Suitable for Children? Controversies in Children's Literature (review)

Nicholas Tucker's Suitable for Children? Controversies in Children's Literature is not a comprehensive introduction to the subject, but a very personal collection of "essays and reviews often not easily accessible elsewhere." What sets this book apart from similar ventures is its editor's determination to avoid what he terms the "cosy, ineffectual criticism" which children's literature has often received in the past. He has "preferred to choose from sharper critics who are concerned with wider issues which are often more stimulating."

The result is a book which contains an interesting mixture of classic essays by writers like Dickens, Chesterton, and Lamb, and more recent critical pieces reprinted from such British periodicals as New Society, The Times Literary Supplement, and Where.

Tucker's approach seems most successful in the section on "Children's Books and Fear." Here he begins by presenting the chapter from Mrs. Sherwood's The History of the Fairchild Family in which the quarrelsome children are taken into a dark forest and shown the body of a murderer hanging in chains upon a gibbet. After this vivid example of the way children's books often used fear to teach moral lessons, the editor shows us what such frightening stories must have meant to young children by including Charles Lamb's account of the "Witches and Other Night Fears" which plagued him as a boy. There is also an interesting description by Charles Dickens of the grisly tales his nurse told him —stories which bear more than a passing resemblance to some of the nightmarish and hallucinatory sequences in his own novels. A brisk essay by Chesterton expresses doubt that censors will ever be able to remove the fear-inducing element from art and his conviction that it is possible to "fortify the child. . .by giving him health and humor and a trust in God" as well as "an intelligent appreciation of the idea of authority, which is only the other side of confidence." The section is rounded off by an article on children's books and fear by a children's author who also happens to be a psychiatrist: Catherine Storr. Her essay is shrewd and well worth reprinting, though the editor's suggestion that it sums up current thinking on the subject may be something of an overstatement

Suitable for Children? is not the kind of comprehensive and balanced survey of controversies in Children's Literature which might be useful as a classroom text. The book is divided into sections dealing with "Fairy Stories," "Comics," "Children's Books and Fear," "Children's Classics," and "The Value of Children's Literature." American readers will probably be baffled by many of the references to British comic strips, and perhaps understandably puzzled by the inclusion of a detailed account of Japanese pornographic and horror comics of a sort certainly not designed for children. Among the pleasures of the book, however, are the introduction by the editor, with its thoughtful treatment of the intrinsic differences between the best books written for children and those written for adults, and his piece on Toad of Toad Hall: "The Children's Falstaff." Like all the items in this collection, Tucker's contributions are lively and well-written. Though the pieces in this anthology may be uneven in value, they are never dull. The book should be of particular interest to smaller American libraries, since it reprints some hitherto inaccessible but undeniably "stimulating" essays.