’ books, from hornbooks to Harry Potter
These days, kids have great options when looking for something to read. Whether a simple picture book, the latest Twilight installment, or a story about a wimpy kid trying to make it through middle school, there are children’s books that speak to every taste. If there’s an untapped demand, you can be sure a children’s publisher will fill it and probably make a solid profit in the process. This wealth of options has come only after a long-fought battle between what children actually want to read and what adults think they should.
In ancient Greece and Rome, education was focused on molding children into well-rounded citizens in mind, body, and moral outlook. Boys attended schools where they were expected to memorize and recite passages from poems and plays (girls, lucky them, would occasionally learn to read and write at home when they were not cooking, cleaning, or mending). Teachers would dictate sections of Homer’s Iliad or Virgil’s Aeneid to students to copy into notebooks (books were much too expensive for each child to have). As they got older, children would read these works themselves, occasionally acting the roles. Always the goal was to educate and edify, not to entertain.
Did You Know?
For something lighter, kids could read Aesop’s Fables, which were passed down for centuries and translated into numerous languages. Many are still popular today, including “The Boy Who Cried Wolf,” “The Tortoise and the Hare,” and “The Fox and the Grapes” (where the expression “sour grapes” originated).
As society’s goals for educating children shifted, so did the books children were encouraged to read. In medieval times, the rise of new social segments including the feudal, royal, and mercantile classes led to new literatures aimed at each social class. Most children had started down their professional path by the time they were ten years old, and these new works aimed to instruct them in how to fulfill their duties—courtesy manuals for royals, apprenticeship guidelines for young merchants, and religious works for aspiring priests and nuns, for example.
Kids looking for a good story, however, could occasionally get their hands on recast versions of Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur (1486) or the narrative ballads of Robin Hood, targeted toward a younger audience. This entertaining literature met resistance from many who felt a child’s education should have a more religious focus. William Tyndale, one of the principal translators of the King James Bible, spoke out against some of the burgeoning children’s literature of the sixteenth century. He wrote, in The Obedience of a Christian Man (1528), that instead of reading scripture, children and laymen were being encouraged to:
Read Robin Hood and Bevis of Hampton, Hercules, Hector and Troilus with a thousand histories and fables of love and wantonness and of ribaldry as filthy as heart can think, to corrupt the minds of youth withal.
Tyndale’s efforts were not in vain, and through the seventeenth century children’s literature was dominated by Puritans working to cultivate the young into moral beings. John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) and James Janeway’s A Token for Children (1671) were the must-read books for kids at the time (often in versions recast for younger readers, such as 1697’s Pilgrim’s Progress in Poesie).
Reading was seen as an extension of bible study. Prayer books and primers, sometimes called “hornbooks,” combined basic alphabets with religious maxims, poetry, illustrations, and stories with a moral purpose. The books instructed children on their place in their family and society at large and touched on themes like sin and salvation.
William Shakespeare has a pun-filled riff on hornbooks in Love’s Labour Lost (1598):
MOTH. Yes, he teaches boys the hornbook. What is a, b, spelt backward with the horn on his head?
HOLOFERNES. Ba, pueritia, with a horn added.
MOTH. Ba, most silly sheep with a horn. You hear his learning.
HOLOFERNES. Quis, quis, thou consonant?
MOTH. The third of the five vowels, if you repeat them; or the fifth, if I.
HOLOFERNES. I will repeat them: a, e,.—
MOTH. The sheep; the other two concludes it: o, u.
Outside England and America, some interesting developments were taking place. Czech writer John Amos Comenius produced what is considered the first picture book, the Orbis Sensualium Pictus (The Visible World of Pictures), in 1658. It serves as a kind of child’s encyclopedia, with chapters on botanics, zoology, religion, and “humans and their activities.”
Around the same time, the French writer Charles Perrault was helping to establish the fairy tale. Perrault’s stories were familiar to many throughout Europe, but had not been written down, including such enduring classics as “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Sleeping Beauty,” “Puss in Boots,” and “Cinderella.” He published a collection of eight of these stories in 1697, calling it Stories or Tales from Times Past, with Morals with the subtitle Tales of Mother Goose (the first such collection attributed to the figure, though “Mother Goose stories” may have been around for decades). These were translated into English in 1729.
Was Mother Goose a Witch?
Since Charles Perrault’s collection, the character of Mother Goose has been depicted with some suspiciously witchlike traits. With pointed hat and nose and riding a goose through the air (instead of a broomstick perhaps?), her appearance, memorably depicted in the classic 1916 collection The Real Mother Goose, is believed to have pagan origins. The owls, frogs, cats, and of course geese that appear in the nursery rhymes and illustrations have been likened to the “familiars” associated with witches, and the rhymes as incantations.
Thanks in part to the influential writings of John Locke, it began to be accepted in England that education should not be rote learning in the classroom, but practical and entertaining. Bookseller John Newbery saw an opportunity in these development, and began publishing inexpensive works illustrated with woodcuts and engravings, marketing them as not only valuable for a child’s development but also fun to read.
The first of these, A Little Pretty Pocket-Book (1744), is considered the first children’s book in England. Each one of his subsequent books, including the enormously popular The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes (1765), all featured advertisements for his other books within the stories themselves and sold at a steady clip. Newbery showed how mark
etable children’s books could be, and others soon followed his lead.
Quick Quote
“You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.”
—Madeleine L’Engle, author of A Wrinkle in Time (1962)
Grimm’s Fairy Tales (1823), James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipp’s nursery rhymes, and Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tales (translated to English in 1846) found immense popularity chiefly for their entertainment value. The growing demand for amusement, not morality, was made clear when George Cruikshank attempted to rewrite traditional fairy tales as lessons on the evil of alcohol consumption, with none other than Charles Dickens calling him out on his moralizing. In his 1853 essay “Frauds on the Fairies,” Dickens writes:
Now, it makes not the least difference to our objection whether we agree or disagree with our worthy friend, Mr. Cruikshank, in the opinions he interpolates upon an old fairy story. Whether good or bad in themselves, they are, in that relation, like the famous definition of a weed; a thing growing up in a wrong place.