In the Hands of Children

Two tales in Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories claim that it was a child who initiated literacy. In "How the First Letter was Written," Taffy, a Neolithic child, unbeknownst to her father draws a series of pictures on bark and hands it to a stranger to bring home to her mother. It is meant to be a request for a new fishing spear but is misinterpreted by her mother, with tragicomic results. Once Taffy's intention becomes clear, the chief of the tribe tells her:

It is a great invention, and some day men will call it writing. At present it is only pictures, and, as we have seen to-day, pictures are not always properly understood. But a time will come, O Babe of Tegumai, when we shall make letters—all twenty-six of 'em—and when we shall be able to read as well as to write, and then we shall always say exactly what we mean without any mistakes.

(138)

In the next story, "How the Alphabet was Made," Taffy, with help from her father, constructs an alphabet, although it is not adopted for "thousands and thousands and thousands of years" (162).

I had assumed until recently that Kipling in these "how" stories was just having some fun. Perhaps he was and did not know how close to the mark he came. Here I want to reaffirm Kipling's claim about the connection between children and the development of writing by making two of my own. The first I have made previously: that without the participation of child hands, we would not have much of what remains of ancient literature today. This is because the ancient educational systems, Sumero-Babylonian, Egyptian, Greek, and Roman, relied heavily on teaching children how to read and write by having them copy texts. Some of the texts we would judge appropriate for children and some were even composed for them; others seem, on the face of it, strange choices. These texts have survived on clay tablets found in excavations of Sumero-Babylonian libraries and school rooms, on ostraca in the middens of Egyptian worksites connected with pyramids, temples, and tombs, and in the ancient papyri found in urban trash heaps, some unearthed by recent construction projects. We know that they are copy texts because they are often full of errors and the hands are inexpert. Indeed, certain texts occur again and again in this condition, leaving the impression that they were customarily used for beginners. Just as Taffy did, early children began with pictographs—Egyptian hieroglyphics and the symbol-based cuneiform; handwriting then developed over time (Kipling's "thousands of years") into the Greco-Roman alphabet. Children's hands were an important part of that development.¹

Sumerian clay tablets and pottery ostraca are cheap, readily discarded, and durable; the desert sands have preserved papyri for thousands of years. Moreover, classical scholars often seem willing to admit to the possibility of children's hands in their analyses of handwriting. The situation is different, however, when we are dealing with medieval manuscripts and incunabula, both of which were relatively expensive and more perishable. We would expect that in the later periods the hands of children would be less likely to survive, and indeed I did not become aware that medieval children's copy texts might exist until I ran across a reference (now mislaid) to a copy of a Latin version of Aesop in an immature hand. I suspect that further research will unearth other examples.

But copy texts are not the only evidence for the presence of child readers and writers. My second claim is that on medieval and later texts, even though not copied by children, the presence of their graffiti and marginalia can tell us much about what they read and how they read it. As early as 1988, Mitzi Myers was urging attention to the material conditions of children's books as "clues to the hidden history of childhood" (Adams, "Myers" 89). More recently, in her book on marginalia in texts from 1700 to 2000, H. J. Jackson remarks:

The marginalia of children are instructive, and...