Editor's Introduction

We are all afraid of forgetting. Forgetting is a sign of age, of stress, of distraction. To forget is to lose something—an object, an appointment, a bit of knowledge—or perhaps something more valuable: an opportunity or a memory. To forget is to make a mistake, to be flawed, to be, finally, utterly human. We fear forgetting, and yet, part of growing up is forgetting some of the obsessions and pleasures that were important to us as children, things that belong only to the province of childhood. We might immediately think fondly of sentimental forgetting which is actually the process of nostalgia: recapturing the joy felt on the last day of the school year with all the promise of lazy summer ahead, or the embarrassed pride when wearing a construction-paper crown listening to “Happy Birthday to You.” None of us want to forget or lose this part of childhood—whether the memories are real or imagined. Of course, there is also the forgetting which is a kind of blocking out of childhood’s pain and fear and loneliness. Once we realize we have forgotten, our immediate response is to rectify the error and resolve never to forget again.

Another side of forgetting is not knowing in the first place—but thinking that you should. I imagine that every teacher/scholar of children’s literature has had the experience of watching the look of delight on a new acquaintance’s face when learning what we do for a living, turn inevitably to disappointment when we admit to ignorance of the interlocutor’s favorite book from childhood. There are too many books out there to ever, ever catch up. So why try to recover any of the lost ones at all? The answer, I think, is obvious, but worth restating here: we want to learn about what is old not to restore what is past in a preserved state, or to return to an earlier time (pleasing, yet impossible tasks) but rather to gain, in the present, a new look, a renewed understanding of what was really there all the time after all. This issue of The Lion and the Unicorn brings forward a number of authors who have been forgotten, lost, or misplaced from our cultural memory, from the children’s literature “canon,” from literary history, in order to recollect, reconnect, and fix them and their fiction, if only for a moment, in place. The following essays on English and American forgotten authors discuss periodical fiction, historical novels, fantasy novels, and poetry, from the nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth. The literary and cultural value of the texts discussed and the relative obscurity of their authors, or their less-known children’s works, is the glue that holds these illuminating essays together.

Claudia Nelson’s “Mixed Messages: Authoring and Authority in British Boys’ Magazines,” explores the dynamic between the doubly anonymous editors of late-nineteenth-century boys’ magazines (whose identities were hidden then and unknown to most scholars now), and their boy readers. Nelson argues that the success of these papers lay in the nimble use of mass-marketing strategies that created an appealing literary product at once both morally conservative and at the same time appearing openly to subvert traditional social hierarchies. Ethel Parton’s historical novel of 1820s Newburyport, Melissa Ann (1931), as Marilynn S. Olson argues, is an appealing and complex novel where the need for “stillness” results in the main character’s gradual transformation into a valued household object. Gillian Adams’ essay brings to our attention the Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen’s now forgotten children’s book The Lost Zoo (1940). Adams analyzes The Lost Zoo’s “uncertain status” as the book suspends between audiences—child and adult, black and white—and its neglect in the canons of both children’s literature and African-American literature. Turning to political ideology as a perhaps surprising issue of concern in 1940s (and later) books for children, Julia Mickenberg describes the “radical” books of Meridel Le Sueur. Le Sueur’s populist and anticapitalist novels offer a different picture of American heritage and history than the widely held belief in Manifest...