Author-Child Collaboration

VICTORIA FORD SMITH'S Between Generations: Collaborative Authorship in the Golden Age of Children's Literature examines certain occurrences of author-child collaboration that took place in the nineteenth century in order to argue that scholars should look more closely at how real children contributed to the production of texts, how they were not simply the passive consumers of stories handed down to them by adult writers but active participants in the making of the Golden Age of children's literature. In what is an exhaustively researched and well-told account, Smith unearths a mostly overlooked but very important part of the history of children's literature—the role that actual children played in shaping not only some of the most popular and beloved texts of the period but the ways in which children and childhood were perceived. In a wide-ranging analysis of many different authors and kinds of children's texts, Smith manages to convince her reader that without such collaborations, the Golden Age of children's literature might not have emerged at all.

Particularly strong is the book's opening chapter which focuses on children as active listeners and the idea that in listening to stories children often become collaborators. In her examination of the Grimms' fairy tale collections, for example, Smith recognizes that the oral tradition creates an instability of language and opens up the possibility of a children's literature in which proper usage gives way to a more fluid and imaginative mode. The child's input into a story, she notes, "through patterns of listening and repetition" worked to introduce a less formal and more playful kind of expression. Children were, according to Smith, "savvy storytellers, creative wordsmiths, and powerful forces in the stories told and written for them." Had storytellers not engaged children, the tradition of layering an oral framework onto the written text would not have developed.

The second chapter looks at one of the more well-known adult-child collaborations of the period as it explores Robert Louis Stevenson's literary relationship with his stepson Lloyd Osbourne. In Treasure Island they achieved a complex negotiation between the adult's nostalgia for and the child's innocent fascination with adventure stories, a part of Stevenson's novel which undoubtedly sets it apart from other nineteenth-century seafaring tales, such as those by W. H. G. Kingston or R. M. Ballantyne. Smith examines the stage adaption of the novel, Treasure Island: A Melodrama in Five Acts, developed by Lloyd Osbourne and his nephew Austin Strong, which picks up where Stevenson's narrative leaves off as it focuses on Jim's marriage after he arrives back home from his sea voyage. According to Smith, "the family dynamics of Stevenson, Osbourne and Strong seem to celebrate the potential of multigenerational collaboration, despite its challenges and failures." While the stage adaptation can hardly be said to have reached the popularity of the original novel, it is worth remembering because it ultimately demonstrates how Stevenson approached his work much more like a family legend than a saleable commodity.

Equally strong is the chapter on children's collaboration with the authorities which examines how "those tasked with managing, educating and writing about children" sometimes canvassed the opinions of child readers in order to incorporate into children's literature a more authentic version of the child's voice. Smith notes how Charles Dickens sometimes displayed a condescending attitude toward his own child narrators, often undercutting their authority as storytellers by indicating some measure of contempt for their cute and precocious ways. She goes on to explain how lesser-known figures, such as William Brighty Rands, adopted instead a kinship model in which "adults must abandon their assumptions about the child's innate inferiority or passivity" in order to allow for the "promotion of sympathy between adults and children." Often there is very little attention paid by scholars to the ways in which texts are shaped by the coming together of two very...