The First Word Francelia Butler (bio) This is a historic issue—the first scholarly journal in the field of children's literature published by a major university press. The contributors include Robert Coles, M.D., winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Children of Crisis; James Hillman, who gave the Terry Lectures at Yale following such scholars as Jung and Erich Fromm; Alison Lurie, critic and novelist, who teaches children's literature at Cornell; Leslie Fiedler, the Samuel Clemens Professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo; Michael Hearn, editor of The Annotated Wizard of Oz; Geoffrey Summerfield, who teaches English at York University and is the author of several books on education and literature; and Roger Sale, whose Fairy Tales and After was recently published by Harvard University Press. The contributions range widely: from critical and historical essays on nineteenthand twentieth-century children's books to discussions of child abuse. A field which we think is still neglected and which we hope to explore in future volumes is the Media. Improving the quality of plays on television for children is one of the greatest needs at the present time. We hope that in the future the Media will offer presentations of fairy tales which have not been bowdlerized. Ideally such presentations would move children, and also adults, into new imaginative worlds. Their imaginations would be challenged, their sensibilities touched, and their sympathies expanded. As the romances and old wives' and fairy tales which Wordsworth read as a child prepared him for life's many physical, mental, and spiritual challenges, so better drama will move children through joy and fear into a broader, grander world. In children's literature itself there is a great need for a more general dissemination of the cultural and humanitarian benefits of fairy tales in their literal or more literal forms. When Bruno Bettelheim, perhaps the greatest living Freudian insofar as child psychology is concerned, and James Hillman of the Jung Institute [End Page 1] agree on the therapeutic uses of enchantment, it is unfortunate that well-meaning groups concerned with literature and television for children criticize the violence in the old fairy tales. Unlike highly didactic stories which often give only a partial view of life, fairy tales show life as it really is. It is better to see all the figures in the carpet of life rather than those woven with just a few select strands. Good and evil are intermingled in life, and in separating one from the other, dangerously false views and expectations are created in children. In contrast the old tales teach us to accept the evil with the good and enable us to live better, more productive lives. "Once upon a time" is timeless. As Dickens put it, times are "hard" when educators thinking to protect children from the evils of the world imprison them in educational Stone Lodges. The old tales reveal Dickens's "wisdom of the heart." Through representation of the "once upon a time," children can escape the limitations both of our times and of themselves and grow, as Dickens envisioned, into adults capable of compassion and understanding. [End Page 2] Francelia Butler Francelia Butler teaches at the University of Connecticut and is the author of the forthcoming Masterworks of Children's Literature of the Seventeenth Century. Copyright © 1980 Children's Literature An International Journal, Inc.