The Cambridge Companion to Children’s Literature Read online

  That we could imagine Locke and Mrs X together in a bookstore evaluating picture books is due to various constructs providing them with a vocabulary to discuss the perennial concerns of childhood education, such as utility, user-friendliness, ends-versus-means, even though their points of reference diverged quite dramatically. They both recognised childhood as a critical stage of life, but their understandings of what children like and need, as well as what could be expected of them, were shaped by their respective culture’s resources and values. Of course, there were many more issues they could have touched upon, had they examined different books. If Mrs X. had tried to explain the concept of young adult fiction to Locke, they might have had quite a contentious discussion, arising out of a fundamental disagreement over when childhood ends (Locke would probably be inclined to say maturity begins sooner than would Mrs X. so that children could move on to texts that had not been specially adapted for them). The difficulties Locke and Mrs X. experienced in communication are not merely symptomatic of their holding different constructs of childhood and of children’s books. Rather, the constructions to which they both adhere are pervasive in the analysis of children’s books in general, which tend to be designed as much for the use as for the pleasure of their readers. As long as writers try to engage young readers in the present with an eye to influencing their future selves, constructs inevitably come into play in the creation, merchandising and evaluation of children’s books. A keen awareness of how constructs can direct our responses to children’s books enhances our ability to interpret them intelligently, sensitively and knowledgeably.

  Notes

  1. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 170.

  2. Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, trans. Robert Baldick (New York: Vintage, 1962), p. 412.

  3. John R. Gillis, ‘Epilogue: The Islanding of Children – Reshaping the Mythical Landscapes of Childhood’, in Designing Modern Childhoods: History, Space, and the Material Culture of Children, ed. Marta Gutman and Ning de Coninck-Smith (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2008), pp. 316–30.

  4. Alijandra Mogilner and Tayopa Mogliner, ‘On the Level’, You Can Write for Children (December 2006), 16–19.

  5. Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer and Jörg Meibauer, ‘First Pictures, Early Concepts: Early Concept Books’, The Lion and the Unicorn, 29 (2005), 324–47.

  6. William Wordsworth, The Prelude, 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams and Stephen Gill (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), lines 395–97, p. 80.

  7. John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) in The Educational Writings of John Locke, ed. James L. Axtell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), p. 259.

  8. Locke, Some Thoughts, p. 261.

  9. Ian Michael, The Teaching of English from the Sixteenth Century to 1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 14–16.

  10. Robert H. Hurwitz and Judith B. Finn, ‘Locke’s Aesop’s Fables’, Locke Newsletter, 6 (1975), 71–83.

  3 The making of children’s books

  Brian Alderson

  One of the most famous and widely facsimiled letters ever written is that directed to Noel Moore from Eastwood, Dunkeld, on 4 September 1893. In it the sender, who signs herself ‘Yours affectionately, Beatrix Potter’, writes and illustrates a story about a disobedient rabbit. Several years later, Miss Potter – who had been having some success in selling designs for greeting cards – conceived the idea of converting the story into a book. She borrowed the letter from Noel and worked it up, with more drawings, into a tale of publishable length and despatched it unavailingly to a sequence of at least six publishers.

  Having faith in her work (and a little money put by), she determined that, if the trade were not interested, she would publish it herself and so, for Christmas 1901, she had ready for distribution 250 copies of The Tale of Peter Rabbit, eighty-six pages, illustrated with electrotypes of her original line drawings, plus a colour-printed frontispiece, the whole bound in pale green paper over boards. Within a month the success of the venture was such that she had another 250 copies run off, while, at the same time, the publishers Frederick Warne began negotiations for an edition that would enter the mainstream book trade. They besought the author to convert her line drawings into watercolours (which would, like her earlier frontispiece, be among the earliest book illustrations to be printed by the new ‘three colour process’) and, with a prudence common to many in the business, they agreed only a modest royalty for this new and unknown author, but with provision for an increase should success attend the project (fig. 3). Thus, in October 1902, two issues of the trade edition appeared on the market, one costing a shilling bound in dark grey or brown paper over boards with a laid-down (that is to say, pasted-on) colour portrait of Peter on the front and with distinctive ornamental lettering for the titling, the second a ‘deluxe’ edition, bound in green cloth gilt. A year later, with the introduction of pictorial endpapers, four of the colour plates had to be dropped, not to return in standard trade editions until 2002.

  Figure 3. Beatrix Potter, Peter Rabbit, front boards of the trade edition (left) and privately printed edition (right).

  Although somewhat truncated, this account of the emergence of a celebrated children’s book provides first-hand evidence of the collaborative nature of the creative process.1 What we are seeing is the conversion of an intimate personal communication (which could even, under other circumstance, have been purely verbal – like a bed-time story) into a public document, and this emerges through the agency of more than just the original storyteller. There is her alter ego, the illustrator (often, of course, an entirely different person from the author, sometimes militating against such a harmonious marrying of work and picture as occurs in Peter Rabbit). Then there are the craftsmen: papermakers, typefounders, blockmakers, printers, bookbinders involved in the physical production of both the private and the trade editions. And finally there are the publishers who are not only responsible for co-ordinating the whole production process but who, through their direct relationship with the author, may make, or encourage, many decisions which can have a crucial influence on readers’ responses to the finished work. Thus, authors, far from having their divine afflatus conveyed unmediated to their audience, must mostly be seen as executants within a collaborative endeavour – and not always the leading ones or even the originators at that.

  For reasons related partly to their production – as seen with Peter Rabbit – and partly to the immaturity of many of their readers, children’s books have been given a treatment that often differed from what was customary with books for adults. For much of their history they have been regarded primarily as keys to unlock gateways into learning, or proper social comportment, or even reading itself. And from as early as the seventeenth century it was recognised that, if children could see a potential for entertainment on the other side of the gateway, then they would be the more eager to pass through. Thus it was that Johann Amos Comenius’ Orbis sensualium pictus employed an ingenious design in carrying out its encyclopaedic aim of introducing children to the facts and concepts of the world which they inhabited. First published in Nuremberg in 1658, it divided this world into 150 ‘classified’ subjects, each one of which was presented to the reader in a woodcut picture. Within the picture were cut minuscule numbers which linked items there displayed – animals, objects, even ideas like ‘providentia dei’ – to a subjoined text, and that text itself was printed in both German and Latin. The book thus became for its readers a most sympathetic guide to both information and language. The importance of the physical presentation of the material was instantly recognised. Within a year the book was translated into English. Finding woodcuts an unsatisfactory medium for conveying the many pictorial details with their accompanying tiny numbers, the English publisher had them converted into engravings on copper, a finer but more expensive process (fig. 7). Printing
from copper plates, where images are incised into the surface of the plate, required a separate press from that used for the letterpress text; hence each sheet had to be printed twice. The method was not altogether fool-proof and the subjects of the plates were occasionally misjudged so that the wrong picture accompanied the text, presumably to the confusion of the reader.

  As Peter Rabbit and the Orbis pictus clearly show, it is an over-simplification to regard the making of a children’s book as a process of parthenogenesis. There are rare exceptions, such as the ‘illuminated books’ of William Blake – not only was Songs of Innocence (1789) written and illustrated by him but also he etched the words and pictures, printed them on his own press, coloured them by hand according to his intentions for individual copies, and published the books from his home address. Otherwise, though, almost every book is a collaboration. Each possesses a private history of its own, a study of which will reveal its dependence on influences operating outside the control of its originator. This dependence also imposes limitations on authorial creativity, the chief of which relate to the social circumstances prevailing at a given time and the materials and technology then current. Only in exceptional circumstances will production be undertaken without some calculation as to the profitability of the venture and – as was apparent in the case of The Tale of Peter Rabbit – it is the publisher rather than the author who is usually foremost in the essential economics of the system – taking profits or suffering losses. It was Miss Potter as publisher rather than writer who was able to finance the reprint of her private edition; Miss Potter as author was beholden to Frederick Warne for the contractual terms of the first, and subsequent, trade editions.

  In so far as prospects of profit persuade publishers to a course of action in the choosing and making of their books, their awareness of ‘the market’ plays a double role. As entrepreneurs, they will see the value of inventiveness and novelty in what they offer to the (frequently adult) purchasers of their wares. Indeed, in the mid eighteenth century, when children’s books first became a significant element in mainstream publishing, several imaginative ploys were quickly tried which differentiated them from both contemporary adult books and the workaday manuals and textbooks with which children were usually furnished. Thus the influential Child’s New Play-Thing, first published by Thomas Cooper in 1742, introduced as a folding frontispiece an alphabet grid designed to be cut up and used as cards in a learning-game. But publishers will also be aware of the customs and mores of their time and will temper experiment with prudence. When the ‘Rev’d Mr Cooper’ (actually Richard Johnson, a writer who produced many children’s books published by the Newbery firms between 1770 and 1793) brought ‘the Beauties of the Arabian Nights entertainments’ into the nursery in 1791, he called the book The Oriental Moralist and assured purchasers that he had ‘carefully expunged everything that could give the least offence to the most delicate reader’.2 A like tenderness for consumers’ sensibilities has never gone away. In the 1970s, for instance, Roald Dahl and his illustrator were forced, for now very obvious reasons, to alter their treatment of the Oompa-Loompas in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964) (figs. 5–6), while the McGraw Hill Book Company went so far as to issue guidelines to staff members and authors on the equal treatment of the sexes.3

  Figure 5. Roald Dahl, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Illustrated by Joseph Schindelman. 1st edn. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964, p. 72.

  Figure 6. Roald Dahl, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Illustrated by Schindelman. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973, p. 72. Redrawn and revised text.

  It is also necessary to note how the publishers’ fear of sanctions from ‘the market’ arises from an awareness of the constituency they are seeking to serve. For well over 150 years, the print-runs of children’s books were governed by expectations of sales to a largely middle-class public, or to schools and Sunday schools, where unthreatening convention prevailed. In the twentieth century, however, beginning in the United States, the public library movement brought children’s librarians to the fore as wielders of corporate budgets, and many publishers trimmed their production to tastes and fashions espoused by professional readers of children’s books who were inclined to encourage experiment and leave popular appeal to look after itself. (The drastic cutting of library book-budgets in recent decades has had the effect of driving publishers back to fostering popular sales and exploiting the potential of such non-literary ploys as ‘character’ merchandising.)

  There are other reasons too why it is problematic to talk about the author as the sole originator of a children’s book. Again the career of Richard Johnson demonstrates this very nicely. Some of his accounts have fortunately been preserved.4 They reveal that he was an assembler of children’s books as much as an author, or rather that the two roles can be indistinguishable. He was paid 16 guineas for ‘abridging’ the Arabian Nights stories, and he is also found ‘writing’, ‘translating’, ‘compiling’ other volumes, and authors are still being commissioned to fashion texts to meet the requirements of their publishers. Text may be demanded that fits a particular series, like the Ladybird Books, or to support a body of already-existing illustrations. Walter de la Mare did this on a number of occasions, most notably for Harold Jones’ lithographs in This Year, Next Year (1937). Likewise, Philippa Pearce, as ‘Warrener’, supplied texts for some storybooks based on designs used to decorate the ‘Bunnikins’ children’s ceramic ware.

  Even when the author seems more auteur than hack, the publisher may intrude as a significant partner. Beatrix Potter’s second book, The Tailor of Gloucester (1902), evolved in a very similar pattern to her first, but with her publisher making more extensive cuts to the privately printed edition, much to the author’s chagrin. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) was similarly the product of a long and intricate series of collaborations. Having begun, like Peter Rabbit, as a tale told to a child, it was also expanded and turned into a manuscript volume which was illustrated by the author and presented to the girl for whom the story was invented. Then, like Noel Moore’s letter, it was borrowed back, and prepared for ‘official’ publication with commissioned illustrations. Much of the business and production negotiation was undertaken by the author in association with the ‘professional’ publisher Alexander Macmillan, and the surviving correspondence between the two gives an intimate view of the book’s wayward course towards its ultimate success.5

  The insights which these detailed examples of copy-preparation give us are exceptional for books of the distant past. They do confirm though that authors’ experiences may differ widely in their negotiations with publishers, a contention that can often be supported by detailed modern evidence. For while in the past it was a matter of routine for many authors and publishers to tidy their files into the dustbin, recent decades have found institutions garnering such papers as valuable research materials – a process abetted by authors’ pleased discovery that this can be a remunerative way of clearing their work-rooms. Collections of working papers, correspondence, manuscripts and original illustrations held by some libraries in Britain and the United States offer confirmation of the former fragmentary evidence of the collaborative effort through which individual books are created. The archive of the celebrated editor Kaye Webb, now held at Seven Stories, the Centre for Children’s Books in Newcastle upon Tyne, is shedding much light on the collaboration behind so many successful Puffin books; similarly, careful study of the Ezra Jack Keats archive in the de Grummond Collection of the University of Southern Mississippi has revealed much about his work.6

  Whatever the origins of, or the innovations in, the bookmakers’ products, the limitations imposed on them by the physical resources at their disposal are decisive in determining the appearance and character of each generation’s children’s books. Put another way, one cannot overestimate the importance of technological factors in determining the kind of books produced for children over the whole history of children’s literature. For example, publishing decisions inev
itably involve consideration of the paper on which work is to be printed. In the hand-press period, which lasted from the days of William Caxton to the early nineteenth century, the limitation on sheet sizes imposed by the dimensions of the hand-held mould in which the paper was made was a strong determinant of format. One of the earliest examples of children’s books as an emergent sector of the book trade was the series of Gigantick Histories published and sold by Thomas Boreman at his stall ‘near the two giants in Guildhall, London’ (1740–3). The series title may have made play with the stall’s location but there was a joke too, since the tiny books were anything but ‘gigantick’, measuring only 2¼ × l¼ inches – a satisfying economic arrangement since they could be printed and made up from a single paper sheet (of about 15 × 20 inches). Many of the other children’s books of that period, being modest in both scale and creative ambition, were similarly economical in both the quality of the paper used and its formatting. There was a tendency to treat the sheet in a Procrustean manner, abridging texts to make them fit or adding extraneous verses, fables, homilies and suchlike if spare space needed to be filled. Only where engravings were to be printed – and the picture books that emerged at the start of the nineteenth century were entirely engraved – was it advisable to turn to superior paper stocks.

  The advent of the subsequent ‘machine-press period’ was heralded by, among other things, the arrival of mechanical papermaking, whose operation allowed for a widening, almost to infinity, of the ways in which paper could be employed. (Modern web-fed presses complete the printing of entire books non-stop in a matter of minutes.) This notably increased the options open to the children’s book publisher and resulted in the printing of picture books (often called ‘toy books’ in the nineteenth century) where the kinds of paper and the dimensions of a book’s leaves were capable of much variation (see fig. 9). The long-established firm of Dean & Munday (later Thomas Dean, Dean & Son, and many other iterations) was particularly versatile in bringing out series in varying formats and, following their model, other publishers took up the challenge. Two of the most energetic, George Routledge and Frederick Warne, produced over 1,000 different titles before the end of the century. The subjects ranged from alphabet books to traditional tales, to original stories and verses, in varying formats and with prices ranging from a halfpenny to 2 shillings, the books in the latter category having their paper backed with linen to become ‘indestructible books’. Up to the late 1850s most toy books were printed on a single paper stock, with coloured-paper wrappers and with the illustrations hand-coloured. After that date, colour printing became customary, with varying requirements demanded of the book’s structure. In many instances the text would be printed on one side of the sheet of a light wove paper with the coloured illustrations appearing on one side of a thicker stock (possibly from a different, specialist printer). The two units would be brought together with text facing picture and stitched into colour-printed card wrappers, often with the endleaves of text as pastedowns.7