Ethics in British Children’s Literature: Unexamined Life by Lisa Sainsbury (review)

Lisa Sainsbury’s book is an early entry in the Bloomsbury series “Perspectives on Children’s Literature,” for which she serves as editor. The series emphasizes cross-disciplinarity, with literature for children as the starting point. In her introduction, Sainsbury makes clear her mission: the book is “a series of disquisitions that consider and demonstrate at close range various . . . ways in which contemporary British children’s literature engages in ethical discourse at the level of philosophical inquiry” (5). “Contemporary” here means post–WWII books for children and young adults. She argues that there is a “flowering of ethical discourse” (5) for children in this period, in which authors seem to acknowledge that children and young adults are fully capable of engaging in ethical thinking; this is quite different from the moralizing that dominated earlier children’s literature. Instead of preaching a position to young readers, British books since 1945 have acknowledged a child reader’s ability to weigh the right and wrong of a situation and make judgments of her own. Cognitively restrictive didacticism used purely for socialization is simply out of fashion in British books for children. Sainsbury examines a few carefully chosen books from a range of genres (“thrillers, satire, historical fiction, and naturalistic writing—and literary forms—including picture books, poetry, novels, and short stories” [8]) rather than touching lightly on many. She makes sure, however, to list and point to other texts, both philosophical and literary, that raise similar issues or invite thinking in a particular way.

The first two chapters provide a foundation in issues of morality and choice that are referenced in the subsequent four chapters dedicated to narrower topics of study. The labeling over time of children as “good or bad, virtuous or wicked” (13) in literature is a main concern of chapter 1. The development of the idea of “naughtiness”—a concept identified with children in particular—is traced from its origins in the fifteenth century. The idea of “naughty” has mingled notions of lack (coming from “noughty”) and wickedness to ultimately mean an ethically hopeful and playful description of an obstinate child going through a phase in a typical childhood (as understood in Freud, Spock, and Piaget). Naughtiness is a tricky concept, and Sainsbury points out that since 1945 it has been ambiguous in meaning. The deviance it describes can be associated with gender, class, or race, and is shown to comprise any number of behaviors that challenge the established social order. Contemporary books pose to the child scenarios that depict complex choices between good and bad behavior, rather than just depicting models of naughtiness or offering a highly religious take on wrong in an increasingly secular Britain. The challenge for books that complicate good and evil as choices is to steer clear of the “ever-present danger of indifference” (38) as an attractive choice for the reader.

Chapter 2 continues the discussion of sins of indifference and actual evil in children and children’s books through an examination of the possibility of childhood evil. How does society portray such a possibility through media and popular culture? Is evil born in the child, making her a “bad seed”? Is evil a psychological product of the imagination? How is evil alluring? How do crimes committed by children—in life and in literature—challenge the idea of innocence? Through thought experiments performed in British children’s literature post–1945, different conceptions of childhood are worked out for the reader—sometimes pitting ideologies of childhood innocence and evil against each other. What is “normal” childhood behavior, and what is “monstrous”?

Chapters 3 through 6 move to specific questions and areas of philosophical inquiry. Whereas the first two chapters feature a variety of philosophers in wrestling with issues of good and evil—including Wiesel, Murdoch, Baudrillard, Schopenhauer, Midgely, and Kierkegaard—chapter 3 offers a specifically Hegelian view of ethical life and its role in family and society through an examination of social institutions in British children’s books. Post–1945 books refuse...