Childhood's Pattern: The Parting of the Ways

This book has arisen out of one that I wrote nine years ago. Nineteenth Century Children was published in 1965, when a new interest in the history of children's reading was beginning, but comparatively little had yet appeared in print. Since then the whole aspect has changed. Children's books now have their own niche in the study of English and of education. Journals are devoted to them; for a graduate to produce a thesis on Ballantyne or Mrs. Molesworth is regarded as in no way eccentric, and the ancient university of Oxford has even gone so far as to include the subject on its lecture list. To repeat my trite remarks on the better-known nineteenth-century authors would be, in the light of the present interest taken in them, superfluous to say the least, though there was a stage when I would have liked the chance to correct some of the errors of fact and of judgment that I had made.

But in spite of the avalanche of words that has been poured out during the last ten years, the great work that Harvey Darton wrote as long ago as 1932—Children's Books in England —does still remain the best study. Only he has had the knowledge, the judgment and the detachment to stand back and take a long, cool look at the whole landscape without getting lost in the trees. He provided literary assessment and bibliographic details—all part of the subject—but his real interest in children's books was because they represent "a minor chapter in the history of English social life," not because they play a great role in English literature.

"Literature," in the sense that they deserve serious and weighty literary discussion, they are not—except for a small handful. But what they do mirror is a constantly shifting moral pattern. What in any given age do adults want of children? What are their values? What are the virtues they are striving to inculcate, the vices they are trying to tread down? Do they rate learning above godliness, truth-telling above obedience; do they encourage or suppress imagination? Examine children's books in this light and even the dreariest becomes rewarding.

This is what, in the present study, I am attempting—having made a faint beginning nine years ago. The giants stand above this scrutiny. Lewis Carroll, Lear, The Just-So Stories, The Wind in the Willows, The Hobbit, Tom's Midnight Garden, cannot be treated in this way. They are in any case works of fantasy and imagination, a subject which lies outside my province and which I do not try to include.

I have given the dates 1770 to 1950 as marking the limits of the study, but it is in fact the middle years that have received most attention. Before the nineteenth century the publishers were not properly under way. After 1910 or so the moralists and educationalists temporarily lost interest in juvenile reading and some thirty years or so of comparatively undirected commercial production followed. No new patterns emerged, only extensions of those formed at the beginning of the century. Of this period I have given only a slight indication. Since 1950 there has been a renaissance, far too recent to assess, but one which will present great interest to future chroniclers. Not only is the output formidable, in quantity and quality, but the educational experts are once again fully involved, as certain as ever they were in the days of Richard Lovell Edgeworth and Mrs. Trimmer and all their successors that their generation is uniquely equipped to form the child mind. . . .

"Damn them! I mean the cursed Barbauld Crew, those Blights and Blasts of all that is Human in man and child," wrote Lamb to Coleridge in 1802. He had been to Newbery's bookshop to try to buy some children's books, and had found that the new educational reading had banished all the old classics that he knew, and that "Mrs. Barbauld and Mrs. Trimmer's nonsense lay about in piles." It was hard to find even a copy of...