Popular Children’s Literature in Britain (review)

Popular Children’s Literature in Britain, edited by Julia Briggs, Dennis Butts, and M. O. Grenby, immediately announces the impenetrability of its subject. Defining “popularity” is tricky enough for any literary historian, but even thornier when discussing a genre whose readers do not buy books and whose buyers do not intend to read the books they buy. The gulf—which Jacqueline Rose’s The Case of Peter Pan, or The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction (1984) confronted us with twenty-five years ago—between the writers, publishers, and purchasers of children’s literature and the child readers whom the literature is supposedly for, is perhaps never as wide as when we ask what books children have actually enjoyed. Grenby’s introduction exposes the unreliability of the evidence that scholars have trusted: sales figures and circulation records tell us merely what adults acquiring books for children thought they would, or should, want to read; retellings and variations demonstrate what publishers and authors hoped adults would buy; and reader surveys and children’s diaries reveal only how savvy youngsters are about the answers expected from them. Even if scholars could determine what books children have liked, why they liked them would still elude us, for as Grenby points out, “the particular pleasure a child might take in a book does not necessarily derive from any qualities which an adult might perceive in it” (7).

The volume thus opens with a daring challenge to its own project, and its finest essays interrogate what popularity means and how we might measure and evaluate it. “Old Tales Retold,” the book’s first section, offers a key correction to the critical commonplace that children’s literature was the invention of eighteenth-century moralists hoping to counter the injurious effects of lowbrow, popular reading. Instead, Kevin Carpenter’s “Robin Hood in Boys’ Weeklies to 1914” and George Speaight and Brian Alderson’s “From Chapbooks to Pantomime” show that children’s writers frequently employed sanitized elements of the seedier genres they sought to unseat, particularly melodrama and theatre. These essays recognize that children’s literature is a complex reticulation of literary borrowings, generic instability, and mixed media. Since the endpoint of the collection is an analysis of the Harry Potter craze, this reevaluation of the relationship between children’s literature and popular entertainment situates J. K. Rowling’s series, and the rest of the texts discussed here, in a long tradition of inscribing childhood both within and against mass culture.

The rise of Harry Potter is, however, not the only narrative that the collection presents. The second part, “Forgotten Favorites,” turns to the writings of Barbara Hofland, Hesba Stretton, G. A. Henty, and Angela Brazil—nineteenth-century bestsellers, now largely unread—in order to construct a counter-history of children’s literature that, according to Grenby, uses “the criterion of popularity alone” in a “deliberate attempt to interrogate the ‘Great Tradition’” (13). This is a commendable task, but it disappointingly overlooks the suspicion, so productively generated in the introduction, about our means of knowing what was popular and with whom. Just after we are told to distrust sales figures and retellings, several essays mobilize precisely this evidence to justify their choices of subject. The thriving sales of Stretton’s Jessica’s First Prayer (1867) and the multiple versions of Madame d’Aulnoy’s “The White Cat” (1698), for instance, are offered as proof of these works’ status among children. There is too little consensus among the chapters about how deeply the collection aims to unsettle our use of the term “popular.”

Despite this conceptual inconsistency, the third section, “Popular Instruction, Popularity Imposed,” smartly illustrates the possibilities for new inquiries and textual approaches that a critical skepticism about popularity could produce. Focusing on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century books published in great quantities but probably not enjoyed by children, Kimberley Reynolds’s “Rewarding Reads? Giving, Receiving and Resisting Evangelical Reward and Prize Books” speculates that the number of...