The Signal Approach to Children's Books, A Collection (review)

The periodical Signal: Approaches to Children's Books released its premier issue in January 1970 and has from its inception provided a forum for the lively, thought-provoking discussion of children's literature in its many aspects. Nancy Chambers' succinct introduction to this volume, a collection of essays published over the journal's ten-year history, states both the aims of Signal the periodical and the achievement of The Signal Approach. Mrs. Chambers writes:

We intended it to provide a publishing opportunity for people whose ideas could not be contained in brief articles or reviews. We wanted to encourage critical writing as well as to reflect the world of children's books from a variety of viewpoints. And we hoped to develop a manner that did not assume an audience of parents or teachers or librarians in their vocational roles . . . but that spoke to individuals who were more than fleetingly attentive to the subject. . . . Our main line, however, is the thoughtful consideration of children's books, their authors and their illustrators.

(p. 9)

These aims have been amply fulfilled and Signal enjoys a fine and continuing reputation which enables it to attract to its pages the critical and writing talents of such people as Elaine Moss, Peter Hunt, John Rowe Townsend, Robert Westall (unfortunately among the many who could not be included in the collection), and Aidan Chambers. Contributors are represented by eighteen major articles, a series of thirteen "Signal Quotes" (extracts from articles on various topics, often regrettably and tantalizingly truncated and formless), and an index to the names and authors of all articles published in Signal between 1970 and 1980 as well as, in a useful overview, "the principal subjects, authors, and books discussed in these articles" (p. 329). The inclusion of numerous illustrations, some accompanying articles and some featured works by artists awarded the Kate Greenaway Medal, complete the book.

Elaine Moss describes Signal as "untied by its open-door policy to any particular aspect of children's books" (p. 73) and applauds the eclecticism of the present collection as a faithful representation of its variform source. There are frequent juxtapositions, surprising but not unpleasantly so, of slight topics lightly handled (usually of a subjective or personal nature, as the very delightful "Amateur Joys" by Julia MacRae), and the thoroughgoing challenge of articles such as Aidan Chambers' "The Reader in the Book." Light and serious, pragmatic and theoretical, Signal encompasses them all. There are, however, recurrent modes, subjects, attitudes and themes, so that the whole, if a conglomerate, is definitely more than a conglomeration.

One unifying theme is provided by Elaine Moss's own article, "The Seventies in British Children's Books." This is a wide-ranging survey, as its title suggests, commissioned for and in many ways the pivot of this book. The seventies were years of hope, energy, and pragmatism, qualities illuminating Signal's pages and children's books—their production, dissemination, and reception (by critics and by children). (John Donovan, in excerpts taken from his regularly featured article "American Dispatch" covers some of the same areas from the American perspective, but refers more directly to the moment, not having written retrospectively.) In the process of recapitulating these developments for us, Elaine Moss illustrates what she considers the decisive development—that these were the "years in which the needs of the child were recognized and considered, years in which the child was seen as an integral part of the book he read" (p. 78).

This is the nexus of the theoretical fabric of the collection: in Aidan Chambers' phrase "the reader in the book." Several of the critical articles, notably those by Peter Hunt, Charles Sarland, and Aidan Chambers, display appraisals circling around, if not centered on, the narrative contract and the ideas inherent in the concept that "in his book an author creates a relationship with a reader in order to discover the meaning of...