The Nesbit Tradition: The Children's Novel, 1945-1970 (review)

Marcus Crouch, Deputy County Librarian for Kent, England, is a respected critic of children's literature. This work only adds to his reputation for balanced and thorough analysis.

Humanists will especially welcome his introductory comment, which establishes the perspective from which the entire book is written: "I come more and more to the view that there are no children's books. They are a concept invented for commercial reasons and kept alive by the human instinct for classification and categorizing. . . . When a child has mastered the technique of reading . . . the world opens for him, and not one artificially isolated segment of it."

Mr. Crouch's initial effort is to isolate several defining characteristics of E. Nesbit's stories: "portraits of real, timelessly naughty children"; "incongruities which make for humour"; "magic applied to the commonplaces of daily life"; "the 'time' theme in historical reconstruction"; and especially "colloquial, flexible and revealing prose which was her unique contribution to the children's novel." To pinpoint these attributes as essential to E. Nesbit's artistic accomplishment is a valuable critical service in itself. But Mr. Crouch's contribution is even more significant as it enables him to single out writers and aspects of style for discerning and sometimes illuminating comment.

For example, he is able to include writers not usually thought of as children's authors among practitioners of the Nesbit traditon; one of those he notes is the distinguished British novelist and translator Rex Warner, who in 1936 wrote a story for the young called The Kite, about the international drug traffic. Crouch calls it "exciting and forward-looking."

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the Nesbit tradition as Mr. Crouch defines it is his emphasis upon the vital role of humor. His high praise of the work of a well-known American writer makes plain the attitude he values most highly as the essence of the Nesbit tradition. His comments also convey a fair sense of the application of his critical outlook to specific works:

Natalie Savage Carlson, an American writer who knows France and French ways, writes with an effortless lightness of touch. It all seems easy, but so vivid a picture of an interdependent society of children and adults cannot but be the work of a disciplined and very skilful writer. The dialogue is especially fine, capturing the fine inconsequence of children talking and of the logic of men like the merry-go-round man. When he was a boy he had always said when he felt miserable: When you are a big man you shall have a merry-go-round.' Now he is big and he has one, and he is sick of it. But he cannot sell it. 'How can I sell the merry-go-round that I promised to a poor, unhappy boy?'

Thus, economically, either by direct quotation or succinct comment, Mr. Crouch illustrates, extends, and refines a number of helpful critical observations about the many writers who wrote in "the Nesbit tradition" during the twenty-five year period, 1945-1970.