The Cambridge Companion to Children’s Literature Read online

  If asked, Mrs X. would readily admit that she hadn’t really thought about all the cultural baggage that can be attached to a gift of books. But she would have to acknowledge that those board books are hardly devoid of that connection. When buying books for strange children, she has thought of them in less personal terms than of the nieces or nephews whose personalities, interests and parents she knows intimately. Of course, she feels herself to be under greater obligation to choose only books that parents from backgrounds different from hers would not find objectionable. To be honest, Mrs X. concedes with a wry grin, it is so much easier to vet baby books. The content is not controversial because it consists of basic information that everybody agrees is necessary for children to learn young.

  But suddenly Mrs X realises that, in her attempt to be sensitive, she has not selected any literature per se. And childhood reading is supposed to be all about the discovery of enthralling narratives. In modern Western culture, she remembers, books are given to children for reasons that don’t revolve around filling them up with information as if they were empty vessels. Of course, it is difficult to factor the child’s potential for philosophical, moral or magical thinking into the equation because it doesn’t lend itself to precise measurement or quantification. But how many people, Mrs X. wonders, would side with Mr Gradgrind in the famous schoolroom scene in Charles Dickens’ Hard Times (1854), in which he calls upon students to define a horse? Who knew more about horses, Sissy Jupe, the supposedly ignorant pupil whose father is an equestrian rider in the circus, or Bitzer, who spits out the zoologically precise answer without having seen one? She recognises Gradgrind’s deficiencies as an educator because he cannot see that children have their own ways of seeing and thinking that are valid precisely because they reveal aspects of things that may be overlooked from the more fixed perspective of an adult. Mrs X. doesn’t thrill to Wordsworth’s figure of the child trailing clouds of glory in the ode ‘Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’ (composed 1802–4), but she has certainly been in the position of Wordsworth’s narrator in the poem ‘We Are Seven’ (1798), surprised by the child’s naïve but profound response to a question that supposedly had one correct answer. One doesn’t have to be a romantic with a capital R, she muses, to agree with Wordsworth in Book V of the 1805 Prelude when he characterises the ideal childhood as a time ‘when every hour brings palpable access / Of knowledge, when all knowledge is delight, / And sorrow is not there’.6 Like Wordsworth, she also believes that books ought not to be among the ‘engines’ that ‘confine’ the child, but rather wondrous vehicles that transport him out of himself (l. 358). That capacity for complete immersion in a book can be among a person’s most cherished memories, as a childhood biography like Francis Spufford’s The Child that Books Built (2002) so eloquently testifies. The gift of a book from an adult can therefore hold out to the child the possibility of transformative reading experiences. Books in childhood can be thought of as vital nourishment, concludes Mrs X, but they have to nourish all the child’s faculties, not just the rational at the expense of the imaginative. And reading should allow some salutary freedom from anxious adult oversight. Mrs X may hold these to be truths universally acknowledged, or even self-evident and inalienable – and so might we – but it is likely that others, in different places and different times, would disagree.

  Mr Locke’s ‘easy pleasant book’ as cultural construction

  Mrs X’s impassioned defence of the Romantic construct of reading suggests that she can hold different constructs of a children’s book in her mind without necessarily experiencing cognitive dissonance. One reason this is possible is because this construct reinterprets an older construct of the appropriate text for a child. We could formulate it as a text that will not alienate the child from the educational process, that is, one that teaches something valuable in an agreeable way at a level the child can grasp. This construct also corresponds to the ancient ideal of tuition as ‘utile et dolce’ (useful and pleasant), the famous phrase from the Roman poet Horace usually translated into English as ‘instruction with delight’. Probably the most famous early modern iteration of this construct of a children’s book appears in John Locke’s 1693 Some Thoughts Concerning Education, where he suggested giving the child ‘some easy pleasant book suited to his capacity’ for a first reader.7 Because of Locke’s importance as a philosopher of education in the Anglophone tradition, his remarks about children’s books have cast a very long shadow, credited as having provided the impetus in the mid eighteenth century for the supposed creation of the modern children’s book by publishers such as John Newbery.

  The notion of an ‘easy pleasant book suited to his capacity’ still works as a standard for the evaluation of contemporary children’s books. When Mrs X. was examining the board books, one thing she was trying to gauge in each was the relationship between the instructive and entertaining elements. Were they properly balanced? Were they integrated seamlessly? Was the synthesis suitable for the implied reader at a particular stage of development? If the book met all these criteria, then she considered it a serious candidate for purchase. But the phrase is not as transparent as it first appears. Although a construct can persist over centuries, it is not a reflection of a transhistorical, universal truth, but rather a culture-specific formulation. Because a construct may take somewhat different forms, we must be alert to the possibility that the current interpretation of the construct’s key terms may not correspond to that of an earlier period. But even when two historical manifestations of a construct may vary significantly in certain respects, others of its terms may serve as common ground for discussion. Understanding when, where and why those shifts occur can be very helpful in understanding the nature of changes to children’s books and how those changes are received.

  While Locke’s vocabulary in Some Thoughts might strike us as a bit old-fashioned, the ideas packed into that phrase are not. During the first stage of lessons, Locke argued, it was best if the teacher could motivate the child to concentrate without letting on that the two of them were working on a task. As proof, he offered examples of children he observed who had been eager to settle down and learn the letters of the alphabet when the assignment was presented as a game. If the child wanted to be a proficient player, then he or she would have to be motivated to transfer a previously mastered skill to a new context. At the second stage of reading instruction, when the child begins to put letters into syllables, words and sentences, Locke conceded that it was more difficult to find ways to enliven the process. But if a teacher were to present the pupil with a text that was both understandable and interesting, the chances were certainly increased. ‘For what pleasure or encouragement can it be to a child’, Locke asked, ‘to exercise himself in reading those parts of a book, where he understands nothing? . . . none should be proposed to a child but such as are suited to a child’s capacity and notions’.8 The child had to come before the curriculum.

  It’s easy to see why Locke’s ideas are regarded as containing the germs of an enlightened modern attitude towards childhood reading, given their emphasis on accessibility, comprehensibility and entertainment. Still, his formulation of appropriateness must be seen in the context of the seventeenth-century teaching methods, educational politics and market for children’s books to comprehend more fully where priorities lay and how they might have shaded the meaning of his key terms. Reading was taught through spelling in the seventeenth century – that is, spelling preceded reading. It was justified on the grounds that complex material was broken down to its smallest parts, the letters, which were then recombined into syllables, words and sentences. Because the method was highly analytic, children were expected to memorise a great deal of material. This approach also required a great deal of the teacher if it were to be done well, but reading instruction was considered a tiresome and unrewarding assignment that was not, consequently, particularly well remunerated. The process of learning to read could take years, depending upon the competence and p
atience of the instructor (and many were reported by irate parents to be neither). Typically, children could not understand much of what they were able to spell out for some time, especially if instruction began, as was not uncommon, at age two or three.9

  Locke’s remarks on reading instruction in his day were integral to his extended critique of the antiquated Latin curriculum and an equally outmoded pedagogy. Locke thought it unconscionable that so much time was wasted trying to coerce resistant, resentful boys to acquire a little Latin by appealing to their dread of corporal punishment. Why adhere to the bad old method of beating learning into a little child, argued Locke, when it was relatively simple to devise ways to trick him into doing the same thing? Identifying those circumstances where new pastimes might reduce the reliance upon corporal punishment was therefore a high priority. He argued that a readily available toy like dice that could be adapted into effective teaching aids, could, when used in conjunction with more psychologically astute methods of motivation, increase the odds of children learning the letters of the alphabet painlessly and pleasurably.

  Locke lays out the potential of educational games with such enthusiasm that it comes as a surprise to encounter what appears to be indifference to the subject of children’s books. In fact, he admits to ignorance about the contemporary market for children’s books, almost as if he didn’t think it was worth the trouble to become better informed. He does not even seem to have been familiar with Comenius’ Orbis sensualium pictus (1658), arguably the greatest children’s book of the seventeenth century, which had been available in Charles Hoole’s English–Latin translation since 1659. Locke’s nonchalance is puzzling. When educational reformers cannot recommend works to their readers, they typically call upon public-spirited men of letters to compose new kinds of books for children, but Locke does not do this.

  One possible explanation for Locke’s apparent lack of interest in the contemporary children’s book publishing was that he was confident that traditional texts were perfectly adequate as a child’s first reading assignment, provided teachers used them intelligently. The ‘easy pleasant book’ did not have to be written exclusively for a young audience to be appropriate for them: it merely needed to be appropriate for their abilities at a given time. No book was inherently ‘good’ for children, including the Bible, in Locke’s opinion, unless they were ready for it. He disapproved of the widespread practice of having children read the Old and New Testaments straight through, because they could not be expected to comprehend a text of which so much was at a vast remove from their experience. Suitable passages, such as the story of Joseph or David and Goliath, could be excerpted and adapted for lessons at this stage. Locke recommended instead that new readers start with Aesop’s fables, for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was the small child’s fascination with animals. Fables were brief and succinct, making them suitable for readers with short attention spans. There were many illustrated editions of Aesop, which facilitated the teaching of new concepts via the senses. When a child found he was capable of reading an entertaining book, he was rewarded for having learned the skill, as well as given an incentive to continue this pleasurable activity. A fable collection also contained many important ideas expressed in ways that might spark a child’s curiosity. While fables had the advantage of being simple enough for a young child to comprehend, nevertheless the texts were not disposable, so to speak, once the child could read independently. Their meanings could not be exhausted after repeated exposures, or even during subsequent stages of development. Fables were worth retaining throughout life.

  While Locke’s concept of the easy, pleasant book certainly does not rule out the possibility of quarantine and specialisation, he himself never ventured very far down that road. The godfather of the modern children’s book tried to improve, not supplant, Aesop in the one book he produced for young learners of Latin.10 His chief priority was to keep children from languishing at the first stage of instruction, where they not only suffered unnecessarily, but lost valuable time that could be spent acquiring the fundamentals of other important new subjects. Perhaps he could not imagine new ways of writing for children – although some of his Restoration contemporaries did, chiefly the Baptists like James Janeway, Thomas White or John Bunyan, who set out to create easy pleasant works suited to the capacities of Puritan children. There are no grounds for inferring from his comments on children’s reading that he himself conceived of a semi-autonomous genre of children’s literature, much less thought it desirable or necessary to his efforts to reform and modernise the curriculum.

  Suppose Locke were to be transported to the children’s book department where Mrs X. is. Would they be able to hold a conversation about the ‘easy pleasant books’ of the early twenty-first century? What would transpire once he became accustomed to the riot of primary colours that increases visual stimulation to a high and not especially comfortable level? He begins by looking for modern editions of what he supposes are still essential works. But there are no stout little leather-bound volumes of Aesop’s fables, just tall slim picture books with brief, evocative titles carefully incorporated into the inviting ‘posters’ for their contents on the front covers. It slowly dawns on him that innovations in printing technologies since the 1690s have made it possible to integrate word and image seamlessly anywhere in a book, including its binding, endpapers and dust jacket. He is having a hard time wrapping his mind around the idea that colour pictures are now commonplace, not fabulous luxuries.

  Mrs X. notices that the gentleman seems to be disoriented and comes over to ask if he needs some help. He thanks her and asks where the editions of Aesop’s fables might be found? He explains that, while he sees a great many books about animals, there seem to be no Aesops. Mrs X is somewhat taken aback by his request, because she has always considered fables pretty difficult, dry and prescriptive for little children, even if they are classics. Perhaps he is home-schooling his children. Many home-schoolers seem to have very conservative tastes in children’s books and Aesop has more than enough morals to go around. ‘There’s a retelling of The Tortoise and the Hare by Janet Stevens in the picture book section, would that do?’ she asks. He stares at the cover, perplexed by the athletic shorts and sports shoes, having never seen a set of fable illustrations featuring animals in anything except their fur, feathers, scales or shells. ‘Thank you’, he says again, ‘but I would like a book with more than one fable. Surely there must be some. There are so many books here.’ He is still trying to comprehend that everything here is for children to read, but that absolutely nothing looks familiar. ‘Well’, says Mrs X., pointing across the aisle, ‘it would be in this section, but I don’t see anything except that Dover Thrift Classic edition. But it’s so dull and unattractive, I can’t imagine any child would be tempted to look into it. Amazon.com would have a pretty big selection, though. The reviews posted on the site would probably help you find a nice lively version with good illustrations. I think there’s a terminal over there.’

  Locke feels as if she is speaking to him in a foreign language. The edition she didn’t like looked quite good to him: the selection of the fables was unobjectionable and the type large and clear. It was certainly preferable to the one she showed him where the huge colour pictures overwhelmed the brief text. Locke walks over to the sale table and begins looking through the marked-down books, but can’t really make sense out of anything. ‘I’m sorry to trouble you again, madam, but what are Cheerios?’ he asks. ‘Oh, it’s a brand of cereal’, replies Mrs X., wondering just exactly where he comes from. ‘It’s eaten for breakfast with milk and sugar and fruit.’ Now Locke is really confused. ‘How exactly is the child supposed to play with this book?’ ‘Oh’, says Mrs X., opening up The Cheerios Play Book: ‘Cheerios are easy for toddlers to pick up. See the recessed spaces in the pictures? You help them complete the pictures by placing the correct number of Cheerios in the spaces provided. It’s an easy way of encouraging little children to develop fine motor skills, learn their nu
mbers, recognise patterns, etc.’ Locke can now see certain cleverness in the approach, although he can’t refrain from observing to Mrs X. that it is surely a bad idea to encourage children to waste food like this. Mrs X. nods yes, hoping that the gentleman hasn’t noticed she is holding a copy. After taking a second look at the book, she can’t believe she fell for such a superficial gimmick so unimaginatively executed just because it was 49 cents.

  ‘Now here is a really nice book for young children’, she says, showing him a copy of The Jolly Postman. He is quite delighted at its ingenuity, but is taken aback to discover that the text is woven around a collection of what he would call old nurse’s songs (nursery rhymes to Mrs X). He has never seen this kind of nonsense printed in a book and can’t imagine it serving any useful purpose. Mrs X. notices the funny look on his face and takes a deep breath before launching into an explanation. ‘Nursery rhymes introduce very young children to poetry’, she explains. He tries to keep his expression politely neutral. ‘And the Ahlbergs were a very clever and creative husband and wife team. They have won all kinds of awards for their children’s books. The Jolly Postman is very popular – it was one of my daughter’s favourite books when she was little. She loved taking all the letters out of the envelopes and hearing me do all the different characters’ voices.’ Locke wonders how it is possible for people to make a living writing such things. Sensing his disapproval, Mrs X. hurries on. ‘This is a book where all novelty features have an educational purpose. They help the child learn how to “read” their world through the story – everything from decoding written language, to following a narrative, internalising conventions of visual and literary representation, assimilating information or schemata, participating in literary play . . . But the child doesn’t realise how much he’s learning because the story is so much fun to read.’ She stops abruptly, sensing that she has lost the gentleman in her enthusiasm to promote what she considers one of the cleverest books to appear in recent memory.