We Must Think of the Children!
A friend forwarded this article about the grim antecedents of children's literature to me and asked what I thought.
Well, except for the slander of Chesterfield, which I think is taken way out of context, it's a pretty good representation of my (admittedly non-academic) reading. The first thing to mind was a passage in Anthony Trollope's engaging autobiography in which he quotes a formidable elderly relative of his saying, in effect, that the stuff she read and enjoyed in her day was pretty rough stuff that makes her blush to reflect on now.
There's something to that. Another anecdote, this one my own: my husband's grandmother (born in 1898), when my daughter was about four and had begun reading up a storm, handed off a battered kids' book her mother had given her. The print was tiny, and the vocab way ahead of my kid's reading level, which was pretty simple (she was, like me, an early reader but no prodigy) so I took it upstairs to read, thinking I'd add it to the bedtime reading rotation.
Well. In the very first chapter--no, the first ten pages--a little boy is torturing small animals to death, whereupon he dies in a barn fire.
Uh, no. I was not giving that to my tender-hearted kid, who sobbed if any animal in cartoons seemed to be in danger. She didn't need that heavy-hammer lesson about kindness to other critters. But that heavy hammer is something I saw repeatedly when I leafed through dusty old books in old bookstores during the days when such things could be bought for a quarter.
Children's literature was cautionary and cruel. Yes, I know life was cruel. The thing is, when people rail today about the violence creeping into YA and middle grade books, I think, I am totally sympathetic, but the truth is, it's creeping back into it. Those who think that Victorial kid lit was all about saintly children doing good are not completely wrong, though most of the time the really saintly ones died before the age of ten, after delivering five-page sermons.
This entry was originally posted at https://sartorias.dreamwidth.org/996075.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
Well, except for the slander of Chesterfield, which I think is taken way out of context, it's a pretty good representation of my (admittedly non-academic) reading. The first thing to mind was a passage in Anthony Trollope's engaging autobiography in which he quotes a formidable elderly relative of his saying, in effect, that the stuff she read and enjoyed in her day was pretty rough stuff that makes her blush to reflect on now.
There's something to that. Another anecdote, this one my own: my husband's grandmother (born in 1898), when my daughter was about four and had begun reading up a storm, handed off a battered kids' book her mother had given her. The print was tiny, and the vocab way ahead of my kid's reading level, which was pretty simple (she was, like me, an early reader but no prodigy) so I took it upstairs to read, thinking I'd add it to the bedtime reading rotation.
Well. In the very first chapter--no, the first ten pages--a little boy is torturing small animals to death, whereupon he dies in a barn fire.
Uh, no. I was not giving that to my tender-hearted kid, who sobbed if any animal in cartoons seemed to be in danger. She didn't need that heavy-hammer lesson about kindness to other critters. But that heavy hammer is something I saw repeatedly when I leafed through dusty old books in old bookstores during the days when such things could be bought for a quarter.
Children's literature was cautionary and cruel. Yes, I know life was cruel. The thing is, when people rail today about the violence creeping into YA and middle grade books, I think, I am totally sympathetic, but the truth is, it's creeping back into it. Those who think that Victorial kid lit was all about saintly children doing good are not completely wrong, though most of the time the really saintly ones died before the age of ten, after delivering five-page sermons.
This entry was originally posted at https://sartorias.dreamwidth.org/996075.html. Please comment there using OpenID.