Instruction and Delight: Letters from a Father to His Children

In a common critical and historical formulation, children's literature is located between the poles of instruction and delight. Depending on historical period and individual predilection, adult critics have valued children's books variously by the extent to which they teach children proper values or useful knowledge, or by their entertainment value. In a world that includes both William Bennett's Book of Virtues and R. L. Stine's Goosebumps series, it seems safe to assert that both poles continue to define the literary landscape for young readers today.

Along the spectrum defined by these poles, Joel Chandler Harris has always seemed to me decidedly on the "delight" end. Notwithstanding the possible folkloric value of his Uncle Remus tales, their primary purpose seems to be to amuse, not to teach. It is the anarchic energy of Br'er Rabbit, the trickster who outwits larger and more powerful opponents, that remains in one's imagination rather than any moral or practical lessons one might derive from the tales. It comes as something of a surprise, then, to discover that Harris exhibits the impulse both to instruct and to delight in this volume of letters. Writing to his children whenever they were away from home, he provided entertainment in his comical accounts of everyday happenings at home and diligently sought to improve his children's minds, giving advice on how to improve handwriting and to follow boarding-school rules, discoursing on good and bad literature, or sending his eldest son Julian a book on Emerson in order to stimulate "a little interest in thoughtful things" (22).

In 1890, when the letters begin, Harris was already well established professionally. His literary reputation had been made ten years earlier with the first volume of Uncle Remus stories. Additional collections of folklore, sketches, and stories followed, firmly placing him as a regional humorist and writer, and he held a respected editorial post at the Atlanta Constitution. With the proceeds of his writing he had settled his large family (wife, mother, and seven children) in a comfortable house in an Atlanta suburb, where he would remain for the rest of his life. For the next eighteen years, he would continue a high rate of literary production while watching his children make the transition to adulthood and making his own transition to patriarch and eventually grandfather.

Because of the time period covered by this collection, the reader seeking illumination of Harris's best-known work, the Uncle Remus stories, will be disappointed, and indeed, there is little direct reference to his own copious writing activities. Harris casually inquires whether one of his daughters received a new volume he has sent her or alludes to the need to finish a story commissioned by some magazine—the reader must consult the footnotes to get a clue to which book he might mean. Seemingly significant family events such as the marriage of a child or the birth of a grandchild also receive comparatively slight attention. Such momentous events seem of less interest to the writer and his audience than comical reactions to the family's circle of acquaintance or solicitous inquiries about the children's financial situation, travel plans, and failure to write (a recurrent theme).

There is little here, then, of a conventional "literary" nature. Rather, the collection's aim is, as one of its subtitles suggests, to provide a picture of the author's home life. Harris is revealed as a devoted father, constantly concerned about his children's welfare and paying attention to the smallest details of family existence that might interest the particular correspondent to whom he is writing. He delights in the comic possibilities of everyday life in such accounts as the epic mystery of a Christmas fruitcake (spun out through several letters to his daughters in anticipation of a break from their convent boarding school) and this "sad story of a piece of cheese":

Well, here was the cheese and close by...