Noel Streatfeild’s Second-Hand Shoes: Reading The Whicharts against Its Juvenilization Ballet Shoes

A Case of Juvenilization

Perhaps more than in the case of a work composed de novo, revising an existing text to make it “suitable” for children implies considerable attention to what authors can say and how they can say it in texts for young readers. The process may involve saying less, saying it differently, or saying something else instead. Juvenilizations therefore illuminate (and are illuminated by) Perry Nodelman’s concept of the “shadow text”—the implied text “that transcends the presumably childlike view” that works of children’s literature “purport to represent” (143)—because they confront that implied text with an actual one: the original source material.

Looking beyond secondary juvenilizations—works of fiction adapted for young readers by someone other than the original author—and retellings of biblical, folk, and oral tales, we find a rather slender corpus of primary juvenilizations—original works of fiction rewritten for children or young adults by the authors themselves. French writer Michel Tournier revised his novels Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique and Gaspard, Melchior et Balthazar for children (as Vendredi ou la vie sauvage and Les rois mages, respectively), but both adult novels were reworkings of existing sources (Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and the biblical story of the Magi) rather than tales originally crafted by Tournier. Original—though unpublished—material from American novelist Laura Ingalls Wilder’s 1930 memoir “Pioneer Girl” inspired both Let the Hurricane Roar (a 1932 novella by Wilder’s daughter Rose Wilder Lane) and On the Banks of Plum Creek (a 1937 children’s novel published under Wilder’s name but written with Lane’s editorial involvement). Plum Creek, however, is less a rewrite of Let the Hurricane Roar than an alternate fiction developed from the “Pioneer Girl” material. Some of the clearest examples of primary juvenilization can be found in autobiographical fictions by Canadian authors Beatrice Culleton Mosionier and Joy Kogawa. Culleton Mosionier rewrote In Search of April Raintree, her 1983 novel of a Metis girl’s coming of age and search for identity, as the 1984 young adult book April Raintree (Cumming 307). Kogawa revised Obasan, her 1981 novel about the internment of Japanese Canadians during the Second World War, first as the juvenile novel Naomi’s Road, published in 1986 and in revised form in 2005, and then as the children’s picture book Naomi’s Tree (Lefebvre 154, 155, 162).

British novelist Noel Streatfeild joins this short list of primary juvenilizers. Trained at the Academy of Dramatic Art in London, Streatfeild had a brief performing career, ranging from pantomimes and revues to a stint with a touring Shakespeare company, but she grew disenchanted with the theatrical profession and decided to become a novelist instead. She would go on to become an immensely prolific writer for both children and adults, publishing nearly a hundred novels, plays, memoirs, and non-fiction texts between 1931 and 1979. Streatfeild’s debut novel, The Whicharts, uses dark humour to expose the theatre as a site of exploitation and corruption (Bull 113). The novel earned significant critical praise, although reviewers regretted “the proprieties occasionally being lost” (Bull 117). Indeed, with “mistresses and illegitimate children . . . introduced in the first chapter” and “swear words drop[ping] casually from the girls’ lips,” as biographer Angela Bull points out, the subject matter and the diction of the novel constituted veritable “shock tactics” for the 1930s (115). The Whicharts would hardly make suitable material for children. Along with Streatfeild’s four subsequent novels, however, it combined child focalizers, nuanced portrayals of young people, and richly detailed depictions of life in the theatre so successfully that in 1936 Mabel Carey, a children’s editor at Dent, urged Streatfeild to write a theatrical novel for children (Bull 127–28). The author accepted, but as Bull reports, she “did not intend to waste much effort on her story”: the basic lines of The Whicharts “still looked serviceable,” so Streatfeild swiftly “rehash[ed]” it for a juvenile readership (Bull 134). The hasty reworking is evident in the nearly identical opening pages of the two novels and their shared...