Beholding American Children: A British Perspective

Gillian Avery's Behold the Child gives general readers an absorbing narrative of three hundred years of children's books in America. The focus of her story is the divergence between British and American children's books from a common beginning, a divergence that she attributes persuasively to differences between British and American childhoods. In America a morality that insists on work as the highest good leads to books in which salvation takes the form of economic success and children are expected to have responsibilities and freedom of action. British children—of the book-buying classes—experience instead a prolonged and sheltered childhood with little realworld freedom or responsibility. For nonspecialist British readers, the book undoubtedly provides much new information. For American readers, its primary virtue is that it gives us the opportunity to see ourselves from without, an opportunity that is especially valuable for those familiar only with American children's books.

Avery herself acknowledges that the first half of these three hundred years cannot illustrate her thesis, because during this period nearly all the books read by American children were written in England. The lengthy chapter on the seventeenth century is designed to establish the pattern of American children's lives. Understandably the least original chapter in the book, it covers much territory familiar to anyone knowledgeable about early American history or the history of English children's books. It also illustrates a general problem: Avery's generalizations about American children are based principally on information about those of New England (the best documented region). On the other hand, her portrayal of the "children of godly ancestors" preparing for eternity from earliest infancy is an apt and ironic preparation for the theme of secular salvation that she sees as central to American children's books, as opposed to the British emphasis on virtue rewarded from above (social superiors, parents, or God).

This chapter also illustrates a strength of Avery's book—her ability to recommend "finds" among older children's books. She can make a reader understand why books familiar now only to scholars were once popular with children. In the seventeenth century, for instance, she describes vividly and sympathetically James Janeway's A Token for Children, an account of the exemplary deaths of some thirteen children that might seem to the modern parent or teacher to represent an inexplicable taste of our ancestors. Avery has a knack for the child's-eye view of such a book: "It was the first book [children] had encountered that told stories of children. . . . Here in Janeway were thirteen children manifestly more holy than their elders, some of them as young as five years old, gloriously holding the stage. And there was dialogue and domestic detail, too—scanty, no doubt, but enough to clothe the incidents with some sort of reality. . . . They exhorted their peers and their elders, and were not rebuked for it" (33). No wonder even a Tom Sawyer can temporarily enjoy imagining himself as the hero of a pious death scene!

In the eighteenth century, the Newbery books, with "their emphasis on industry and effort and on the material advantages that accrue therefrom . . . were what the new colonies wanted to read." (49) Avery argues that the American antipathy toward fairy tales and even nursery rhymes, and the thirst for practical, factual knowledge, were already apparent then.

Avery's story is centered, however, on the nineteenth century, with which both part 2, "An American Style," and part 3, "Differing Ideals," deal (a brief "postscript" brings the account to a rather abrupt stop in 1922). Part 3 is divided by gender, as nineteenth-century children's fiction often was; part 2 deals with more general developments.

In these sections, some of the materials required by Avery's descriptive purpose and chronological arrangement seem to be presented merely dutifully, interrupting the presentation of the developments related to her thesis. For example, Avery looks first at the American interest in practical education, on the model of the Edge-worths...