Sentiment and Significance: The Impossibility of Recovery in the Children's Literature Canon, or The Drowning of The Water Babies

Recovery of a forgotten author always sounds like a wonderful idea; one takes a writer whose work, like a dropped stitch, fell out of its place, and knits it back into its row in the canonical garment. I use “recovery” here to mean not just a return to print but a return to broad awareness of a book as indispensable, as, in short, a children’s literature classic to be passed on to ensuing generations. A hypothetical version of recovery works something like this: a critic writes a brilliant new book on Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies (1863), causing people to reassess its importance. The book is favorably reviewed not only in academic journals, but in “gatekeeper” periodicals such as the New York Times Book Review and the New York Review of Books. Other scholars find this work relevant to their own, and Water-Babies articles begin to appear in PMLA, contesting, restructuring, and expanding on the original pivotal volume. At the same time, non-academics who have read the monograph’s reviews and seen the author on the Today show exhibit heightened interest in The Water-Babies itself, buying it in greater numbers for their children. Soon, Spielberg’s plans for a new live-action movie are announced, the book is repackaged with a flashy film tie-in (while the Norton edition steadily infiltrates universities), and the children and scholars of the 1990s rediscover the magic and/or import of Mrs. Doasyouwouldbedoneby and Mrs. Bedonebyasyoudid and then pass them onto the next generations as treasures of their own childhood.

It is an appealing picture, but it is not going to happen. Children’s literature depends upon a canon of sentiment, and such canons are proof against attempts at academic recovery; the academic curriculum, which is based on a canon of significance, may rediscover the historical significance of a children’s author but can never truly recover it to the literature’s dominant popular canon.

Canons are an increasingly problematized notion in our time; children’s literature, with its conflicting and often polarized formative currents, offers a particularly complex response to the issue. In common academic discourse, we employ “canon” to refer to that list of works we consider requisite for understanding a part of literature; that, in short, is what we must teach if we wish students to comprehend a subject. While there is heated debate about how such texts should be chosen and perpetuated, or even what they mean, there have been some excellent analyses, both from those who approve of the process and those who do not, of how canon formation operates. Yet the academic canon formation described by Richard Ohmann as taking place “in the interaction between large audiences and gatekeeper intellectuals,” is not the process that creates lasting classics in children’s literature (“Shaping” 383).

Canon formation is largely a concern of literary scholarship, which has, as opposed to the disciplines of library science and education, lately turned its attention to the genre of children’s literature; only recently have academic rankings of significance for the books within the genre begun to appear. While children’s literature does not yet offer academic anthologies of the same weight and importance as the Heath or the Norton collections, which operate as arbiters or thermostats of canonical status, other works such as Charles Frey and John Griffith’s Classics of Children’s Literature (which offers a similar compendium flavor and paperback textbook format and which just appeared in its fourth edition) seem to want to emulate them. If academic criticism of children’s literature continues to burgeon, doubtless such books will gain in popularity and number.

As Brian McCrea discusses in Addison and Steele Are Dead (1990), academic canons exist to fill a variety of needs, both artistic and professional; scholars are likelier to discuss books about which they have something to say. The long academic silence on children’s literature seems likely to stem from the absence of its critical cachet as well as a lack of critical tools for...