The Reception of Ancient Greece and Rome in Children’s Literature: Heroes and Eagles ed. by Lisa Maurice (review)

This collection of thirteen essays attempts to demonstrate how the Greco-Roman world has been variously “received” in works of children’s literature, and especially how such “sites of reception” encode later ideological viewpoints for delivery to the child reader. This “reception” approach to classical literature, in which classics are understood to be “ante-texts” and adaptations and retellings as “receiving texts” (4), is a relatively recent but dynamic branch of classical studies. The contributors to this volume are specialists in classics, children’s literature, or both, and they describe a range of materials: Anglo-American but also Polish and French literature, novels and picture books, but also video games, graphic novels (bandes déssinées), and comic strips. Virtually all of the essays offer convincing proof for their claims along with extensive notes and bibliography for further context. The essays tend to be long on description and short on analysis, but properly so, since the work of such a text should surely be to establish a context and terms of discussion so that analysis can take place in later scholarship.

The collection is organized into four sections of related chapters, an organization that avoids some of the inevitable sense of hit and miss in any collection—that is, of heavy coverage in some areas and none in others—and allows the texts in each section to reinforce each other. Part 1, “Classics and Ideology in Children’s Literature,” examines how the so-called golden age of Victorian and Edwardian children’s literature received the similarly golden age of the Greco-Roman past. In the first chapter, Elizabeth Hale shows how classical motifs contribute to the construction in children’s literature of both character and ideal child. Though she begins her discussion with Tom Brown’s Schooldays, her main focus is on the late-Victorian and Edwardian periods, where childhood is shown to be a separate and superior state, nostalgically attuned to a pastoral spirit of nature, and presided over by pagan gods (25). Hale’s discussion includes the puer aeternus in Peter Pan (23); classical encounters with Pan in The Wind in the Willows (23–24) and in The Secret Garden, via the Pan-like Dickon (24–25); and Peter and Wendy (25). The children in E. Nesbit’s The Enchanted Castle similarly demonstrate that they are superior beings to adults by enjoying the gods’ company (27–28). Of course, as Hale herself acknowledges, Victorian and Edwardian ideas of childhood were very different from those of the actual, original Romans.

In the next chapter, Joanna Paul focuses on how Edwardian anxieties and sensibilities inform Nesbit’s work, especially The Story of the Amulet. Time travel in Amulet allows Nesbit to propose Fabian socialism, criticize British shortcomings in social welfare at home and in the empire, and suggest that Britain is truly great and will be a utopia in the future, but also suggest less obvious Edwardian fascinations. She draws attention to Nesbit’s “feel of history” (33) that resonates more strongly with children than didacticism. Young readers “are clearly meant to revel in the exotic excitement” of visiting ancient cities (37). Some of the adult excitement at the time is suggested by Paul’s mention of such Edwardian interests as ancient garden cities, theosophy, origins of Egyptian civilization, research on the potential historicity of Atlantis, and conflicted views of British identity as cultural heir to an invading country, a subject also visited in part 4 of this essay collection.

In chapter 3, Katarzyna Marcinak extends classics reception to Polish literature. Classics have always been important in Poland, which still considers itself to be part of the Mediterraneum, a spiritual community exceeding geographical borders (59). The works of two classics professors have made that classicism particularly available to children and have inspired classical reception in later works of Polish children’s literature. The Mythology of Jan Parandowski (1895–1978) links classical past to...