Historical Dictionary of Children's Literature (review)

[Response]

Since the publication in 1984 of Humphrey Carpenter and Mari Pritchard's groundbreaking Oxford Companion to Children's Literature, there have been several overarching surveys of the subject, of which Emer O'Sullivan's is the most recent. Some have chosen a thematic, essay based format, while others like Victor Watson's Cambridge Guide to Children's Literature in English (2001) and the four volume Oxford Encyclopedia of Children's Literature, edited by Jack Zipes in 2006, have used a more easily interrogated alphabetical arrangement. O'Sullivan, whose Introduction acknowledges her debt to Zipes and Watson, has created her Dictionary as volume 46 of Scarecrow's ongoing series of "Historical Dictionaries" of literature and the arts. This, the back cover blurb claims, "tells the story of children's literature through a chronology, an introductory essay, appendixes, a bibliography, and over 500 cross-referenced dictionary entries on authors, books, and genres." This it does, though there is a single rather than the promised multiple appendices. Given the obvious restrictions dictated by the house style of the series, the 370 small pages of fairly large print of which this book is comprised provide a good overview of the history of English language literature written for young people. The first section of O'Sullivan's Introduction briefly considers the question "what is children's literature?" (1), outlining some of the ideological dilemmas which arise in attempting to define the texts which children read. She moves to a two-page account of "The Rise and Early Development of Children's Literature" (7), in which she acknowledges the "Anglo-American" emphasis of the Dictionary, and concludes with a section outlining the possible effect of internationalism and globalisation on the future of children's literature.

In the main body of the work, existing scholars of children's literature are as likely to identify what has been omitted as what is included, and the Chronology that prefaces the author's Introduction and the Dictionary itself cannot be all inclusive. Most of the major authors, publishers and titles of the years between 990 and 2008 are there, but the inclusion of more North American data than British-published reference works might result from the author being selective in her choice of people or books. Items that many may regard as significant in the history of this literature have been excluded. There is, for example, no reference to Ellenor Fenn either in the Chronology or the Dictionary, to Eliza Fenwick, nor to the Darton publishing house, all of which made a substantial contribution to the development of writing for young people in the long eighteenth century. In the Chronology, we find the major event of 1996 is the invention of Teletubbies, but nothing there nor in the Dictionary about the development of broadcasting for children. Under the entry for 1969 we find Sesame Street, but 1964 sees no mention of Playschool, surely equally significant for preschool children in the UK and Canada. And if we are looking at the history of children's literature, why is there no reference to the British television programme Jackanory, which has promoted stories and storytelling, and their writers, to children for nearly fifty years? The lack of a specific reference to the influence of broadcast media is another significant omission.

As O'Sullivan's book is a dictionary, with the assumption that readers should be able to find anything by a simple alphabetical search, there is no index, and though there is heavy-type cross referencing within the dictionary section, it does not necessarily pick up references made elsewhere in the text. As a result, readers must search each section of text to find the totality of information on any subject. This inaccessibility is frustrating, for example when the Chronology mentions the institution of the Carnegie Medal in 1936 (xxii), the Dictionary elaborates on that entry (60), but readers are directed to the Appendix (278) to see who the recipients have been. It must also be noted that...