Notes on the Waist-High Culture

I want to state at the start my uneasiness about the classroom use of children's literature, for my position is on the side of the Luddites, even to Sans Culottism. I once wrote a book called The True Adventures of Huck Finn, which was originally titled Huck Finn for the Critics, in the hope that they would leave the original book alone; and if consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds, what I propose talking about is hobgoblins and small minds, anyway. If the author of "Goldilocks and the Three Bears" had meant for his work to be studied in the classroom, he would have written something along the lines of Moby-Dick, which as a children's poem became "The Hunting of the Snark." As a matter of fact he did, although few critics pay much attention to Southey's The Doctor; nor do many children, for all of that, though Southey has much to say on the subject.

What I find most fascinating about children's literature is that so much of it was not written for children but, like "Goldilocks," was created for an adult audience. Southey himself observes how a child may read Pilgrim's Progress for enjoyment, "without a suspicion of its allegorical import," for what "he did not understand was as little remembered as the sounds of the wind, or the motions of the passing clouds; but the imagery and the incidents took possession of his memory and his heart. . . . Oh! what blockheads are those wise persons who think it necessary that a child should comprehend everything it reads!"¹ Or to put it in the vernacular of Huck Finn: "The statements was interesting, but tough." Children have likewise appropriated the interesting parts of Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels, and The Leatherstocking Tales, among others. They have not appropriated parts of The Mill on the Floss and The Rise of Silas Lapham, among others.

It is important to note somewhere that no children's literature was written by children, nor are children much interested in the stories other children tell. Most children aim their little fictions, as a matter of fact, at grown-ups, who likewise supply, intentionally or otherwise, the stories children prefer being told. Such were the golden oldies that Mother Goose laid, and such, I imagine, are skip-rope rhymes and the moron, elephant, and "baby" jokes that kids love to tell. "Higgledy, piggledy, pop!" wrote S. G. Goodrich, who as an author known as Peter Parley turned out—with the parttime help of Nathaniel Hawthorne—didactic literature for children: "The dog ate up the mop." Goodrich was mocking the simple-mindedness of nursery rhymes, which he detested, but his dactyls succeeded where his didacticism did not, and Peter Parley survives today because of "Higgledy, Piggledy, Pop!"

As a children's author, S. G. Goodrich was a latter-day product of the Enlightenment, which likewise produced Diderot's Encyclopedia, most definitely not a book for children, and J.J. Rousseau, who wrote Émile, which is about books for children and contains a recommended reading list of one volume, Robinson Crusoe. From Émile, which like Sesame Street made learning fun, came the grand original for many subsequent books for children, Sandford and Merton, who begat Swiss Family Robinson, who begat Masterman Ready and Coral Island. Goodrich, that is to say, was representative of the Victorian age, a period greatly productive of children's literature and pornography, Little Lord Fauntleroy being a dandy case in point: from Burnett's pretty prig in velvet knickers it is not a far leap to Oscar Wilde, who gave us The Happy Prince, and to Swinburne, who gave us little boys blue and black, proving, I guess, that perversion is the other side of subversion.

Because subversion is what children's literature—that is, the literature preferred or even stolen by children—is all about. The rest, as Southey points out, is just wind. If Frances Hodgson Burnett's best book for children, The Secret Garden, was written in the Rousseauistic tradition, being intended as a treatise on how a child might be reformed...