Childhood Studies Goes to War

In Children’s Literature and Culture of the First World War, editors Lissa Paul, Rosemary R. Johnston, and Emma Short bring the experiences of children and childhood to the forefront of the study of war culture. The collection asks both how children were affected by the First World War and how the adults who participated in this war were affected by their past childhood experiences. The collection also includes several chapters examining how modern children are affected by the war, including Michael Morpurgo’s opening essay and Peter Hunt’s closing chapter, which remind readers that examinations of war remain current in contemporary children’s literature.

The editors frame the discussion in their introductory chapter by arguing that the voices in children’s “images, diaries, letters, and journals” were “mature in their engagement” with the realities of war, especially when compared to the “childlike qualities” of King George, Kaiser Wilhelm, and Czar Nicholas, who are described as “large scale children” acting immaturely and irrationally (3). This theme of young people’s maturity and rationality in wartime marks an important departure from previous studies, many of which have painted civilians as ignorant and blindly patriotic.

This volume, which brings together interdisciplinary scholars from children’s literature, war studies, and education, is the result of three conferences funded by the Leverhulme Trust that were held in Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom between December 2011 and March 2013. Its nineteen chapters shed new light on the wartime experiences of children from Europe, North America, and the Global South, making it the first transnational account of children and childhood during the First World War. The collection also crosses “enemy” lines by studying children from both Allied and Central powers, allowing contributors to examine differences and commonalities across nations. Unfortunately, the collection does not examine the experiences of underage soldiers or displaced families. The editors highlight interdisciplinary perspectives and themes common to diverse nations by grouping articles under the headings “Writing War,” “Propaganda and Experience,” “Education and Play,” and “Activism,” instead of by nation or discipline.

The first section, “Writing War,” illustrates how children living in the early twentieth century were primed for war by the literature they read. Paul Stevens’s chapter, for instance, reveals that Winston Churchill’s devotion to the “joys of war” was shaped by his childhood reading. Stevens explores the impact of Victorian adventure novels such as King Solomon’s Mines (1885) in sustaining Churchill’s enjoyment of war even when the noble horse was replaced with tanks and planes, and trench warfare stifled the agency of individual soldiers. In contrast, Andrea McKenzie demonstrates how American girls rejected prescriptive messages in children’s literature that placed girls in the home by writing letters and stories for St. Nicholas Magazine that provided their fictional female characters with active and exciting wartime roles. Katharine Capshaw considers how adult authors who wrote for The Brownies’ Book and Our Boys and Girls used the First World War to encourage African American children in fighting racial prejudice at home. She further shows that the black community conceptualized African American children “as public thinkers and social activists on the subject of war” (90).

While Capshaw analyzes the ways in which some periodicals used the war to strengthen minority cultures, Agnieszka Stasiewicz-Bieńkowska sees shifting understandings of Otherness and Selfness in Swedish American children’s magazines as a force that strengthened Swedish American children’s “unhyphenated American identity” (102). Finally, Lindsay Myers and Francesca Orestano further diversify this section by investigating how Italian children’s authors shifted their writing from fantasy to realism to subvert socio-political pressure to glorify war. Myers analyzes Arturo Rossato’s subversion of the domestication of war and the rhetoric of Italian unification in his work L’aeroplano di Girandolino, and Orestano deals with Salvator Gotta’s classic text Piccolo Alpino, to explore the “militarization of childhood” and “childification of war” (48). Orestano also examines Italian texts that were used to...