Children’s literature, the body of written works and accompanying illustrations produced in order to entertain or instruct young people. The genre encompasses a wide range of works, including acknowledged classics of world literature, picture books and easy-to-read stories written exclusively for children, and fairy tales, lullabies, fables, folk songs, and other primarily orally transmitted materials.
Children’s literature first clearly emerged as a distinct and independent form of literature in the second half of the 18th century, before which it had been at best only in an embryonic stage. During the 20th century, however, its growth has been so luxuriant as to make defensible its claim to be regarded with the respect—though perhaps not the solemnity—that is due any other recognized branch of literature.
Definition of terms
All potential or actual young literates, from the instant they can with joy leaf through a picture book or listen to a story read aloud, to the age of perhaps 14 or 15, may be called children. Thus “children” includes “young people.” Two considerations blur the definition. Today’s young teenager is an anomaly: his environment pushes him toward a precocious maturity. Thus, though he may read children’s books, he also, and increasingly, reads adult books. Second, the child survives in many adults. As a result, some children’s books (e.g., Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh, and, at one time, Munro Leaf’s Story of Ferdinand) are also read widely by adults.
In the term children’s literature, the more important word is literature. For the most part, the adjective imaginative is to be felt as preceding it. It comprises that vast, expanding territory recognizably staked out for a junior audience, which does not mean that it is not also intended for seniors. Adults admittedly make up part of its population: children’s books are written, selected for publication, sold, bought, reviewed, and often read aloud by grown-ups. Sometimes they seem also to be written with adults in mind, as for example the popular French Astérix series of comics parodying history. Nevertheless, by and large there is a sovereign republic of children’s literature. To it may be added five colonies or dependencies: first, “appropriated” adult books satisfying two conditions—they must generally be read by children and they must have sharply affected the course of children’s literature (Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, the collection of folktales by the brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, the folk-verse anthology Des Knaben Wunderhorn [“The Boy’s Magic Horn”], edited by Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano, and William Blake’s Songs of Innocence); second, books the audiences of which seem not to have been clearly conceived by their creators (or their creators may have ignored, as irrelevant, such a consideration) but that are now fixed stars in the child’s literary firmament (Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Charles Perrault’s fairy tales; third, picture books and easy-to-read stories commonly subsumed under the label of literature but qualifying as such only by relaxed standards (though Beatrix Potter and several other writers do nonetheless qualify); fourth, first quality children’s versions of adult classics (Walter de la Mare’s Stories from the Bible, perhaps Howard Pyle’s retellings of the Robin Hood ballads and tales; finally, the domain of once oral “folk” material that children have kept alive—folktales and fairy tales; fables, sayings, riddles, charms, tongue twisters; folksongs, lullabies, hymns, carols, and other simple poetry; rhymes of the street, the playground, the nursery; and, supremely, Mother Goose and nonsense verse.
Five categories that are often considered children’s literature are excluded from this section. The broadest of the excluded categories is that of unblushingly commercial and harmlessly transient writing, including comic books, much of which, though it may please young readers, and often for good reasons, is for the purposes of this article notable only for its sociohistorical, rather than literary, importance. Second, all books of systematic instruction are barred except those sparse examples (e.g., the work of John Amos Comenius) that illuminate the history of the subject. Third, excluded from discussion is much high literature that was not originally intended for children: from the past, Jean de La Fontaine’s Fables, James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking tales, Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Alexandre Dumas’ Three Musketeers, Rudyard Kipling’s Kim; from the modern period, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ Yearling, J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, The Diary of Anne Frank, Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki, Enid Bagnold’s National Velvet. A fourth, rather minor, category comprises books about the young where the content but not the style or point of view is relevant (Sir James Barrie’s Sentimental Tommy, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, F. Anstey’s [Thomas Anstey Guthrie] Vice Versa). Finally, barred from central, though not all, consideration is the “nonfiction,” or fact, book. Except for a handful of such books, the bright pages of which still rain influence or which possess artistic merit, this literature should be viewed from its socioeducational-commercial aspect.
The case for a children’s literature
Many otherwise comprehensive histories of literature slight or omit the child’s reading interests. Many observers have made explicit the suspicion that children’s literature, like that of detection or suspense, is “inferior.” They cannot detect a sufficiently long “tradition”; distinguish an adequate number of master works; or find, to use on thoughtful critic’s words, “style, sensibility, vision.”
Others, holding a contrary view, assert that a tradition of two centuries is not to be ignored.
Though the case for a children’s literature must primarily rest on its major writers (including a half dozen literary geniuses), it is based as well on other supports that bolster its claim to artistic stature.
Children’s literature, while a tributary of the literary mainstream, offers its own identifiable, semidetached history. In part it is the issue of certain traceable social movements, of which the “discovery” of the child (see below) is the most salient. It is independent to the degree that, while it must meet many of the standards of adult literature, it has also developed aesthetic criteria of its own by which it may be judged. According to some of its finest practitioners, it is independent, too, as the only existing literary medium enabling certain things to be said that would otherwise remain unsaid or unsayable. The nature of its audience sets it apart; it is often read, especially by children younger than 12, in a manner suggesting trance, distinct from that of adult reading. Universally diffused among literate peoples, it offers a rich array of genres, types, and themes, some resembling grown-up progenitors, many peculiar to itself. Its “style, sensibility, vision” range over a spectrum wide enough to span matter-of-fact realism and tenuous mysticism.
Other measures of its maturity include an extensive body (notably in Germany, Italy, Sweden, Japan, and the United States) of commentary, scholarship, criticism, history, biography, and bibliography, along with the beginnings of an aesthetic theory or philosophy of composition. Finally, one might note its power to engender its own institutions: publishing houses, theatres, libraries, itinerant storytellers, critics, periodicals, instruction in centres of higher learning, lectureships, associations and conferences, “book weeks,” collections, exhibitions, and prizes. Indeed, the current institutionalizing of children’s literature on an international scale has gone so far, some feel, as to cast a shadow on the spontaneity and lack of self-consciousness that should lie at its heart.
Some general features and forces
The discovery of the child
A self-aware literature flows from a recognition of its proper subject matter. The proper subject matter of children’s literature, apart from informational or didactic works, is children. More broadly, it embraces the whole content of the child’s imaginative world and that of his daily environment, as well as certain ideas and sentiments characteristic of it. The population of this world is made up not only of children themselves but of animated objects, plants, even grammatical and mathematical abstractions; toys, dolls, and puppets; real, chimerical, and invented animals; miniature or magnified humans; spirits or grotesques of wood, water, air, fire, and space; supernatural and fantasy creatures; figures of fairy tale, myth, and legend; imagined familiars and doppelgänger; and grown-ups as seen through the child’s eyes—whether Napoleon, Dr. Dolittle, parents, or the corner grocer. That writers did not detect this lively cosmos for two and a half millennia is one of the curiosities of literature. At any moment there has always been a numerous, physically visible, and audible company of children. Whether this sizable minority, appraised as literary raw material, could be as rewarding as the adult majority was never asked.
And so, almost to the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, children’s literature remained recessive. The chief, though not the only, reason is improbably simple: the child himself, though there, was not seen—not seen, that is, as a child.
In preliterate societies he was and is viewed in the light of his social, economic, and religious relationship to the tribe or clan. Though he may be nurtured in all tenderness, he is thought of not as himself but as a pre-adult, which is but one of his many forms. Among Old Testament Jews the child’s place in society replicated his father’s, molded by his relation to God. So, too, in ancient Greece and Rome the child, dressed in the modified adult costume that with appropriate changes of fashion remained his fate for centuries to come, was conceived as a miniature adult. His importance lay not in himself but in what Aristotle would have called his final cause: the potential citizen-warrior. A girl child was a seedbed of future citizen-warriors. Hence classical literature either does not see the child at all or misconstrues him. Astyanax and Ascanius, as well as Medea’s two children, are not persons. They are stage props. Aristophanes scorns as unworthy of dramatic treatment the children in Euripides’ Alcestis.
Throughout the Middle Ages and far into the late Renaissance the child remained, as it were, terra incognita. A sharp sense of generation gap—one of the motors of a children’s literature—scarcely existed. The family, young and old, was a kind of homogenized mix. Sometimes children were even regarded as infrahuman: for Montaigne they had “neither mental activities nor recognizable body shape.” The year 1658 is a turning point. In that year a Moravian educator, Comenius, published Orbis Sensualium Pictus (The Visible World in Pictures, 1659), a teaching device that was also the first picture book for children. It embodied a novel insight: children’s reading should be of a special order because children are not scaled-down adults. But the conscious, systematic, and successful exploitation of this insight was to wait for almost a century.
It is generally felt that, both as a person worthy of special regard and as an idea worthy of serious contemplation, the child began to come into his own in the second half of the 18th century. His emergence, as well as that of a literature suited to his needs, is linked to many historical forces, among them the development of Enlightenment thought (Rousseau and, before him, John Locke); the rise of the middle class; the beginnings of the emancipation of women (children’s literature, unlike that for grown-ups, is in large measure a distaff product) and Romanticism, with its minor strands of the cult of the child (Wordsworth and others) and of genres making a special appeal to the young (folktales and fairy tales, myths, ballads). Yet, with all these forces working for the child, he still might not have emerged had it not been for a few unpredictable geniuses: William Blake, Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, George MacDonald, Louisa May Alcott, Mark Twain, Collodi, Hans Christian Andersen. But, once tentatively envisaged as an independent being, a literature proper to him could also be envisaged. And so in the mid-18th century what may be defined as children’s literature was at last developing.
Shifting visions of the child
Even after the child had been recognized, his literature on occasion persisted in viewing him as a diminutive adult. More characteristically, however, “realistic” (that is, nonfantastic) fiction in all countries regarded the discovered child in a mirror that provided only a partial reflection of him. There are fewer instances of attempts to present the child whole, in the round, than there are (as in Tolstoy or Joyce) attempts to represent the whole adult. Twain’s Huck Finn, Erich Kästner’s Emil (in Emil and the Detectives), Vadim Frolov’s Sasha (in What It’s All About), and Maria Gripe’s delightful Josephine all exemplify in-the-round characterization. More frequently, however, children’s literature portrays the young as types. Thus there is the brand of hell of the Puritan tradition; the moral child of Mrs. Trimmer; the well-instructed child of Madame de Genlis; the small upper class benefactor of Arnaud Berquin; the naughty child, modulated variously in Catherine Sinclair’s Holiday House and in the books of Comtesse de Ségur, E. Nesbit, Dr. Heinrich Hoffmann (Struwwelpeter), and Wilhelm Busch (Max und Moritz); the rational child of Maria Edgeworth; the little prig of Thomas Day’s Sandford and Merton; the little angel (Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy); the forlorn waif (Hector Malot’s Sans Famille); the manly, outdoor child (Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons); etc. The rationale behind these shifting visions of childhood is akin to Renaissance theories of “humours” or “the ruling passion.” Progress in children’s literature depended partly on abandoning this mechanical, part-for-the-whole attitude. One encouraging note in realistic children’s fiction of the second half of the 20th century in all advanced countries is the appearance of a more organic view.
A third universal feature: children’s literature appears later than adult and grows more slowly. Only after the trail has been well blazed does it make use of new techniques, whether of composition or illustration. As for content, only after World War II did it exploit certain realistic themes and attitudes, turning on race, class, war, and sex, that had been part of general literature at least since the 1850s. This tardiness may be due to the child’s natural conservatism.
Fourth, the tempo of development varies sharply from country to country and from region to region. It is plausible that England should create a complex children’s literature, while a less-developed region (the Balkans, for example) might not. Less clear is why the equally high cultures of France and England should be represented by unequal literatures.
The fifth, and most striking, general feature is the creative tension resulting from a constantly shifting balance between two forces: that of the pulpit-schoolroom and that of the imagination. The first force may take on many guises. It may stress received religious or moral doctrine, thus generating the Catholic children’s literature of Spain or the moral tale of Georgian and early Victorian England. It may bear down less on morality than on mere good manners, propriety, or adjustment to the prevailing social code. It may emphasize nationalist or patriotic motives, as in Edmondo De Amicis’ post-Risorgimento Cuore (The Heart of a Child) or much Soviet production. Or its concern may be pedagogical, the imparting of “useful” information, frequently sugarcoated in narrative or dialogue. Whatever its form, it is distinguishable from the shaping spirit of imagination, which ordinarily embodies itself in children’s games and rhymes, the fairy tale, the fantasy, animal stories such as Kipling’s Jungle Books, nonsense, nonmoral poetry, humour, or the realistic novel conceived as art rather than admonition.
Children’s literature designed for entertainment rather than self-improvement, aiming at emotional expansion rather than acculturation, usually develops late. Alice in Wonderland, the first supreme victory of the imagination (except for Mother Goose), did not appear until 1865. Frequently the literature of delight has underground sources of nourishment and inspiration: oral tradition, nursery songs, and the folkish institutions of the chapbook and the penny romance.
While the didactic and the imaginative are conveniently thought of as polar, they need not always be inimical. Little Women and Robinson Crusoe are at once didactically moral and highly poetical. Nevertheless, many of the acknowledged classics in the field, from Alice to The Hobbit, incline to fantasy, which is less true of literature for grown-ups.
The development of children’s literature
Keeping these five general features of development in mind, certain criteria may now be suggested as helpful in making a gross estimate of the degree of that development within any given country. Some of these criteria are artistic. Others link with social progress, wealth, technological level, or the political structure. In what seems their order of importance, these criteria are:
1. Degree of awareness of the child’s identity (see above).
2. Progress made beyond passive dependence on oral tradition, folklore, and legend.
3. Rise of a class of professional writers, as distinct from moral reformers, schoolteachers, clerics, or versatile journalists—all those who, for pedagogical, doctrinal, or pecuniary reasons turn themselves into writers for children. For example, a conscious Italian literature for young people may be said to have begun in 1776 with the Rev. Francesco Soave’s moralistic “Short Stories,” and largely because that literature continued to be composed largely by nonprofessionals, its record has been lacklustre. It took more than a century after the Rev. Francesco to produce a Pinocchio. And only in the 20th century, as typified by the outstanding work of a professional like Gianni Rodari (e.g., Telephone Tales), did children’s literature in Italy seem to be getting into full stride.
4. Degree of independence from authoritarian controls: church, state, school system, a rigid family structure. Although this criterion might be rejected by historians of some nations, one must somehow try to explain why the Spanish, a great and imaginative people, took so long—indeed until 1952—to produce, in Sanchez-Silva, a children’s writer of any notable talent.
5. Number of “classics” the influence of which transcends national boundaries.
6. Invention of new forms or genres and the exploitation of a variety of traditional ones.
7. Measure of dependence on translations.
8. Quantity of primary literature: that is, annual production of children’s books and, more to the point, of good children’s books.
9. Quantity of secondary literature: richness and scope of a body of scholarship, criticism, reviewing.
10. Level of institutional development: libraries, publishing houses, associations, etc.
To these criteria some might add a vigorous tradition of illustration. But that is arguable. While Beatrix Potter’s words and pictures compose an indivisible unit, it is equally true that a country may produce a magnificent school of artists (Czechoslovakia’s Jǐrí Trnka, Ota Janec̆ek, and others) without developing a literature of matching depth and variety.
The criteria applied: three examples
West versus East
The first application of such standards reveals the expected: a gap separating the achievement of the Far East from that of the West. Some Eastern literatures (New Guinea) have not advanced beyond the stage of oral tradition. Others (India, the Philippines, Ceylon, Iran) have been handicapped by language problems. Professional children’s writers are rarer than in the West: according to D.R. Kalia, former director of the Delhi Public Library, “No such class exists in Hindi.” In Japan, authoritarian patterns—filial piety and ancestor worship—have operated as brakes, though far less since World War II. A low economic level and inadequate technology discourage, in such countries as Burma, Sri Lanka (Ceylon), and Thailand, the origination and distribution of indigenous writing. A towering roadblock is the tendency to imitate the children’s books of the West.
It is true that this vast Eastern region, considered as a whole, has produced a number of works ranking as “classics.” Most advanced is Japan. Its literature for children goes back at least to the late 19th century and by 1928 was established in its own right. Japan’s “discovery” of the child seems to have been made directly after World War II. In Iwaya Sazanami, Japan has its Grimm; in Ogawa Minei, perhaps its Andersen; in the contemporary Ishii Momoko, a critic and creative writer of quality; in Takeyama Michio’s Harp of Burma (available in English), a high-quality postwar controversial novel. But, though less markedly in Japan, the basic Oriental inspiration remains fixed in folklore (also, in China and Japan, in nursery songs and rhymes), and the didactic imperative continues to act as a hobble. By most criteria the development of Eastern (as compared with Western) children’s literature still appears to be sparse and tentative.
North versus south
In western Europe there is a sharp variation or unevenness, as between north and south, in the tempo of development. This basic feature was first pointed out by Paul Hazard, a French critic, in Les Livres, les enfants et les hommes (Eng. trans. by Marguerite Mitchell, Books, Children and Men, 1944; 4th ed., 1960): “In the matter of literature for children the North surpasses the South by a large margin.” For Hazard, Spain had no children’s literature; Italy, with its Pinocchio and Cuore, could point only to an isolated pair of works of note, and even France in order to strengthen its claims had to include northern Frenchmen: Erckmann-Chatrian, Jules Verne—and the classic Comtesse de Ségur came from Russia.
Hazard wrote in the 1920s. Since then the situation has improved, not only in his own country, but in Italy and in Portugal. Yet he is essentially correct: the south cannot match the richness of England, Scotland, Germany, and the Scandinavian countries. To reinforce his position, one might also adduce the United States, noting that the Mason–Dixon line is (though not in the field of general literature) a dividing line: the American South, even including the Uncle Remus stories, has supplied very little good children’s reading. As for nursery literature, though analogous rhymes are found everywhere, especially in China, the English Mother Goose is unique in the claims made for it as a work of art.
Why is the north superior to the south? The first criterion of development may be illuminating. It simply restates Hazard’s dictum: “For the Latins, children have never been anything but future men. The Nordics have understood better this truer truth, that men are only grown-up children.” (“Adults are obsolete children,” says the American children’s author “Dr. Seuss.”) Hazard does not mention other factors. Historically, the south has shown greater attachment to authoritarian controls. Also, up to recent times, it has depended heavily on reworked folklore as against free invention. Besides, there is the mysterious factor of climate: it could be true that children in Latin countries mature faster and are sooner ready for adult literature. In France a special intellectual tradition, that of Cartesian logic, tends to discourage a children’s literature. Clear and distinct ideas, excellent in themselves, do not seem to feed the youthful imagination.
Again applying the chosen criteria, familiar patterns are recognizable: unevenness, as compared with the United States; belatedness—in Argentina the cuento infantil is hardly detectable before 1900; and especially an unbalanced polarity, with didacticism decidedly the stronger magnet. The close connection of the church with the child’s family and school life has encouraged a literature stressing piety, and this at a time when the West, at least in its northern latitudes, is concerned less with the salvation than with the imagination of the child. Fantasy emerged only in the 1930s, in Brazil and in Mexico, where a Spanish exile, Antoniorrobles (pen name of Antonio Robles), continued to develop his inventive vein. And realistic writing about the actual life of the young evolved even more deliberately, being generally marked by a patriotic note. Though understandable and wholesome, this did not seem to help the cause of the imagination.
Folklore has been vigorously exploited, often by scholars of high repute. It is largely influenced by the legendry of Spain. Cuba, however, has produced interesting Afro-American tales for children; Argentina offers some indigenous folk stories and tales of gaucho life; and Central America is rich in native traditional verse enjoyed by children.
Latin American literature in general displays a special characteristic, part of its Iberian heritage: a partiality for linguistic decoration, which is unpalatable to the relatively straightforward taste of the young reader. Also the Latin-American view of the child remains tinged with a sentimentality from which many European countries and the United States had by 1914 more or less freed themselves. Thus verse for children, a medium specially cultivated in Latin America, has run to the soft, the sweet, even the lachrymose rather than to the gay, the humorous, or the sanguine—moods more congenial to the child’s sensibility. This is true even of the children’s verse of the Nobel Prize-winning poet Gabriela Mistral. To these two weaknesses one must add a third: the practical difficulty involved in the fact that most families cannot afford books. The absence of a powerful middle class has had a retarding effect.
Children in Latin America often complain that the authors write not for them but for their parents. They are given lectura (“reading matter”) rather than literatura, which is but to say that in Latin America the admonitory note, considered so useful by church, state, and parent, continues to be sounded.
In summary, and applying the criteria: some less advanced Latin-American countries can hardly be said to have a children’s literature at all. Others have produced notable writers: Brazil’s José Bento Monteiro Lobato, Argentina’s Ana Maria Berry, Colombia’s Rafael Pombo, Uruguay’s Horacio Quiroga. Yet the quality gap separating Latin-American children’s literature from that of its northern neighbour is still wide.