A Notable Irrelevance: Class and Children's Fiction

Abstract

Class, Fred Inglis says, at once too obvious and too irrelevant a term to apply to children's fiction. Its (whatever it is) has to be faced and grasped. But I think that children's reading, whatever class messages may be carried to the class-conscious adult, is always and endlessly capable of being relocated in the classless paradise (50). This is a remarkable comment coming from a critic as aware of the interrelation of the literary and the social as is Fred Inglis. Class is, we notice, at once obvious and irrelevant—that is, so blatant as to need no critic to draw a reader's attention to it, and of no relevance anyway. It is beside the point. What is it that moves Inglis here? Since he is concerned only with the child's reading, Inglis feels licensed to ignore a potentially disruptive adult interpretation and to concern himself instead with what he assumes to be the child's ability to relocate what she or he reads, to respond to the undoubted presence of class in such a way as to erase it. This confident certainty about how children interpret texts, and that the re- sponses of adult and child can be distinguished unproblematically, ef- faces two major issues in the criticism of children's books. First, it is no easy matter to assess the response of any reader, adult or child, and it is therefore implausible to imagine that children's reading will relocate any aspect of a text, including class.1 Second, Inglis forgets that the books children read are, generally speaking, written, published, and provided by adults and that the sleight of pen by which they then become the child's possession—children's fiction—obscures the fact that these books are the creations of the necessarily class-conscious adult.2 What seems to be at stake here, then, is not children's reading as such, but an adult's desire to think of children as reading in a certain way. To put it in Jacqueline Rose's terms, we can suggest that this is the result of an investment made by the adult in the child and a made by the adult on the child as the effect of that investment, a demand which fixes the child and then holds it in place.3 As a result, children's fiction draws in the child, it secures, places and frames the child ... sets up a world in