Shackled by Past and Parents: The Child in British Children’s Literature after 1970

Abstract

In children’s literature, adult authors can safely critique the adult world, and child characters in British literature, from William Blake’s Little Black Boy through Lewis Carroll’s Alice to Edith Nesbit’s Oswald Bastable, have always commented on the flawed nature of this adult world. Beginning in the 1970s, however, the nature of this critique became peculiarly focused on parents and past. Child characters, in books such as Roald Dahl’s Danny the Champion of the World (1975), Anne Fine’s The Granny Project (1983), and David Almond’s The Fire-Eaters (2003), take responsibility for educating and protecting their parents, who are flawed caretakers of both past and present generations. It is up to child characters to save them — thereby saving themselves and often their grandparents in the process. Even very young characters, such as Dick King-Smith’s Sophie (in his series beginning with Sophie’s Snail in 1988) or Grace Nichols’s Leslyn in Leslyn in London (1984), are forced to look after themselves emotionally because their parents are incapable of filling, or unable to fill, this role.