A Garland from the Golden Age: An Anthology of Children's literature from 1850-1900 (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: A Garland from the Golden Age: An Anthology of Children's literature from 1850-1900 Lynne M. Rosenthal (bio) Demers, Patricia , ed. A Garland from the Golden Age: An Anthology of Children's literature from 1850-1900Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1983 In the preface to Garland From the Golden Age; An Anthology of Children's Literature From 1850-1900, Patricia Demers suggests that children are the true democrats among readers, asking only "that their books make claims on the imagination strong enough to transport them to another world." During the second half of the nineteenth century, the "golden age" of children's literature, the horizons of the worlds to which the imaginative child could be transported were enlarged to include, as Demers' section headings suggest, the fairy tale, the allegory, evangelical writing, the children's novel, nursery fiction, school stories, adventure stories and shockers, animal tales, periodicals and poetry. While some of the currents underlying these new genres (such as the impulse to moralize and socialize the young) gathered strength in the earlier part of the century, new forces began to drive these currents: a wish to entertain as well as to instruct, an openness to fantasy as well as to utilitarianism, a desire to create credible characters as well as the familiar positive and negative models prevalent in children's literature earlier in the century. Demers has included excerpts from well-known works like John Ruskin's The King of the Golden River, Charles Dickens' The magic Fishbone, Lewis Carroll's Alice and Looking Glass, Oscar Wilde's fairy tales, Dinah Maria Craik's The Little Lame Prince, George MacDonald's At the Back of the North Wind, Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses, and Thomas Hughes' Tom Brown's Schooldays, along with selections from authors like Edward Knatchbull-Hugessen, Lucy Clifford, Annie Keary, Angela Brazil, and Hesba Stretton, whose works, Demers says, have been unjustly neglected by contemporary scholars and readers. Although focusing on British texts, this collection does include selections from American writers like Horatio Alger, Jr., Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Helen Hunt Jackson, and Howard Pyle, and Canadian authors like James De Mille, and W. A. Fraser, and Norman Duncan. Demers also provides short essays before each section and text, which concisely provide valuable historical and biographical information and highlight significant themes and issues in each genre. With the help of these signposts, the reader is encouraged to infer a great deal more about the literary and social conventions from which these texts emerge. Thus, the general description of the fairy-tale as encompassing "many common elements: magic objects and social conventions from which these texts emerge. Thus, the general description of the fairy-tale as encompassing "many common elements: magic objects and agents, a journey to another world either dreamed or realized, and frequent transformations," along with the rubric "Beauty, Humor and Terror" which introduces the section, helps the reader not only to recognize motifs, but also to think about how terrifying sadomasochistic images of physical and emotional abuse in invented fairy tales like Clifferd's The New Mother and Christina Rossetti's "The Land of Nowhere" may reflect both the conventions of the fairytale and the psychological realities of middle-class family and social life. But while subtle, deeply-rooted adult doubts about the satisfactions of social life may be implicit in a number of children's stories included in the anthology (consider Frederic Farrar's school novel, Eric; or Little by Little, in which the young anti-hero falls more and more deeply into sin, despite every effort to be good), the majority of the texts Demers include includes continues to transmit traditional values of piety, hard work and conformity to social and familial norms. While even fairy tales could be invented to inculcate moral values (Charles Kingsley's The Water Babies, for example), important new vehicles for socializing the young during the second half of the nineteenth century in England and the United States were the domestic and school novels. Writers like Charlotte Yonge (The Daisy Chain), Juliana Ewing (Six to Sixteen), the American Helen Jackson (Nelly's Silver Mine), and, of course, Louisa May Alcott...