I’m not sure how ground-breaking Huck’s relationship with Jim was perceived at the time these books were new, but I can guess that it was pretty spectacular. With Mark Twain and his The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, books about adventure which try to teach the world a lesson, as opposed to the children doing the reading, come into their own. Considering that this was originally cooked up to keep three little girls amused on a summer’s afternoon, I think it definitely passes the ‘was this intended for children?’ test with flying colours.
#A lost masterpiece by a a milne full
They’re probably more appealing to adults, these days.Īlice’s Adventures in Wonderland dates, scarily, to 1865 it’s definitely a masterpiece, though it’s also stuffed full of lessons and allusions, not that you’d notice them because the story is so much fun.
His fairy tales, including The Happy Prince, are still considered masterpieces – though, again, I’m not sure what modern children would make of them. Oscar Wilde did a good job, in my opinion, of marrying the didacticism with wonderful stories. Little Women was also published in 1868, and it’s admittedly a masterpiece – but it’s also full of lessons, despite being as different from North Wind as it’s possible for two texts to be. At the Back of the North Wind, from 1868, is a good example of a story which is full of wonder and imagination, but also stuffed with the sickly-sweet idealisation of childhood between its goody-two-shoes narrator and its puke-tastic ending, it wouldn’t last two seconds with a modern child reader. Swiss Family Robinson ,published in 1812, is a great adventure story but it was designed to teach. However, they were heavy on the moralistic didacticism, and light on the fun. Throughout the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth, texts and stories written with children in mind began to proliferate. It’s incredible to think it dates from the 1720s. A tale which deals with changing body size, the arbitrary nature of justice in a world you don’t understand, and being utterly lost, are all things familiar to anyone who loves to write or read children’s books, even now. I recently attended a lecture about children’s literature in which the speaker discussed Gulliver’s Travels, by Jonathan Swift, as a story which is full of allusions to things kids wouldn’t have a clue about, like history, politics and sexuality but which is, nevertheless, for children.
Even fairy tales (now considered the foundation of children’s literature) weren’t originally designed for child readers, and were sanitised thoroughly by nineteenth-century moralists to make them ‘suitable’, which is a shame. Early writing for young readers was all about control and instruction.
Early literature didn’t really distinguish between ‘adult’ readers and ‘child’ readers in the sense that nobody wondered whether kids would like to read stuff that appealed to their imaginations – in fact, it was precisely this sort of flightiness that literature for children sought to keep under wraps. So, it’s probably not news to anyone that the idea of ‘children’s literature’ didn’t really exist until the mid to late eighteenth century before that, texts were written for children, of course, but they were without exception things like ‘horn books’, or primers to help them learn to read, primarily composed of Scripture excerpts and lessons. Photo Credit: Stewart Leiwakabessy via Compfight cc Is it just me, or is this really creepy? *shudder*
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