Cultivating the Gardens of Golden Age Children's Literature

"Is there really anything new I can say about children's books of the 'Golden Age'?" This was the question voiced by a graduate student in a seminar I recently taught in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century children's books. The student had made a trip to our university's library and discovered that there were already hundreds of published articles dealing with such works as Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (1868-69), Francis Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden (1911), and Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865). While I reassured the student that there are certainly "new" things to say about these books, I flashed back to a letter I received the first time I submitted an article to this very journal. At that time, an outside reader suggested that I might want to write on something other than Alice's Adventures in Wonderland because so much has already been said about it.

Painting the Roses Red from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, illus. John Tenniel

During the rest of that semester, the student I mentioned, along with others in the seminar, tilled the gardens of Golden Age children's literature, occasionally discovering that—like Burnett's Mary Lennox and Carroll's Alice—an apparently overgrown, dead garden might yield beautiful flowers. Or that paradisiacal gardens might really contain white roses painted red or tiger lilies that talk back. Not surprisingly, much of what we found in these gardens was not original and, more often than not, we discovered that other critics had previously voiced our apparently novel ideas. Still, three students in that seminar (Susan Stewart, Angelia Blair, and David Morgan) went on to write innovative theses that germinated from the literary gardens we nurtured.

In the past few years, many scholars in our field have indeed proved that there is still much left to be said about Golden Age children's texts. As I am writing this introduction, I have just finished reading Jack Zipes's insightful discussion of Heinrich Hoffman's Der Stuwwelpeter (1845) in his new book, Sticks and Stones: The Troublesome Success of Children's Literature from Slovenly Peter to Harry Potter (Routledge, 2001), and I have recently perused Martin Gardner's newly revised Annotated Alice (Norton, 2000), Michael Patrick Hearn's Annotated Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Norton, 2000), and Janice M. Alberghene and Beverly Lyon Clark's Little Women and the Feminist Imagination (Garland, 1999). Waiting in the wings are many of the scholarly works recently reviewed in the Quarterly, including U. C. Knoepflmacher's Ventures into Chilldhood: Victorians, Fairy Tales, and Femininity (U of Chicago, 1998).

The five critical articles in this special issue of the Quarterly, which is devoted to children's literature of the "Golden Age," are certainly additional evidence that it is still worth unlocking the gates of well-known Golden Age literary gardens, demonstrating that a garden may look different on closer inspection than it does viewed from the tiny door at the bottom of a rabbit hole. Each of the articles included, selected from many fine submissions, reiterates Alison Lurie's contention in Don't Tell The Grown-ups (Little, Brown 1990) that many of the well-known children's texts of the Golden Age are subversive. In addition, these articles turn inside out certain preconceptions about classic children's texts, including, coincidentally, three that my graduate students had studied.

The first article, Danielle Price's "Cultivating Mary: The Victorian Secret Garden," is an insightful rereading of Burnett's The Secret Garden, focusing on issues of gender, class, and imperialism and drawing on the work of nine-teenth-century theorists about gardening. Price argues that the "cultivation" of Mary Lennox follows nineteenth-century ideas about creating perfect gardens, and Mary learns to provide beauty and comfort, in turn cultivating her male cousin and furthering male power.

In "'Why is a Raven like a Writing-Desk?': The Play of Letters in Lewis Carroll's Alice Books," Jan Susina reexamines Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking...