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  Jane Johnson was producing these materials between 1742 and 1747, just after Richardson had described the ideal of maternal education in Pamela and at the same time as Thomas Boreman, Mary Cooper and John Newbery were making their experiments with publishing children’s books in London. The agreement of dates makes it difficult to resist speculating, as Victor Watson has done, that the commercial ventures should be understood not as ‘the “beginning” of children’s literature’, but as the emergence into the public realm ‘of a traditional private and domestic nursery-culture – undervalued, orally transmitted from one generation to the next, responsive to changes in contemporary thinking, making a pragmatic use of available materials, and mostly sustained by mothers’.13 This is almost to accuse Newbery and others of expropriating somebody else’s property, profiting from something that had been available for free, and masculinising something that had previously been produced and controlled by women. But the commodification of home-made products was common in eighteenth-century print culture. Alphabet and picture cards or tiles (common educational aids), ‘dissected maps’ (geographical jigsaws) and ‘harlequinades’ (with flaps glued at the edges so that they could be turned up or down to reveal new scenes) were all apparently first made at home before they went into commercial production in the second half of the eighteenth century. And, notably, what was being appropriated by the producers of these new commodities was not only the product itself, but the whole ethos of maternal education. When Ellenor Fenn published The Art of Teaching in Sport (1785) to accompany a set of educational toys, she was adamant that the book was to be used only by a mother (or perhaps an elder daughter). We should not regard the commercialisation of domestic education as a kind of piracy, then, but rather as two elements of the same movement.

  Nor should we imagine that commercial children’s literature suddenly superseded domestic practices and home-made products. Rather, printed and home-made children’s texts continued to be produced in tandem. Fables in Monosyllables (1783), also by Fenn, gives a nice indication of this symbiotic relationship. Her preface explains ‘To My Little Readers’ how the book was designed for one little boy:

  One day I met with some nice, clear, large print let-ters; and I cut them out, and stuck them on card; then laid them thus, c-a-t – cat, d-o-g – dog; and he said the words at sight.

  Was this not nice?

  Then it came in mind to print with a pen for him; so I made tales of the dog, and the cat, and such short words – Should you not jump for joy? – He did.14

  Fenn had apparently taken a commercially available product (the printed letters), stuck them onto card and turned it into an educational game, then written stories based on this game, and then published a book based on these stories. The home-produced and the commercially available were intertwined.

  Indeed, the role of the mother as the proper provider of education was continually stressed throughout the first generations of commercial children’s literature. She is placed in the most prominent place possible – the frontispiece – in many books, including Newbery’s A Little Pretty Pocket-Book and Fenn’s Fables in Monosyllables (fig. 1). In the latter, she hands over a book, doubtless Fables in Monosyllables itself, to a child, presumably her own. The symbolism is clear: this mother is giving her child the book as a continuation of her own tuition, and, in more general terms, the book is being identified as an admissible component of domestic education. The book’s subtitle – ‘Dialogues between a Mother and Children’ – confirms how the book should be used, and the preface directly addresses the ‘judicious mother’ who ‘condescends to prattle with her children’, and ‘thus infuses ideas in their tender minds, whilst she engages their affections’. Also characteristic of the children’s books of this period is the dedication, a carefully choreographed acknowledgement that the book had been written for a particular child (in this case, her adopted son): ‘You are now at the same age as my boy was, when I wrote this book for him.’15

  Figure 1. Lady Ellenor Fenn, Fables in Monosyllables. London: J. Marshall, [1783], frontispiece and title-page.

  Stressing that their books were first produced for their own children was a rhetorical act, designed to place the new work in a respectable tradition, linking it with conduct books written for particular children throughout the early modern period, such as Fénelon’s Télémaque or Lord Chesterfield’s Letters Written to his Son (1774), and perhaps to such widely known cultural motifs as St Anne teaching the Virgin, or Venus teaching Cupid. It asserted the efficacy of the books, arguing that the text had been trialled by real children and found beneficial. It might be seen as a staking out of territory: ‘It seems . . . a very easy task to write for children’, wrote Maria Edgeworth, before adding: ‘Those only who have been interested in the education of a family . . . who have daily watched over their thoughts and feelings . . . can feel the dangers and difficulties of such an undertaking’, effectively disallowing anyone but mothers from producing children’s literature.16 But it also may have acted as an apology for the ‘intrusion’ into the public sphere by women professedly anxious about transgressing against domestic propriety. Thus in 1785 Dorothy Kilner insisted that she had ‘written without the most distant thought of publication’ and reluctantly ‘consented’ to publish only after her friends had convinced her of ‘the service in future life, [the book] may possibly afford you, my dear children’.17 These pre-emptive justifications were placed in the paratextual ‘vestibules’ of the books – prefaces, dedications, frontispieces – because they were designed to reach parents choosing books for their children to use, not the children themselves. This gives an indication of what was surely the principal purpose of the claim that the books had been designed for, and first used by, actual children: the alleviation of any anxiety that real-world mother–child relations could be destabilised by the new commodity. These paratexts offered the assurance that children’s literature was not intended to supplant, but to supplement, the parent.

  Specific and symbolic origins

  Another way of thinking about the origins of children’s literature is to consider what is known about the genesis of individual books. Originary ‘myths’ have developed around many of the most successful. These are very often accounts of how the book grew from a story told privately by a particular adult to particular children. Carroll’s Liddell girls, Barrie’s Llewelyn Davies boys and Rushdie’s Zafir have already been mentioned, but others are to be found in every period and genre. Robert Louis Stevenson famously based Treasure Island (1883) on the map he made for his step-son, and unfolded the story to him every night as it was being written. Frances Hodgson Burnett wrote Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886) in response to her son Vivian’s questions about the English aristocracy, and modelled the hero on him. G. A. Henty wrote his first adventure story, Out on the Pampas (1871), for his own children, whose names he used for the four protagonists. A. A. Milne turned his son’s playthings into characters in the Pooh stories. Thomas Hughes wrote Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857) to counsel his eight-year-old about school life. It is ‘common knowledge’ – repeated in biographies, reference books and on countless websites – that The Wind in the Willows (1908) and The Hobbit (1937) began as bedside stories, that Watership Down (1972) was first told to Richard Adams’ daughters on long car journeys, that The BFG (1982) was for and about Roald Dahl’s granddaughter Sophie, that Robert Cormier’s son actually did refuse to sell chocolates for his school’s annual sale, providing the inspiration for The Chocolate War (1974). Although some authors try to repudiate such myths, others have endorsed or even instigated them. Of his prize-winning The Machine Gunners (1975), for instance, Robert Westall recalled,

  I . . . only intended to read it to my son. It was my gift to him . . . I read him the chapters as soon as I had written them, at Sunday teatime. He was the most savage of critics: if a part bored him he’d pick up a magazine and start reading that instead. The parts that left him cold, I crossed out, which is perhaps what gives the book its pace.
But I had no thought of trying for publication . . . It is, I suppose, ironical that a book written solely for one boy has sold over a million copies.

  Echoing C. S. Lewis’ views on the ‘good ways’ of writing for children, Westall has mused: ‘Perhaps all the best books start by being written for only one child, and that child very close to you.’18

  No doubt many of these accounts are perfectly true, but the basic story of a tale told by a parent to a child, with publication only as an afterthought, has been so recurrent that it must often seem more symbolic than biographical. Certainly, these accounts can sometimes appear to be very tightly bound together with the works themselves. Take the complicated though conventional origin story behind William Makepeace Thackeray’s The Rose and the Ring (1855). First told to the unwell daughter of a friend, the story was based on pictures Thackeray had drawn for his children, and was then finished when his own daughter became ill. Because it is largely concerned with matriarchal power and its absence, U. C. Knoepflmacher reads this fairy tale as an attempt ‘to reinstate the maternal femininity’ from which Thackeray ‘felt so profoundly cut off’ by childhood separation from his own mother and then the insanity of his wife, the mother of his children. By emphasising Thackeray’s attempt ‘To be father and mother too’, as he later put it, the originary story endorses, and almost becomes part of, the literary text.19 The same is true, more famously, of the ‘originary myths’ that have grown up around Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Peter Pan. Most biographers and critics, and many general readers too, would struggle not to read the texts in the light of, respectively, what is known (and surmised) of Carroll’s relationship with Alice Liddell and Barrie’s with the Llewelyn Davies boys.

  Taking a longer view though, the continued emphasis in these originary myths on individual adults telling stories to individual children can be understood as the persistence of the motif that had been such an important element in the establishment of children’s literature in the eighteenth century. The stories remain a sort of paratext, preparing the reader (the child end-user, but more especially the adult purchaser) for the text. One might argue that these originary stories are demeaning, for by rooting children’s literature in the domestic they necessarily construct the children’s author as an amateur, however gifted. Portraits of children’s authors can exhibit this clearly: the images of E. Nesbit and Enid Blyton owned by the UK’s National Portrait Gallery, for example, show them with their daughters sitting at their feet. It is difficult to imagine two more professional authors than Nesbit and Blyton, yet their authorial success, the portraits assert, emanates from their motherhood, not their literary prowess or commercial acumen. But these images, like the origin stories in general, are the equivalent of eighteenth-century frontispieces, and, even if they belittle the authors and the genre, they still perform a particular kind of ideological work that requires investigation.

  Here, for instance, is another paratext, Rudyard Kipling’s invocation of his daughter ‘Effie’ as the inspiration for some of his early Just So Stories for Little Children (1902):

  Some stories are meant to be read quietly and some stories are meant to be told aloud . . . All the Blue Skalallatoot stories are morning tales (I do not know why, but that is what Effie says). All the stories about Orvin Sylvester Woodsey . . . are afternoon stories because they were generally told in the shade of the woods. You could alter and change these tales as much as you pleased; but in the evening there were stories meant to put Effie to sleep, and you were not allowed to alter those by one single little word. They had to be told just so; or Effie would wake up and put back the missing sentence.20

  Kipling presents Effie as his muse, which no doubt she was. But the domestic origin of the stories is very strategically deployed. It frames the stories neatly, and advertises their particular qualities and merits. It enables Kipling to create a hinterland for them, as if they have emerged from a whole mythology (the Blue Skalallatoot and Orvin Sylvester Woodsey stories no longer exist, if they ever did). And it endows Effie, and through her all child readers, with a flattering agency in the creation and conservation of stories. But it also continues to do what those eighteenth-century prefaces and dedications had done. It asserts that the text had been successfully ‘road-tested’; it apologises, albeit archly, for presuming to intrude the domestic into the public sphere; it allays any anxieties that a children’s book might somehow usurp the role of the parent.

  There may be many reasons, then, both specific and general, factual and symbolic, unconscious and contrived, for these biographical accounts of the inceptions of children’s books. But these originary stories are at least partly the vestige of the historical origins of children’s literature, developed at first within the home, and then as a commercial product that deployed a rhetoric of domesticity to justify and advertise itself. In this sense, all these different kinds of origin – the historical, the domestic and the biographical – coalesce. It seems that, even today, children’s literature has not been entirely able to escape the conditions, and anxieties, of its origins.

  Notes

  1. ‘Lewis Carroll’s Diaries’, 6 August 1862, in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, ed. Richard Kelly (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2000), p. 244; Rosalía Baena, ‘Telling a Bath-Time Story: Haroun and the Sea of Stories as a Modern Literary Fairy Tale’, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 36 (2001), 65–76.

  2. C. S. Lewis, ‘On Three Ways of Writing for Children’, in Of This and Other Worlds, ed. Walter Hooper (London: Fount, 1984), p. 44.

  3. F. J. Harvey Darton, Children’s Books in England, 3rd edn, rev. Brian Alderson (1932; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 1.

  4. Peter Hunt, Criticism, Theory and Children’s Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), p. 67.

  5. Gillian Avery, ‘The Puritans and their Heirs’, in Children and their Books. A Celebration of the Work of Iona and Peter Opie, ed. Gillian Avery and Julia Briggs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 95–118 (p. 113).

  6. Barbara Wall, The Narrator’s Voice. The Dilemma of Children’s Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1991), pp. 2 and 9.

  7. Sarah Trimmer, An Easy Introduction to the Knowledge of Nature (1780; London: J. Dodsley, 1781), p. v; Hannah More, Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education (2 vols., London: Cadell and Davies, 1799), vol. i, p. 170.

  8. Roger L’Estrange, Fables of Æsop and Other Eminent Mythologists with Morals and Reflexions (London: R. Sare et al., 1692), pp. 2–3.

  9. Arnaud Berquin, The Children’s Friend; Consisting of Apt Tales, Short Dialogues, and Moral Dramas, trans. Mark Anthony Meilan (London: ‘for the translator’, 1786), p. 36.

  10. John Bennett, Strictures on Female Education; Chiefly as it Relates to the Culture of the Heart (London: ‘for the author’, 1787), pp. 95–6 and 151–2.

  11. Mary Wollstonecraft, Original Stories, From Real Life (London: J. Johnson, 1788), p. vii.

  12. Noël-Antoine Pluche, Spectacle de la Nature: or, Nature Display’d (6 vols., London: R. Francklin et al., 1763), vol. vi, pp. 38–9.

  13. Victor Watson, ‘Jane Johnson: A Very Pretty Story to Tell’, in Opening the Nursery Door: Reading, Writing and Childhood 1600–1900, ed. Mary Hilton, Morag Styles and Victor Watson (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 31–46 (p. 45).

  14. Lady Ellenor Fenn, Fables in Monosyllables (London: J. Marshall, [1783]), pp. xi–xii.

  15. Fenn, Fables in Monosyllables, pp. ix and v.

  16. Maria Edgeworth, The Parent’s Assistant; or, Stories for Children, Part I (London: J. Johnson, 1796), p. iv.

  17. [Dorothy Kilner], Miscellaneous Thoughts in Essays, Dialogues, Epistles, &c. (London: J. Marshall, 1785), pp. iv–v and ii.

  18. Robert Westall, The Making of Me: A Writer’s Childhood, ed. Lindy McKinnel (London: Catnip, 2006), pp. 186–7; and ‘How Real Do You Want Your Realism?’, Signal, 28 (1979), 34–46.

  19. U. C. Knoepflmacher, Ventures into Childland: Victorians, Fairy Tales, and Femininity (Chicago: Universit
y of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 75–6.

  20. ‘Preface’ to the ‘Just So Stories’, St Nicholas Magazine (December 1897), rpt in Rudyard Kipling, Writings on Writing, ed. Sandra Kemp and Lisa Lewis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 47.

  2 Children’s books and constructions of childhood

  Andrea Immel

  What do children know? How do they learn best? What rights should they have? All these fundamental questions about childhood can be contested (and frequently are). The framing of discussions about childhood are therefore influenced by the time and culture, as twentieth-century historians, anthropologists and sociologists have shown. How a person formulates responses to such questions, moreover, is also shaped by his or her perspective as an artist, biologist, economist, parent, philosopher or teacher. The issues at stake are not purely academic: whatever the answers, they are likely to have some impact on the way children are regarded and treated in a particular culture at a given time. A subsistence farmer in thirteenth-century France, a society where childhood mortality was extremely high and Roman Catholicism permeated all of life, would have had quite a different perspective on childhood from an upper middle-class father in Victorian England, whose children were likely to survive into adulthood but would bear the weight of dynastic, national and imperial expectations. Just as conceptions of childhood can differ sharply, so can ideas about children’s books. The nursery rhyme anthology that delighted a mother in post-Second World War America might be condemned by an ardent communist in the Soviet Union of the 1920s as laughably deficient for training up the future citizens of the new society. But whatever the circumstances, there is no guarantee that children will accept the books adults press on them.