Robin Hood and the Invention of Children's Literature

Literary historians usually regard English children's literature as an invention of the 1740s, when Thomas Boreman and John Newbery, independently moved by John Locke's Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) as well as by the prospect of tidy profits, published the Gigantick Histories and A Little Pretty Pocket-Book. Given the definition of children's literature as imaginative literature marketed to children and designed for their amusement as well as their edification, scholars have not seriously questioned that date of origin, even though they have shown that chapbook fiction probably designed for children appeared in the later seventeenth century.¹ We have left unexplored, however, a conceptual problem which may be of greater interest than determining the date of the first book of children's fiction: how did it become possible for entrepreneurs like Boreman and Newbery to perceive a distinct market for children's books? What led to the emergence of the genre that we today call children's literature? The extant evidence does not permit absolute answers to these questions. If my speculations are valid, however, the consequences of the way in which the genre was invented are serious and have been largely detrimental to the content as well as to the study of children's literature.

Befitting a study of children's literature, this essay has its heroes and its villains. The heroes are the authors of medieval romance, whose works maintained popularity well into the sixteenth century. The villains are a well-intended and familiar lot: those implacable enemies of medieval romance, the sixteenth-century humanists—whom C. S. Lewis charitably berated in the Oxford History of English Literature—and their puritanical contemporaries. I propose to lay one more sin to their charge by arguing that their hostility to things medieval, particularly romance, created a conception of children's literature which implied that it was second-class (or third-class) literature, and that their mistrust of fiction, especially romance fiction, separated children's literature from other literature and implied that the former was intrinsically inferior. With the aid of the religious reformers, their unsuspecting allies, the new humanists became the unwitting parents of children's literature; an illegitimate child, it still bears, at least in academia, the stigma of its conception.²

Robin Hood enters this story as neither hero nor villain but merely as an illustration taken from the larger world of popular literature that the Renaissance inherited from the Middle Ages and bequeathed in chapbook form to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Most of us share, I suspect, a more or less vivid impression of Robin Hood carried over from our childhood reading. We can scarcely think of him as anything other than a hero of children's books. The process by which he in fact became the property of children provides evidence for my thesis.

The key to the evolution of this new genre lies in the pervasive Renaissance mistrust of fiction and in the new humanists' devoted hostility toward romance inherited from the Middle Ages.³ To be sure the Middle Ages no less than the Renaissance had difficulties with the idea of fiction: if it is by definition untrue, then it must be a form of lying, and hence morally suspect. But medieval theorists seem to have lived more comfortably with their misgivings than did their successors. As Professor Nelson summarized, the Middle Ages characteristically sought "an accommodation of two conflicting attitudes: on the one hand, the insistence of the Judeo-Christian tradition on veritable report, testified to as by witnesses in a courtroom; on the other, a sense that in tales of the past truth mattered little in comparison with edification or even entertainment" (p. 27). The outrage which Renaissance purists reserved for fiction was not typical of the Middle Ages. Far more characteristic was the intent to use fiction to convey truth, to entice readers' interest, and to veil high mysteries from those unwilling to make an effort to comprehend.⁴

Medieval theorists likewise made distinctions in kinds of fiction—distinctions their humanistic successors were to echo with more practical effect. A...