Digging for Literacy

A sad tale's best for winter: I have oneOf sprites and goblins . . . .There was a man—. . . .Dwelt by a churchyard: I will tell it softly;Yond crickets shall not hear it.

So says little Mamillius to his pregnant mother in The Winter's Tale; but like so many children of Shakespeare's day, he dies before he can tell out his story. Yet even if he had lived to grow up and write his memoirs, we should never have known the interrupted story, for it would not have crossed his mind to record it.

Peter Laslett, in The World We Have Lost, suggests how badly our view of childhood, and of children, is skewed by the lacunae in the documents we study:

In the pre-industrial world there were children everywhere . . . The perpetual distraction of childish noise and talk must have affected everyone almost all the time, except of course the gentleman in his study or the lady in her boudoir . . . There is something mysterious about the silence of all these multitudes of babes in arms, toddlers and adolescents in the statements men made at the time about their own experience.

How can we recreate this male-recorded history to include, not only the physical presence of children, but the sounds of play, the songs and stories that filled the air around them?

At the beginning of Children's Literature of the English Renaissance, a posthumous collection of articles by Warren W. Wooden, Jeanie Watson quotes from Wooden's grant application to the American Council of Learned Societies a description of the book he planned to write. "My study will mine the riches of English Renaissance literature, including both works written for children and those appropriated or "adopted" by children, with the hope of establishing a canon of children's literature from the invention of printing down to 1700." We have in this book nine articles in different critical modes, explorations of the field, and attempts to establish the parameters for his ambitious project. Most of these articles were initially delivered as conference papers, where the emphasis is on provoking discussion and response; the volume presents readers with speculations as well as evidence, propositions to be validated by future research. The articles are printed in chronological order of subject, but it seems more rewarding to note their inter-connections and consider them as bearing on a projected whole.

At the beginning of the age of print, the only books directed at children were instructional. School texts posited a teacher; books of manners or religion, ostensibly addressed to children, also were meant for a parent, who would filter through to the child those precepts of which he approved. In his first article Wooden artificially groups Comenius with Caxton and Foxe, because he sees in Caxton's Aesop's Fables and Foxe's Book of Martyrs the first stumbling attempts to make picture an integral part of text—an idea brilliantly fulfilled in Comenius's Latin textbook Orbis Pictus. Surprisingly Wooden discusses only two volumes designed exclusively or primarily for children—Orbis Pictus and Bunyan's strange little book of Country Rhimes for Children. Bunyan, unlike Comenius, seems to address children (or "artificial Babes") who must either teach themselves or rely on adults outside the classroom for help; the introductory lessons in reading and numbers (which would be needed for Bible reference) are seen as mere preparation for the moral lessons. In simple, awkward rhyming verse Bunyan teaches the child how to reflect upon himself and upon the world around him; seen rightly, a pig, a candle or an egg can all instruct. Wooden argues that in judging only from later cut, re-arranged and illustrated versions, critics have failed to understand or appreciate Bunyan's planning for a child reader, and that the rarity of the first edition suggests popularity and heavy use.

A much greater challenge to the critic arises over that large body of Renaissance literature addressed to a dual audience of adults and children. Though...