But, if it cannot be accounted for, it can be summed up. From the critic's vantage point, the English (as well as the Scots and the Welsh) must be credited with having originated or triumphed in more children's genres than any other country. They have excelled in the school story, two solid centuries of it, from Sarah Fielding's The Governess; or, The Little Female Academy (1745) to, say, C. Day Lewis' Otterbury Incident (1948) and including such milestones as Thomas Hughes's Tom Brown's School Days (1857) and Kipling's Stalky & Co. (1899); and the boy's adventure story, with one undebatable world masterpiece in Stevenson's Treasure Island (1883), plus a solid line of talented practitioners, from the Victorian Robert Ballantyne (The Coral Island) to the contemporary Richard Church and Leon Garfield (Devil-in-the-Fog); the "girls' book," often trash but possessing in Charlotte M. Yonge at least one writer of exceptional vitality; historical fiction, from Marryat's vigorous but simple Children of the New Forest (1847) to the even more vigorous but burnished novels of Rosemary Sutcliff; the "vacation story," in which Arthur Ransome still remains unsurpassed; the doll story, from Margaret Gatty and Richard Henry Horne to the charming fancies of Rumer Godden and the remarkable serious development of this tiny genre in Pauline Clarke's Return of the Twelves (1962); the realism-cum-fantasy novel, for which E. Nesbit provided a classic, and P.L. Travers a modern, formulation; high fantasy (Lewis Carroll, George MacDonald, C.S. Lewis, Alan Garner); nonsense (Carroll again, Lear, Belloc); and nursery rhymes. In Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels and Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, the English furnished two archetypal narratives that have bred progeny all over the world, and in Mary Norton's Tom-Thumb-and-Gulliver-born The Borrowers (1952) a work of art. In Leslie Brooke (Johnny Crow's Garden) and Beatrix Potter (e.g., The Tale of Peter Rabbit) they have two geniuses of children's literature (and illustration) for very small children--probably the most difficult of all the genres. In poetry they begin at the top with William Blake and continue with Christina Rossetti, Robert Louis Stevenson, Eleanor Farjeon, Walter de la Mare, A.A. Milne, and James Reeves. In the mutation of fantasy called whimsy, Milne (Winnie-the-Pooh) reappears as a master. In the important field of the animal story, Kipling, with his Jungle Books (1894, 1895) and Just So Stories (1902), remains unsurpassed. Finally the English have produced a number of unclassifiable masterpieces such as Kenneth Grahame's Wind in the Willows (which is surely more than an animal story) and several unclassifiable writers (Mayne and Lucy Boston, for example).
The social historian, surveying the same field from a different angle, would point out that the English were the first people in history to develop not only a self-conscious, independent children's literature but also the commercial institutions capable of supporting and furthering it. He would note the striking creative swing between didacticism and delight. He would detect the sources in ballads, chapbooks, nurses' rhymes, and street literature that have at critical moments prompted the imagination. What would perhaps interest him most is the way in which children's literature reflects, over more than two centuries, the child's constantly shifting position in society.
Before that, and as far back as the Middle Ages, children came in contact with schoolroom letters. There was the Anglo-Saxon theologian and historian the Venerable Bede, with his textbook on natural science, De natura rerum. There were the question-and-answer lesson books of the great English scholar Alcuin; the Colloquy of the English abbot Aelfric; the Elucidarium of the archbishop of Canterbury Anselm, often thought of as the first "encyclopaedia" for young people. Not until the mid-14th century was English (the genius of which somehow seems fitter than Latin for children's books) thought of as proper for literature. For his son "litel Lowis" Geoffrey Chaucer wrote in English the "Treatise on the Astrolabe" (1391). The English child was also afflicted, in the 15th and 16th centuries, by many "Books of Courtesy" (such as The Babees Boke, c. 1475), the ancestors of modern, equally ineffective manuals of conduct.
Along with these instructional works, there flourished, at least from the very early Renaissance, an unofficial or popular literature. It may not have been meant for children but--no one quite knows how--children managed to recognize it as their own. It included fables, especially those of Aesop; folk legends, such as those in the much read Gesta Romanorum; bestiaries, which, along with Aesop, may be ancestral to that flourishing children's genre, the animal story; romances, often clustering around King Arthur and Robin Hood; fairy tales, of which Jack the Giant Killer was the type; and nursery rhymes, probably largely orally transmitted. Perhaps the most influential underground literature consisted of the chapbooks, low-priced folded sheets containing ballads and romances (Bevis of Southampton, and The Seven Champions of Christendom [1597] were favourites), sold by wandering hawkers and peddlers. They fed the imagination of the poor, old and young, from Queen Anne's reign almost through Queen Victoria's. These native products of fancy were, in the early 18th century, reinforced by the first English translations of the classically simple French fairy tales of Charles Perrault and the more self-conscious ones of Madame D'Aulnoy.
Against this primitive literature of entertainment stands a primitive literature of didacticism stretching back to the early Middle Ages. This underwent a Puritan mutation after the Restoration. It is typified by that classic for the potentially damned child, A Token for Children (1671), by James Janeway. The Puritan outlook was elevated by Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress (1678), which, often in simplified form, was either forced upon children or more probably actually enjoyed by them in lieu of anything better. Mrs. Overtheway (in Juliana Ewing's Mrs. Overtheway's Remembrances, 1869), recalling her childhood reading, refers to it as "that book of wondrous fascination." A softened Puritanism also reveals itself in Bunyan's Book for Boys and Girls: or, Country Rhymes for Children (1686), as well as the Divine and Moral Songs for Children by the hymn composer Isaac Watts, whose "How doth the little busy bee" still exhales a faint endearing charm.
The entire pre-1744 period is redeemed by two works of genius. Neither Robinson Crusoe nor Gulliver's Travels was meant for children. Immediately abridged and bowdlerized, they were seized upon by the prosperous young. The poorer ones, the great majority, had to wait for the beginning of the cheap reprint era. Both books fathered an immense progeny in the children's field. Defoe engendered a whole school of "Robinsonnades" in most European countries, the most famous example being Wyss's Swiss Family Robinson (1812-13).
On the whole, during the millennium separating Alcuin from Newbery, the child's mind was thought of, if at all, as something to be improved; his imagination as something to be shielded; his soul as something to be saved. And on the whole the child's mind, imagination, and soul resisted, persisted, and somehow, whether in a dog-eared penny history of The Babes in the Wood or the matchless chronicle of Gulliver among the Lilliputians, found its own nourishment.
The elevation of the publisher-bookseller-editor Newbery (who also sold patent medicines) to the position of patron saint is an excusable piece of sentiment. Perhaps it originated with one of his back writers who doubled as a man of genius. In Chapter XVIII of The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), Oliver Goldsmith lauds his employer as "the philanthropic bookseller of St. Paul's Churchyard, who has written so many books for children, calling himself their friend, but who was the friend of all mankind." There is no reason to believe that Newbery was anything but an alert businessman who discovered and shrewdly exploited a new market: middle class children, or rather their parents. Nevertheless this was a creative act. In 1744 he published A Little Pretty Pocket-Book. Its ragbag of contents--pictures of children's games, jingles, fables, "an agreeable Letter to read from Jack the Giant Killer," plus a bonus in the form of "a Ball and a Pincushion"--are of interest only because, addressing itself single-mindedly to a child audience, it aimed primarily at diversion. Thus children's literature clearly emerged into the light of day.
The climate of Newbery's era was nevertheless more suited to a literature of didacticism than to one of diversion. John Locke's Some Thoughts concerning Education (1693) is often cited as an early Enlightenment emancipatory influence. But close inspection of this manual for the mental conditioning of gentlemen reveals a strong English stress on character building and practical learning. Locke thinks little of the natural youthful inclination to poetry: "It is seldom seen that anyone discovers mines of Gold or Silver in Parnassus." He does endorse, as a daring idea, the notion that a child should read for pleasure, and he recommends Aesop. But the decisive influence was not Locke's. It came from across the Channel with Rousseau's best-seller Émile (1762). What is positive in Rousseau--his recognition that the child should not be too soon forced into the straitjacket of adulthood--was more or less ignored. Other of his doctrines had a greater effect on children's literature. For all his talk of freedom, he provided his young Émile with an amiable tyrant for a teacher, severely restricting his reading to one book Robinson Crusoe. It was his didactic strain, exemplified in the moral French children's literature of Arnaud Berquin and Madame de Genlis, that attracted the English.
They took more easily to Rousseau's emphasis on virtuous conduct and instruction via "nature" than they did to his advocacy of the liberation of personality. Some writers, such as Thomas Day, with his long-lived Sandford and Merton, were avowedly Rousseauist. Others took from him what appealed to them. Sarah Kirby Trimmer, whose Fabulous Histories specialized in piety, opposed the presumably free-thinking Rousseau on religious grounds but was in other respects strongly influenced by him. The same is true of Anna Laetitia Barbauld, with her characteristically titled Lessons for Children. But Mary Martha Sherwood could hardly have sympathized with Rousseau's notion of the natural innocence of children; the author of The History of the Fairchild Family (1818-47) based her family chronicle on the proposition (which she later softened) that "all children are by nature evil." Of all the members of the flourishing Rousseauist or quasi-Rousseauist school of the moral tale, only one was a true writer. Maria Edgeworth may still be read.
Though the tone varies from Miss Edgeworth's often sympathetic feeling for children to Mrs. Sherwood's Savonarolan severities, one idea dominates: a special literature for the child must be manufactured in order to improve or reform him. The reigning mythology is that of reason, a mythology difficult to sell to the young.
Yet during the period from John Newbery's Little Pretty Pocket-Book to Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, children's literature also showed signs of antisolemnity. In verse there was first of all William Blake. His Songs of Innocence (1789) was not written for children, perhaps indeed not written for anyone. But its fresh, anti-restrictive sensibility, flowing from a deep love for the very young, decisively influenced all English verse for children. Yet the poetry the young really read or listened to at the opening of the 19th century was not Blake but Original Poems for Infant Minds (1804), by "Several Young Persons," including Ann and Jane Taylor. The Taylor sisters, though adequately moral, struck a new note of sweetness, of humour, at any rate of nonpriggishness. Their "Twinkle, twinkle, little star," included in Rhymes for the Nursery (1806), has not only been memorized but actually liked by many generations of small children. No longer read, but in its way similarly revolutionary, was The Butterfly's Ball and the Grasshopper's Feast (1807), by William Roscoe, a learned member of Parliament and writer on statistics. The gay and fanciful nonsense of this rhymed satiric social skit enjoyed, despite the seeming dominance of the moral Barbaulds and Trimmers, a roaring success. Great nonsense verse, however, had to await the coming of a genius, Edward Lear, whose Book of Nonsense (1846) was partly the product of an emergent and not easily explainable Victorian feeling for levity and partly the issue of a fruitfully neurotic personality, finding relief for its frustrations in the noncontingent world of the absurd and the free laughter of children.
In prose may be noted, toward the end of the period under discussion, the dawn of romantic historical fiction, with Frederick Marryat's Children of the New Forest (1847), a story of the English Civil War; and of the manly open-air school novel, with Thomas Hughes's Tom Brown's School Days (1857). A prominent milestone in the career of the "realistic" children's family novel is Holiday House (1839), by Catherine Sinclair, in which at last there are children who are noisy, even naughty, yet not destined for purgatory. Though Miss Sinclair's book does conclude with a standard deathbed scene, the overall atmosphere is one of gaiety. The victories in the field of children's literature may seem small, but they can be decisive. It was a small, decisive victory to have introduced in Holiday House an Uncle David, whose parting admonition to his nieces and nephews is: "Now children! I have only one piece of serious, important advice to give you all, so attend to me!--Never crack nuts with your teeth!"
A similar note was struck by Henry (later Sir Henry) Cole with his Home Treasury series, featuring traditional fairy tales, ballads, and rhymes. The fairy tale then began to come into its own, perhaps as a natural reaction to the moral tale. John Ruskin's King of the Golden River (1851) and William Makepeace Thackeray's "fireside pantomime" The Rose and the Ring (1855) were signs of a changing climate, even though the Grimm-like directness of the first is partly neutralized by Ruskin's moralistic bent and the gaiety of the second is spoiled by a laborious, parodic slyness. More important than these fairy tales, however, was the aid supplied by continental allies: the English publication in 1823-26 of the Grimms' Fairy Tales; in 1846 of Andersen's utterly personal fairy tales and folktales; in the '40s and '50s of other importations from the country of fancy, notably Sir George Dasent's version of the stirring Popular Tales from the Norse (1859), collected by Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and J.E. Moe. Though the literature of improvement continued to maintain its vigour, England was readying itself for Lewis Carroll.
The age is characterized by a literary level decisively higher than that previously achieved; the creation of characters now permanent dwellers in the child's imagination (from Alice herself to Mary Poppins, and including Long John Silver, Mowgli, intelligent Mr. Toad, and--if Hugh Lofting, despite his American residence, be accepted as English--Dr. Dolittle); the exaltation of the imagination in the work of Carroll, Macdonald, Stevenson, E. Nesbit, Grahame, Barrie, Hudson, Lofting, Travers, and the early Tolkien (The Hobbit [1938]); the establishment of the art fairy tale (Jean Ingelow with Mopsa the Fairy [1869]; Dinah Maria Mulock Craik with The Little Lame Prince [1875]; Mrs. Ewing with Old Fashioned Fairy Tales [1882]; Barrie's Peter Pan [1904]; and the exquisite artifices of Oscar Wilde in The Happy Prince, and Other Tales [1888]); the transmutation and popularization, by Andrew Lang, Joseph Jacobs, and others, of traditional fairy tales from all sources; the development of a quasi-realistic school in the fiction of Charlotte M. Yonge (Countess Kate); Mrs. Ewing (Jan of the Windmill); and Mrs. Molesworth; and, furthering this trend, a growing literary population of real, or at least more real, children (by E. Nesbit and Ransome).
It is further characterized by the rapid evolution of a dozen now-basic genres, including the school story, the historical novel, the vacation story, the "group" or "gang" novel, the boy's adventure tale, the girl's domestic novel, the animal tale, the career novel (Noel Streatfeild's Ballet Shoes, 1936), the work of pure whimsy (A.A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh, 1926); the solution, a brilliant one by Beatrix Potter and a charming one by L. Leslie Brooke, of the problem of creating literature for pre-readers and beginning readers; and the growth of an impressive body of children's verse: the lyric delicacy of Christina Rossetti in Sing-Song (1872), the accurate reflection of the child's world in Stevenson's Child's Garden of Verses, the satirical nonsense of Hilaire Belloc in his The Bad Child's Book of Beasts (1896), the incantatory, other-worldly magic of Walter de la Mare with his Songs of Childhood (1902) and Peacock Pie (1913), the fertile gay invention of Eleanor Farjeon, and the irresistible charm of Milne in When We Were Very Young (1924).
Finally it is characterized by the dominance in children's fiction of middle and upper middle class mores; the appearance, in the late 1930s, with Eve Garnett's The Family from One End Street, of stories showing a sympathetic concern with the lives of slum children; the reflection, also in the 30s, of a serious interest, influenced by modern psychology, in the structure of the child's vision of the world; the rise, efflorescence, and decline of the children's magazine: Boy's Own Magazine (1855-74), Good Words for the Young (1867-77), Aunt Judy's Magazine (1866-85), and--famous for its outstanding contributors--The Boy's Own Paper (1879-1912); the beginning, with F.J.H. Darton and other scholars, of an important critical-historical literature; institutionalization, commercialization, standardization--the popularity, for example, of the "series"; and the dominating influence of the better English work on the reading taste of American, Continental, and Oriental children.
During these 80 years a vast amount of trash and treacle was produced. What will be remembered is the work of a few dozen creative writers who applied to literature for children standards as high as those ordinarily applied to mainstream literature.
Among the genres that fell in favour, the old moral tale, if not a corpse, surely became obsolescent but raised the question whether it was being replaced by a subtler form of didactic literature, preaching racial, class, and international understanding. The standard adventure story too seemed to be dying out, though excellent examples, such as The Cave (U.S. title, Five Boys in a Cave [1950]), by Richard Church, continued to appear. The boy's school story suffered a similar fate, despite the remarkable work of William Mayne in A Swarm in May (1955). Children's vese by Ian Serraillier, Ted Hughes, James Reeves, and the later Eleanor Farjeon, excellent though it was, did not speak with the master tones of a de la Mare or the precise simplicity of a Stevenson. In science fiction one would have expected more of a boom; yet nothing appeared comparable to Jules Verne.
Conversely, there was a genuine boom in fact books: biographical series, manuals of all sorts, popularized history, junior encyclopaedias. Preschool and easy-to-read beginners' books, often magnificently produced, multiplied. So did specially prepared decoys for the reluctant reader. After the discovery of the child came that of the postchild: conscientiously composed teen-age and "young adult" novels were issued in quantity, though the quality still left something to be desired. A 19th-century phenomenon--experimentation in the juvenile field by those who normally write for grown-ups--took on a second life after World War II. Naomi Mitchison, Richard Church, P.H. Newby, Richard Graves, Eric Linklater, Norman Collins, Roy Fuller, C. Day Lewis, and Ian Fleming, with his headlong pop extravaganza Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1964), come to mind.
A post-World War II stress on building bridges of understanding was reflected both in an increase in translations and in the publication of books, whether fiction or nonfiction, dealing responsibly and unsentimentally with the sufferings of a war-wounded world. One example among many was Serraillier's Silver Sword (1958), recounting the trans-European adventures that befell four Polish children after the German occupation. The Silver Sword was a specialized instance of a general trend toward the interpretation for children of a postwar world of social incoherence, race and class conflict, urban poverty, and even mental pathology. Such novels as John Rowe Townsend's Gumble's Yard (1961); Widdershins Crescent (1965); Pirate's Island (1968); Eve Garnett's Further Adventures of the Family from One End Street (1956); and Leila Berg's Box for Benny (1958) represented a new realistic school, restrained in England, less so in the United States, but manifest in the children's literature of much of the world. It failed to produce a masterpiece, perhaps because the form of the realistic novel must be moderately distorted to make it suitable for children.
In two fields, however, English postwar children's literature set new records. These were the historical novel and that cloudy area comprising fantasy, freshly wrought myth, and indeed any fiction not rooted in the here and now.
Not as finished in style, but bolder in the interpretation of history in terms "reflecting the changed values of the age," was the pioneering Geoffrey Trease. He also produced excellent work in other juvenile fields. Typical of his highest energies is the exciting Hills of Varna (1948), a story of the Italian Renaissance in which Erasmus and the great printer Aldus Manutius figure prominently. Henry Treece, whose gifts were directed to depicting violent action and vigorous, barbaric characters, produced a memorable series of Viking novels of which Swords from the North (1967) is typical.
This new English school, stressing conscientious scholarship, realism, honesty, social awareness, and general disdain for mere swash and buckle, produced work that completely eclipsed the rusty tradition of Marryat and George Alfred Henty. Some of its foremost representatives were Cynthia Harnett, Serraillier, Barbara Leonie Picard, Ronald Welch (pseudonym of Ronald O. Felton), C. Walter Hodges, Hester Burton, Mary Ray, Naomi Mitchison, and K.M. Peyton, whose "Flambards" series is a kind of Edwardian historical family chronicle. Leon Garfield, though not working with historical characters, created strange picaresque tales that gave children a thrilling, often chilling insight into the 18th-century England of Smollett and Fielding.
In the realm of imagination England not only retained but enhanced its supremacy with such classics as Tom's Midnight Garden (1958), by Ann Philippa Pearce, a haunting, perfectly constructed story in which the present and Victoria's age blend into one. There is the equally haunting Green Knowe series, by Lucy M. Boston, the first of which, The Children of Greene Knowe, appeared when the author was 62. The impingement of a world of legend and ancient, unsleeping magic upon the real world is the basic theme of the remarkable novels of Alan Garner. Complex, melodramatic, stronger in action than in characterization, they appeal to imaginative, "literary" children. Garner's rather nightmarish narrative The Owl Service (1967) is perhaps the most subtle.
Tolkien's fellow scholar, C.S. Lewis, created his own otherworld of Narnia. It is more derivative than Tolkien's (he owes something, for example, to Nesbit), more clearly Christian-allegorical, more carefully adapted to the tastes of children. Though uneven, the seven volumes of the cycle, published through the years 1950 to 1956, are exciting, often humorous, inventive, and, in the final scenes of The Last Battle, deeply moving.
The third of these classic secondary worlds is in a sense not a creation of fantasy. The four volumes (1952-61) about the Borrowers, with their brief pendant, Poor Stainless (1971), ask the reader to accept only a single impossibility, that in a quiet country house, under the grandfather clock, live the tiny Clock family: Pod, Homily, and their daughter Arrietty. All that follows from this premise is logical, precisely pictured, and carries absolute conviction. Many critics believe that this miniature world so lovingly, so patiently fashioned by Mary Norton will last as long as those located at the bottom of the rabbit hole and through the looking glass.