Between Generations: Collaborative Authorship in the Golden Age of Children's Literature by Victoria Ford Smith (review)

Between Generations is part of the Children's Literature Association series. Books in this series present critical examinations of all elements involved in the production, distribution, and reception of children's and young adult literature. The focus in Between Generations is on the active role children play in creative processes to do with children's books in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In her scrutiny of young people's agency and their creative partnership with adults, Smith, as she explains in the introduction, contests critical assumptions about children's literature that date back to the 1980s, in particular Jacqueline Rose's claim that the child figure was nothing but the product of adult desire and children's literature an adult practice with children as passive receivers. Inspired by scholars such as Marah Gubar, Rachel Conrad, and Robin Bernstein, to name the most important ones, Smith turns to real children and their agency in the production of cultural artifacts, but she does so without losing sight of child figures in texts for children. In the four chapters following the introduction, she presents case studies involving both real and fictive collaborations between adults and children, for which she draws on archival documents as well as narrative analyses of texts by well-known authors such as Charles Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson, but also of more popular materials such as children's newspapers and painting books. For her analysis of the collaborative child and the intergenerational dialogue throughout cultural production, Smith makes use of publication history, in her own words, "a methodology that has the potential to alter the critical practice of scholars in children's literature and Victorian studies" (256).

In the first chapter, "Active Listeners," Smith discusses examples of storytelling processes in the nineteenth century that challenge assumptions about storytelling as a practice involving an active adult narrator and a passive child listener. She does so against the backdrop of the "Child Study movement" (46) and the importance of children's language development for the acknowledgment of the active role children play in creating stories in storytelling sessions. She gives a detailed description of conflicting theories within this movement: on the one hand, there are theories that emphasize that children mainly reproduce language they hear in their environment; on the other, there are theories that focus on the creative use of language by children. Insight into the changing perceptions of the connection between children and language is definitely relevant for understanding why authors pay attention to oral culture in real and fictive narrator-listener partnerships, but a more concise presentation of information would have made this part of the chapter tighter.

Whereas in the first chapter Smith explores several cases of active listeners and of authors paying attention in their work to the collaborative nature of storytelling scenes, chapter 2, "Family Dynamics," focuses exclusively on the co-authorship between Robert Louis Stevenson and his stepson Samuel Lloyd Osborne. As their partnership started with a small printing press, the fascinating portrait of the complexity of intergenerational partnership in this particular case is embedded in research on boyhood in the nineteenth century, in particular on how the small printing press, very fashionable among boys in those days, stimulated children's creative participation in literary productions.

Taking Peter Hunt's plea for "childist criticism" as her point of departure, Smith in chapter 3, "Collaborating with the Authorities," goes into the attempts on the part of nineteenth-century children's book mediators such as teachers and librarians to give children a voice in the evaluation of children's books. Although accepted methods of instruction in the British educational system in the nineteenth century for quite some time left little room for the imaginative child, Smith convincingly shows how influential adults such as children's author Charles Kingsley and the well-known school inspector Matthew Arnold successfully argued for a teacher-child relationship in the classroom that ties in with...