Grand Canon Suite

Developing a list of important children's books is an undemocratic but praiseworthy endeavour. Despite our North American horror of offending even the most awful of writers and those who enjoy their awful writing, some books are more important than others. But the word "canon" is infortunate. Its meanings suggest regulation and repression; it applies to church laws, or to axiomatic and universally binding standards; or it is a catalogue of saints. The members of ChLA are often wise and sometimes even saintly, but we are certainly not the First Church of Children's Literature Triumphant. We are not trying to lay down the law about children's literature. We do not mean our "canon" to be universally binding. [End Page 1] [Begin Page 3] We are not going to decide which books are, as my dictionary says, "genuine and inspired"; and we certainly do not want to consign all the other books to eternal damnation, or eternal remaindering, whichever comes first.

But having talked about developing a "canon" for years, we are stuck with the word; so our first job is to re-define it. Some important steps toward re-definition were taken at the session on "Developing a Canon" at the last ChLA conference. The members of the panel for that session—Mary Ake, Jane Bingham, Alethea Helbig, Marcia Shafer, and Jon Stott-did admirable work in preparing possible lists of works to be included in a canon. Their lists led to a lively discussion; the session as a whole showed what problems there are in canon-building, and even suggested some solutions.

Our search for a canon emerges from our sense of responsibility, as people knowledgeable about children's literature, to pass our knowledge onto others. We all have ideas about what makes a children's book important—and more significantly, about which children's books are the important ones. Our model in developing a canon is a presumed canon of literature in general—a list of the literary works everybody should know. Some people would say such a canon does not exist; even if it does, its astonishing flexibility suggests some of the problems we face.

The canon of important literary works was not put together by a committee. It grew and changed over time; it is still growing and changing. According to the editors of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, there are thirty-one "major" English authors. They include Carlyle, whom I have my doubts about; they do not include Fielding and Dickens, who surely ought to be included. Furthermore, they include Blake and Donne, who would certainly not have been named a hundred years ago; and they do not include James Thomson and Robert Southey, who certainly would have been named a hundred years ago. Literary canons are slippery things that vary with literary taste; a canon of children's literature is bound to be elusive.

Furthermore, every list of books implies a principle by which choices have been made. A list of books experts admire will be different from a list of books they consider important, and many of us have suffered through numbing sessions with "important" books like Richardson's Pamela or anything by Hemingway. Is our canon of children's literature going to list important books? Or good ones? Or both? If good, who decides what "good" is? If important, important for what reasons?

An even more significant question is, who is the list for? Consider Hamlet. No-one would doubt it is part of the canon of great literature. Everyone should know what Hamlet is about, but educated people should actually have read it; well-educated people should also have read Lear and Othello and Macbeth; people with a good education should know ten or fifteen other "important" Shakespeare plays; people with a specific interest in drama should know everything Shakespeare wrote; and graduate students should know, not just all of Shakespeare, but all of Ben Jonson and of Beaumont and Fletcher and even of Shakerly Marmion. What matters varies with whom it matters to. Is our canor of children's literature going to include only the works everyone should know? Only the works...