The Editor's High Chair

Up to now, children's literature has been ignored by many humanists and by most critics. There are a number of possible reasons for this situation.

First, simplicity is too readily equated with triteness. Many forget that the greatest literature—like the Psalms of David, Christ's Parables, Blake's Songs—possesses the same simplicity as children's stories. Nor are these critics aware of the attitude of such writers as C. S. Lewis, who said, "A children's story is the best art form for something you have to say. "

Second, children's literature usually lacks the verbal sophistication and complexity with which people in higher education have been traditionally trained to deal. As a result of this, children's literature is difficult to teach and, as the head of the English Department of one of the leading Ivy League Universities wrote me, the teaching of it is "deplorable."

Third, children's literature, good and bad, tends to be lumped together with no clear critical standards. Moreover, the generally unrecognized but pernicious influence of commercial interests and children's "experts" upon both the writers and reviewers tends to discourage criticism of a quality comparable to that available for adult literature. (Of course, commercialism affects the criticism of adult literature, too, but not to such an extent.)

Naturally, scholars have avoided a field where art is smothered by political and economic interests.

It is my feeling that the trouble started four hundred years ago when children's literature became a separate field. In Shakespeare's day, for example, there was not one literature for children and another for adults. Everyone together enjoyed the oral literature, including Aesop's Fables, the chapbooks, and so on. Even after the separation of the literature, the great books for children have been those which adults and children shared. Alice in Wonderland, Huckleberry Finn, Winnie-the-Pooh are for the man as well as the child.

Preliminary research has led me to believe that children's literature as a separate field came about as a result of certain economic interests. Indications are that the separation might have begun with the "Warnings to Apprentices, " published by commercial interests in the seventeenth century. These bear a striking resemblance to the warnings to little children, the "deathbed confessions" of children who disobeyed moral "laws" and reformed too late. Numerous books of these confessions were published in England and America by the Puritan merchant class in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These "deathbed confessions" and other dire warnings to children were continued in the hundreds of Sunday School tracts which grew out of the Sunday School movement begun by Robert Raikes. Raikes, a wealthy shipowner, acknowledged that he began the Sunday Schools to keep working children from depredations on Sundays. I should like to delve into the significance, if any, of Raikes' ties with John Newbery, regarded by educators as the "father" of children's literature, who bolstered the waning market for adult chapbooks by writing some books for children. I believe children's literature began as an exploitation of children—threatening them with death if they did not behave. I should like to see whether there is an historic link between the economic undercurrents in early children's literature and much of the current writing for children—promising them success if they follow a certain social pattern. Perhaps the scorn of the literature on the part of the humanists is due to a confusion in terminology. Perhaps many current books should not be considered "literature" but rather, cleverly disguised propaganda for moral or economic purposes.

Children's literature is almost entirely in the hands of those in education or library science, who emphasize the uses of literature in the classroom, methodology, biographies of current writers, graded reading lists, book reports—good things but not the concern of those in the Humanities.

What, then, should be the concern of humanists? Perhaps more than with other literature, they should be concerned with the quality of the literature available to our children and youth, especially since they have neglected it for so long. The obvious influence of available literature on the young...