Editor's Introduction

The golf links lie so near the mill
    That almost every day
The laboring children can look out
    And see the men at play.

Sarah Cleghorn

This special issue of The Lion and the Unicorn is devoted to Work and Children's Literature. As is the case with some earlier special topics, notably Violence and Children's Literature, the theme word chimes oddly with the discourse of childhood, a dissonance made plain, for example, in Sarah Cleghorn's wry 1917 quatrain. Such a dissonance between childhood and work, a tension examined in detail in the essays of Makman, Nikolajeva, and Pace, is peculiar since the worldwide phenomenon of laboring children is familiar in fiction—from "Cinderella" and Kingsley's Water Babies through Sachar's Holes—and in fact, as seen in the documentary reports on nineteenth-century children in mines and mills, and contemporary children at third-world carpet looms and first-world fast-food griddles.

But pervasive as child labor may be in literature and in life, it has not been morally normalized in either place. A document such as the 1989 U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child (cited and discussed by Makman) virtually asserts an antithesis between childhood (treated as a universal concept) and almost all kinds of labor by specifying the child's right "to be protected from economic exploitation and from performing any work that is likely to be hazardous or to interfere with the child's education or to be harmful to the child's health or physical, mental, spiritual, moral or social development."

In the five essays that follow, the authors analyze relations between childhood and work both by problematizing terms and historicizing circumstances: Is childhood universal, or entirely the creation of class or moment, or even of the camera's lens? Is work to be rightly understood as exploitation or as the primary means of self-development? Lisa Makman argues that contemporary Children's Rights discourse, epitomized in recent youth activism against third-world child labor in the name of universal childhood, is in tension with the multicultural discourse that regularly represents child labor as a means of socialization. Maria Nikolajeva makes sweeping generic claims for children's literature as a pastoral form from which labor is inevitably banished by a number of maneuvers she deftly catalogues. Patricia Pace treats Lewis Hine's class-conscious photographs of working children as themselves complicit with the exploitative labor practices that turn human subjects into industrial objects. In Marilynn Olson's treatment of the "Little Workers" of Froebel's kindergartens, work is seen not as exploitative and contrary to the interests of the child but as a means of highly disciplined and rationalized self-expression. Mary Sebag-Montefiore reads Mrs. Molesworth's girls' novels as a series of failed romances with meaningful work, depicting a historical moment in which the demands of caste and gender thwarted the possibilities of individual self-formation through a chosen vocation.