"A Dream of Complete Idleness": Depiction of Labor in Children's Fiction

"If you look for the working classes in fiction . . . ," George Orwell writes in his famous essay on Dickens,"all you find is a hole" (57). There is no sense of work; indeed work is virtually invisible, for " . . . in the typical Dickens novel, the deus ex machina enters with a bag of gold in the last chapter and the hero is absolved from further struggle" (57). Orwell calls it "a dream of complete idleness" (94, author's emphasis). Whether Orwell's accusation is just to Dickens or not, it is an accurate description of children's fiction. Such a hole where work should be, such "a dream of complete idleness," is characteristic of most children's fiction from the late nineteenth century until the present.

There may be several ways of explaining why labor is absent from children's literature. The simplest is that children do not work—which is certainly not true from the historical point of view and not quite correct in our day either. Yet we can observe that since child characters cannot, without a very good reason, have a professional occupation, a large number of typical mainstream characters and, consequently, plots and conflicts tied to these characters, are impossible in children's fiction. In fact, most of the several hundred occupations suggested for characters in writers' manuals (e.g. Lauther) are not relevant for children's fiction. Child protagonists can neither be brokers nor ambassadors, physicians nor jet pilots, college professors nor tax collectors. Naturally, there are certain genres that allow a substitute for an occupation. For instance, the child detective is a widely used figure. A journalist of the mainstream novel may become an editor of a school newspaper, a company executive the president of a student board. Further, child characters may be fieldworkers, horse trainers, circus artists, babysitters, and so on. Hobbies and school achievements can provide some insight into professions. However, the actual depiction of labor is significantly limited.

This is, however, a superficial explanation. Of much greater importance is the essence of children's literature itself: literature written by adults for young readers. Consequently the notion of childhood that we meet in children's fiction reflect adults' views, which may or may not correspond to the real status of children and childhood in any given society. The central concept seems to be that childhood is something irretrievably lost for adults, and this lost Arcadia can only be restored in fiction. With this premise, children's fiction is not, as it is commonly defined, literature addressed to children, but a sort of storytelling therapy for frustrated adults, a point made by Jacqueline Rose in her famous study The Case of Peter Pan, or The Impossibility of Children's Literature (1984). This is a disturbing and provocative statement, which I have explored in my book From Mythic to Linear (2000). Rather than, like Rose (and many other critics), focusing exclusively on the sexual innocence of the fictional child, I find it essential to treat this innocence more broadly, encompassing remarkable freedom from most of the defining attributes of adulthood, including its financial and occupational obligations.

It is a commonplace to point out that before Romanticism, children were hardly believed to be different from adults—and certainly not thought to be better than adults. Anglo-Saxon criticism tends to focus on Blake and Wordsworth as sources of the new concept of childhood; however, similar ideas have been developed by Romantic writers in other language areas. The most essential issue is that childhood in the Romantic tradition is equal to idyll, while growing up is equal to loss of Paradise. However, the idea of the child as innocent continues to influence children's fiction long after mainstream literature has abandoned the Romantic views. Traditional children's fiction creates and preserves what may be called a pastoral convention, maintaining a myth of a happy and innocent childhood, apparently based on adult writers' nostalgic memories and bitter insights about the impossibility of returning to the childhood...