Casting Nets for Children's Literature

Abstract

Casting Nets for Children's Literature Irving P. Cummings (bio) Children's Books in England: Five Centuries of Social Life, by F. J. Harvey Darton. Third edition, revised by Brian Alderson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Fifteen Centuries of Children's Literature: An Annotated Chronology of British and American Works in Historical Context, by Jane Bingham and Grayce Scholt. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980. The Oxford Companion to Children's Literature, by Humphrey Carpenter and Mari Prichard. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984. A new edition of a standard history and two new reference works join the rapidly expanding materials for students, teachers, and scholars of children's literature in England and America. The new edition of the history makes that book even more valuable, but the two reference works are not entirely successful in realizing their aims. F. J. Harvey Darton's Children's Booh in Englandhas been meticulously and tactfully edited by Brian Alderson, bringing this classic history up to date. Darton's text has been clarified, corrected, and amended where information not available or not known in 1932 has emerged in the last fifty years. Sometimes silent corrections have been made, sometimes paragraphs have been recast, and sometimes editor's notes, at the back of the book, have extended or commented on Darton's text. The net effect of these editorial amendments has been to leave Darton's narrative relatively untouched but at the same time to make the facts as dependable and as accurate as current scholarship can make them and to keep the paraphernalia of footnoting to a minimum. If there is—as there might well be—an uncomfortable feeling about this kind of tinkering with the text, a reading of that text makes clear why the revision was done that way. For Darton's book is an engaging narrative, with the impress of a relaxed, informed, and [End Page 187]discriminating mind. If one wonders how the "good godly books" of the Puritans, with their narratives of the edifying deaths of children, could have been called "pleasurable," Darton's page or so in chapter 4 effectively explains it. We may not accept those books on our own terms. There is a largeness of mind here that avoids temporal provinciality and yet can articulate judgments that are not trapped in mere historical relativism. The several pages on Martha Mary Sherwood's once famous (notorious?) The Fairchild Familyor those on J. M. Barrie's still famous (notorious?) Peter Panare only two instances of Darton's large mind, acute judgment, and elegant prose. This is still the best history of children's books in England: its opening sentence clearly and accurately announces its focus. "By 'children's books' I mean printed works produced ostensibly to give children spontaneous pleasure, and not primarily to teach them, nor solely to make them good, nor to keep them profitablyquiet." It is a deceptively simple sentence whose crucially discriminating adverbs make clear that Darton knows how difficult it is to chart this terrain. Newbery is the one pole of Darton's history; in six brief chapters he tells how Newbery used the six kinds of children's tales that preceded him. In his middle chapter Darton narrates the Newbery story, and then, in seven chapters, sweeps from Day and Edgeworth to his other pole, Lewis Carroll, then on to the age of Kipling, Barrie, Grahame, Nesbit, and Stevenson. Throughout Darton does more than survey books. He indicates the context in which the books appear, a context that reviews the shifting ideas of what spontaneous pleasure might and ought to be, and a context that depends upon the changing technology of printing, the creation of audiences, and the financial concerns of publishers. Darton's narrative laid out the mainlines of the history; most of the works since then have been expansions of his work, rarely matching his in elegance, easy clarity, and narrative power. Alderson's edition is a remarkably handsome book. There are more illustrations than in the earlier editions, most of them the actual size of the originals, and all carefully captioned so that they do more than illustrate the text—they extend it. Alderson has updated...