Rediscovering Nancy Drew

11. Children's Series Books and the Rhetoric of Guidance: A Historical Overview

Children's Series Books and the Rhetoric of Guidance: A Historical Overview Nancy Tillman Romalov ~ri\.rJhether children's reading of mass-marketed series books ~ ~ should be encouraged or discouraged is the subject of a longraging debate. This essay will provide a bit of historical background to the debate. For to fully understand the controversy we need to consider the broader cultural contexts which have nourished it. In particular we need to recognize this campaign against series books and other mass-produced fiction as part of the history of popular culture in America, of the ongoing discourse over "high" and "low" culture, oflarger debates about literary value and about who gets to do the valuing. Uncovering the specifics of the debate reveals our attitudes and policies regarding reading and readers and the role of educators and librarians in determining certain cultural standards. I will begin by returning to the emergence of the public library movement in the late nineteenth century and specifically to the rise ofchildren's services in the public library, since this development coincided with the rise ofthe popular series books published by Stratemeyer and others. The public library movement was part of larger reform efforts of the Progressive Era that sought to shape public behavior . In the course of enacting their mission public librarians generated a rhetoric ofguidance that created and has helped maintain a dichotomy between different types of fiction and reading, between what has variably been labeled popular (i.e., low, subliterary, escapist , trashy) and elite (i.e., edifying, uplifting, artful) literature. 113 114 READING NANCY DREW, READING STEREOTYPES The public library movement in the United States was established in the mid-nineteenth century on the principles of Americanizing foreigners, controlling social and urban problems, and uplifting readers. According to recent library histories, the public library was originally subsidized by capitalists and political leaders who saw it as a way of extending genteel culture to workers and their children (Garrison, Geller). When the American Library Association was established in 1876, the right of children to public library service had not yet been recognized. Most libraries set the age at which children should be admitted to library privileges at between twelve and fourteen. It was, in great part, the recognition that youth were reading dime novels and other so-called sensational literature and the horror with which this literature was viewed by many adults that led to early library work with children. If they were not allowed full library privileges , librarians argued, children would be limited to reading dime novels and similar "immoral literature" which they felt incited readers to disrespect authority and created a taste for the sensational, the ugly, or the merely mediocre. Their mission was to get children into the library, where their reading could be carefully guided. It was a persuasive argument, and by the end of the century age limits had all but been abolished. Once the matter of whether to admit children into public libraries was settled, the focus of the debate centered on what kind of fiction should be available to them. The first children's librarians had been trained to view the library as a "moral force" and felt that it was their duty to make certain that children read nothing but "wholesome" literature: a vague term, to be sure, but one around which librarians could rally. All sides agreed that dime novels-those distant cousins of the Stratemeyer series books-story papers, and cheap books had no place in the library's collection and devised ingenious plans to reform readers found smuggling such literature into the library. But they were less unified when debating the popular new adventure novels of Horatio Alger, Oliver Optic, or later the adventure series of the Stratemeyer Syndicate. Often the debate was drawn along class lines. One librarian explained that children "who are born and bred in the habitation of labor . . . cannot and will not read what, as a rule, I am willing to recommend" (Johnson 1990, 21). For them Alger and other popular authors were permissible. They might not be desirable for every li- SERIES BOOKS AND THE RHETORIC OF GUIDANCE 115 brary, another librarian argued, but were appropriate in libraries located at or near factories, where children ofworkers could enjoy them and perhaps graduate to better things. In arguing for including in the children's library books which might not be considered of high literary quality, one librarian...