Mediation and Children's Reading: Relationships, Intervention, and Organization from the Eighteenth Century to the Present ed. by Anne Marie Hagen

Abstract

Reviewed by: Mediation and Children's Reading: Relationships, Intervention, and Organization from the Eighteenth Century to the Present ed. by Anne Marie Hagen Margaret Mackey (bio) Mediation and Children's Reading: Relationships, Intervention, and Organization from the Eighteenth Century to the Present. Edited by Anne Marie Hagen. Lehigh University Press, 2022. The individuality of readers and the infinite potential of specific texts makes reading a massively plural enterprise. It is tempting to think of the social side of reading as a more orderly and institutional affair—schools, libraries, even families operate on some predictable norms and conventions. But literature comes to the attention of children in ways that are diversely framed and situated. Similarly, academic studies of this literature and its readers represent a variety of perspectives. Mediation and Children's Reading, for example, is part of a series of Studies in Text and Print Culture (general editor Sandro Jung of the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics). This venue roots the book firmly in the book history camp, a disciplinary field known for a principled eclecticism. Thus, the editor of this book, Anne Marie Hagen, is an associate professor of English in Norway, concentrating on the history of reading and publishing since the nineteenth century. The nine other contributors represent a diverse range of specialisms: for example, children's literature (and English studies more broadly), education, library and archive studies, book history, typography, and book charities. One of the virtues of this book is that the topic invites them to consider the implications of the framing supplied by their own disciplinary perspective. To take a single example from this highly varied book, Suzan Alteri, in chapter 3, entitled "Mediating the Archives: Child Readers and Their Books in Special Collections," discusses how the academic study of children's literature has been mediated from the outset through the priorities of those historical figures whose private collections of children's materials form the core of many important archives today. Alteri's examples illustrate "how children's literature archives and special collections shape our views about child readers and their reading habits" (76). Additionally, she addresses the issue of "interrogating the archive" itself (84). But this is only one of many perspectives. The book is divided into four sections, following an introduction from Hagen to which I will return below. Part I looks at historical reading practices, Part II at programs and collections, Part III at textual and material strategies, and Part IV at texts, worlds, and mediation. Each section contains two chapters. In chapter 1, Elspeth Jajdelska explores the implications of socio-economic [End Page 332] status for children's access to reading materials in the eighteenth century, and raises a counter-intuitive observation: "[T]hose children who were least free, mainly because of poverty, to choose their own preferences from a wide range of potential reading, may in fact have been most free to read those texts they could access without interference or supervision, and therefore more free than their wealthier contemporaries to interpret what they read without reference to the expectations or desires of anyone else" (29). In other words, scaffolding adults, even as they enabled child reading, could frame it in invasive ways. In an era of levelled reading and other forms of instructional tyranny, it is impossible to say that this problem has been solved. In chapter 2, Rebecca Davies looks at a nested issue: the mediating form of the reading list as it is represented in a second mediating form, exemplar novels by Jane Austen, Mary Wollstonecraaft, and Amelia Opie. Chapter 4, by Emma Davidson and Tracy Cooper, looks at the "Bookbug" program, which "gifts bags of books and resources to every child in Scotland, from birth to . . . the first year of primary school and supports a network of practitioners to deliver free song and rhyme sessions" (95). The program also trains professionals in healthcare, library, education, and social work, as well as volunteers from charities, on supporting effective forms of family engagement. This chapter discusses mediation as a form of intervention. In Part III, however, Sue Walker and Jennifer Farrar look at mediation as something internal to the text, rather than coming from outside. Walker explores...