Home and Away in Children's Fiction

The highest compliment a children's book can receive is for critics to say that it isn't for children at all. When adults annex a book like Alice's Adventures in Wonderland or Huckleberry Finn for themselves, it achieves a higher literary status than even that of being numbered among the "classic" works for children, works such as Now We Are Six, Treasure Island, or—a more complicated case, as we shall see —The Wind in the Willows.

The criteria by which a book may be placed in one category or the other have been much discussed but never clearly defined, and they are a great deal less obvious than they may seem. To say that a book appeals to people of many different ages is no help here; all the books I have listed do that, as do the Iliad, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, Gulliver's Travels, and most books about the Civil War. Nor is it enough to identify the primary audience that the writer had in mind, since Huckleberry Finn and the Alice books were written, illustrated, and marketed for children. Realism is no criterion; most fiction for adults is no more realistic than most children's fiction. That a book raises issues which are intellectually beyond the comprehension of most children may seem a slightly more promising standard; yet how many adults are equipped to comprehend the linguistic and logical issues in Through the Looking-Glass, the moral issues in Huckleberry Finn, or indeed the full range of questions raised by any profound work of literature? That many adults understand more of these thing than many children is hardly an adequate basis for confident taxonomizing.

It is improbable that any single standard can be used to tell us which of the books we deeply admire are "really" children's books, which adult books (a phrase with contemporary connotations that imply sexual interest as a criterion), and which genuinely ambiguous. The books we don't deeply admire may present fewer problems, but then the question of their status is correspondingly less interesting.

This essay will speculate on why some books fall into one category, some into another. My intrinsic approach will not, admittedly, apply to all works of fiction, but where it does apply it should almost infallibly distinguish books that are genuinely for children. It applies strikingly to two of the works cited above, Huckleberry Finn and The Wind in the Willows, about which Grahame's biographer had this to say: "It is interesting to compare the double theme which preoccupies Grahame in The Wind in the Willows—the judgment of Innocence on the World, the deep basic symbolism of the River—with the somewhat different treatment both receive in Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn. Twain's classic had appeared in 1885, and there is little doubt that Grahame knew it well. He certainly gave a copy to his son."¹ Twain's influence on Grahame's book is palpable, not so much in the use both make of the River as in the tall tales and female disguise by which Toad escapes from a series of captors. Both are stories of escape and return, of naive innocence ambiguously overcoming the perils of the Wide World, of civilization making ominous advances into the heartland of natural goodness. Each ends with the protagonist and his friends restored to honor and fortune. Yet nearly everyone will agree that Grahame has written a genuine children's book and Twain has not. Why? I believe that a key to what appeals to children in Grahame's book is this: in The Wind in the Willows, the major escape (Toad's) is from prison to home. Although several of the characters are tempted by travel, home is clearly where the characters belong and where, after many vicissitudes, they return. As Mole feels when he has found again the home he left on a spring morning:

He saw clearly how plain and simple—how narrow, even—it all was; but clearly, too, how much it all meant to him, and the special value of some...