For a long time the history of children’s literature was said to have begun either in the 17th century with the efforts of the Puritans, who considered childhood a particularly urgent time for the saving of souls, or with the commercial publishers of the 18th century, who developed children’s literature publishing as a distinct market, largely within an Anglo-American context. However, scholars now ‘consider multiple definitions of childhoods and children’s literatures’ (Lamb 2010, 412), with fresh attention given to childhood reading in pre-modern and early modern periods, more attention to global histories, and more attunement to overlooked regional histories and underexplored literary movements. Recent scholarship has also upended some prevailing narratives about the foundational texts of children’s literature. For example, Czech humanist John Amos Comenius is often credited with producing the first picture-book, Orbis Sensualium Pictus, published in German in 1658, but Mary Ann Farquhar asserts that China produced such a picture-book a century before: ‘an illustrated version of Daily Stories, a staple in the Confucian children’s canon,’ written in 1542 (Farquhar [1999] 2015, 16).
In my first chapter I discussed ways in which the definition of children’s literature is strongly rooted in a specific time and place, and how social and cultural institutions shape what we consider ‘children’s literature.’ The study of children’s literature reveals much about our conceptions of childhood itself, including sometimes contradictory notions. For example, while the Puritan period stressed religious salvation, several romances and folktales available in the oral and written cultures kept pagan ideals and practices very much in the forefront of childhood reading. While the 19th century ushered in a spirit of anti-didacticism, it also possessed many explicitly didactic works in a variety of genres, including religious tracts, fictions espousing civic virtues, as well as works that underpinned the colonialist project of empire. The history of children’s literature at any given moment frequently unfolds as a debate between conflicting ideas of both childhood and its literature. We see this, for example, in the late 18th century tension between a Romantic vision of a child as an avatar of transcendent freedom and an equally strong vision of the child as needing rigorous socialization into social and cultural norms.
It is with an eye to these conflicting ideas about childhood that I have chosen Edward Lear’s A Book of Nonsense (1846) as my case study for this chapter. In several ways this collection is very much a work of its time: an anti-didactic, playful work of poetry leading into the ‘golden age’ of children’s literature. Yet its strict poetic form affirms the very order it seeks to disrupt. It is a work that embodies some of the contradictions that inhere within the history of children’s literature.
Pre-modern children’s literature
Recent scholarship asks whether there is something we can term ‘children’s literature’ in earlier periods, predating its ostensible emergence in the 17th or 18th centuries. Gillian Adams has looked at works ‘closely associated with children’ in the Sumerian civilizations of the Third Dynasty of Ur (from the 22nd to 21st century bc) (Adams 1986, 1). She finds that the Sumerians created fables and instructional works stressing values such as hard work, the attainment of status, and material prosperity, but also the cultivation of ‘“nam-lú-ulù”, humanity, a concept which included the practice of truth, goodness, justice, mercy, courage, loyalty, and other virtues’ (Adams 1986, 27). These were qualities that made people worthy of the favour of the Gods. Wrestling with whether this pre-print literature was indeed meant for children, Adams described it as ‘an imaginative literature which may or may not have been originally composed for younger children or directed at them, but which was considered particularly suitable for them and to which they were regularly exposed’ (Adams 1986, 26). It would be impossible to find a more inclusive definition; it stresses children’s ‘exposure’ to literature or their ‘association’ with it without the obligation to prove that they were imagined as its readers, much less its sole readers.
When trying to find out what children read (or what was read to them) in earlier eras, scholars have often focused on educational conventions and children’s attainment of literacy. Sometimes looking at children’s books from the past can be a means of exploring literacy and educational practices that are no longer familiar. As Seth Lerer notes of classical antiquity, ‘Literary study led to a proficiency in rhetoric, and law, politics, and military leadership that were all rhetorical activities in Greek and Roman culture. To look for children’s literature in classical antiquity, therefore, is to look at the history of rhetoric and education’ (Lerer 2008, 17). Greek and Roman children were given excerpts from Homer or Virgil with a stress on recitation, memorization, and quotation. Educators of the period sought to break these texts down into ‘manageable sections,’ with each section age-levelled so that ‘Different passages would be read at different ages. And, always, texts would be prepared for recitation. Education trained the students to put on new roles: the parent, the teacher, the god, the ruler’ (Lerer 2008, 19). Karen Sánchez-Eppler notes, in fact, that the ‘preservation of ancient literature depends to a remarkable extent on the plethora of copies of texts produced by Sumero-Babylonian, Egyptian, Greek, and Roman children learning to write’ (Sánchez-Eppler 2013, 226).
Michael Levy and Farah Mendlesohn note how children’s engagement with literature in classical and ancient times anticipates adulthood, rather than lingering on childhood as a special state:
Levy and Mendlesohn see this strand of ‘civic education’ persisting into the 19th century with works like Thomas Hughes’ Tom Brown’s Schooldays(1857). The history of children’s literature reflects this ongoing tension between children’s books preserving and promoting a ‘childlike’ quality, and children’s books as a way to push children towards adulthood. There has always been a strand of children’s literature that does not seek to enable the child ‘to be a child’ but to move him or her as quickly as possible into a state of maturity.
Scholars have also discerned what we now conceive of as ‘childlike’ qualities in early modern or pre-modern works. In her studies of medieval texts, Gillian Adams searches for ‘as many indications as possible’ that something might be considered children’s literature (Adams 1998, 11–12). This includes both internal evidence (the address of a child; a child functioning as a character; explanatory glosses directed at ‘inexpert readers’) and external evidence (appearance in collections meant for schools; references in other works of children’s education). Her studies also require sensitivity to the complex registers of the Latin language in which many of these works are written:
The qualities or markers that distinguish a work as one for children or not for children, as the case may be, continue to preoccupy scholars and theorists in the field: an enduring question even for 20th and 21st century works. Take, for example, the idea that if a main character in a given work is a child, it is probably a work of children’s literature. A child protagonist is often a good indicator that a work is aimed at children, but that is not true, for example, of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2005), whose quirky nine-year-old protagonist Oskar roams New York City to try to piece together clues about a mysterious key left behind by his father, who was killed in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In short, the kinds of questions that animate the early history of children’s literature remain in force as we contemplate more contemporary texts.
Anyone working on medieval literature must reckon with Philippe Ariès’ influential, but now widely challenged, thesis that medieval people did not recognize childhood, as he argued in his Centuries of Childhood (first published in 1960 as L’enfant et la vie familiale sous l’Ancien Régime and in English in 1962). However, he also noted that this was ‘not to suggest that children were neglected, forsaken or despised’:
Historians such as Barbara Hanawalt, Nicholas Orme, and Shulamith Shahar have challenged Ariès and delineated the social institutions and structures that addressed the specific needs and capacities of children, including systems of education. Historians of childhood have elucidated the theories and practices of pre-modern and early modern life stages, as Adrienne Gavin notes:These ‘ages of man’ should not be confused with modern theories of psychological development, of the kind that we see in the work of Jean Piaget, a 20th century Swiss clinical psychologist who posited that, from birth to age 16, infants and children go through four main developmental stages. Pre-modern and early modern ‘ages of man’ are perhaps best understood through Gavin’s notion of ‘roles.’ For example, Jaques’ speech in Shakespeare’s As You Like It (1623) compares the world to a play with seven acts or ‘seven ages’ played by each actor: infant, schoolboy, lover, soldier, justice, pantaloon, and ‘second childishness,’ which is extreme old age:
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages
(Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act 2, Scene VII, Lines 138–142).
The pre-modern and early modern ‘ages of man’ are also calibrated to class. For example, the ‘mirror for princes’ genre helped prepare future rulers for their elevated roles when they were very young.
Daniel T. Kline acknowledges some of the challenges in his study of medieval literature for children when he suggests that ‘the relative paucity of available texts and the difficulties of language make pre-printing press children’s literature difficult to study, while the relatively narrow diffusion of manuscript materials makes it difficult to draw any general conclusions about medieval youths’ access to literature’ (Kline 2003, 2). Peter Hunt muses on our historical distance from children of previous centuries: ‘It is difficult to imagine the impact of a chapbook on a child four hundred years ago; was it the equivalent of the impact of a virtual-reality CD hologram on the child of today?’ (Hunt 1996, 201). Nonetheless, scholars do make the attempt. As one example among many, Nicholas Orme talks about medieval alphabet books: ‘The alphabet, by the twelfth century, was no longer a mere list of letters. It had become Christianized. Saying it was a kind of devotion, beginning with the act of crossing yourself and ending, as all prayers did, with “amen”’ (Orme 2006, 56).
Medieval children’s literature contains varied genres such as Bible stories, dialogues with ‘wise children,’ conduct books at least partly directed to youth, and miscellaneous story collections. Chaucer’s A Treatise on the Astrolabe, about an instrument used to make astronomical measurements, is an example of a book specifically tailored for the instruction of a single child: his son Lewis. Scholars of childhood and children’s literature have also gone back to look at dramatic performances such as the morality plays and how they included child audiences and child performers.
Fables like those of Aesop played an important role. Although not translated into dedicated editions for children until the 17th century, they were certainly part of childhood reading. Victoria DeRijke notes, ‘Aesop’s fables have been adapted for feudal, medieval, clerical, educational use; in fact, the fable form is also part of worldwide acculturation’ (DeRijke 2014, 47). For example, the Panchatantra (or ‘Five Treatises’), an ancient Indian collection written in Sanskrit, has entered the folklore of many countries and been retold many times for children.
Early children’s literature emerges from a different socioeconomic and cultural system than ours, including differences in language, generic conventions, and attitudes about childhood. Our sense of the ‘literary’—where its boundaries fall— affects our definition of children’s literature. When we speak of the medieval treatise or sermon, or the early modern conduct book, we might not think of them as ‘literary works.’ But the pre-Enlightenment age did not draw strict boundaries between fiction and non-fiction and between the literary and the non-literary. That is one reason why we might explore medieval conduct manuals as works of children’s literature.
In our arguably secular age it can also be something of a challenge to acknowledge how the early history of children’s literature was shaped by religious aims and conviction, so much so that without this sacred orientation children’s literature as a field would not exist. Pat Pinsent notes that ‘Much of the material intended for young readers was either directly religious in origin, or took the form of stories calculated to motivate them towards behavior regarded as appropriate to young Christians’ (Pinsent 2017, 247). Pinsent, like many, sees continuity as well as change, with the religious feeling of early children’s literature transformed into ‘the spiritual value of respect for the environment’ in contemporary works (Pinsent 2017, 248).
Despite certain continuities, some critics have asserted that contemporary children cannot relate to historical children’s books. Since children’s literature from earlier periods might embody very different values, or reflect unfamiliar cultural norms, the place of historical children’s literature in the reading lives of children today is an open question. In ‘Passing on the Past: The Problem of Books That Are for Children and That Were for Children,’ Hunt argues that historical children’s literature is no longer viable for contemporary children: ‘History is marked by fractures, chasms, which readers cannot in the natural way of things cross, and this is particularly true of the history of children’s literature and reading’ (Hunt 1996, 201). Gillian Adams disagrees, noting that imaginative works from the medieval period appeal to contemporary readers ‘when they are well translated’ (Adams 1998, 17). She points to the repository of stories in the Western world that draw on medieval themes and narrative structures, including the various iterations of the Reynard the Fox stories and material used by the Grimm brothers. Even if some of this medieval material is adapted or transmuted, it remains a living part of the tradition.
Early children’s literature is often felt to be too ‘didactic’ for modern audiences. The term ‘didactic’ simply means that a work was meant to teach or instruct. But it can also imply an excessively pedantic manner, or material whose informative function is devoid of any pleasurable elements. However, scholars such as Daniel T. Kline, Gordon Moyles, Patricia Demers, David Rudd, Andrea Immel, Andrew O’Malley, and Mitzi Myers among others have revealed that the didacticism of children’s texts before the 19th century was more complex than it originally appeared. Daniel T. Kline argues that there are startling similarities between pre-modern works and more recent writings for children. Contemporary literature ‘expresses the social attitudes and anxieties of its era,’ just as medieval literature does.
In Kline’s formulation, the didacticism of the pre-modern period is not worlds away from our own cultural practices. Modern literature teaches young people about the ‘social attitudes and anxieties’ of our time, just as earlier children's literature did in its time. Klein’s remarks help us to acknowledge how much of children’s literature aims to teach children the nature and norms of the society into which they will mature.
Klein takes aim here at the idea that didacticism is always disempowering for child readers. Recent researchers have in fact found in didactic works a unique site to explore childhood agency and child power. Merridee L. Bailey stresses ‘the direct emphasis on the actions of the child or youth themselves’ in medieval courtesy literature, an emphasis that reveals ‘perceptions of personal autonomy and responsibility at the forefront of the culture of childhood’ (Bailey 2007, 30). Although marked by hierarchical organization, and authoritative in its advice, the Anglo-Norman conduct manual The Babees’ Book, or, A Little Report of How Young People Should Behave (c.1475) assumes that children are able to join the adult world and master its expectations, from table manners to interactions with other people. Early in The Babees’ Book the author notes:
While we might hear this authorial voice as a lofty, superior one, it could equally be read as the voice of a kind and wise informant who wants to show young people the ropes, a cultural imperative in the fostering system where young people had to adjust quickly to life outside their family of origin when they were sent to a new household. Juanita Feros Ruys uses the contemporary idea of ‘emotional intelligence’ to consider ‘medieval parental didactic literature’:
Scholars have also discerned elements in these early texts that militate against their didacticism or offer a subversive subtext in opposition to their explicit messages. David Rudd, for example, looks closely at ‘Symon’s Lesson of Wisdom for all Manner of Children,’ part of The Babees’ Book, with its admonitions to ‘climb not over house nor wall … make no crying, jokes nor plays/ In holy Church on holy days.’ He concludes: ‘While authority can be seen wagging its finger, the author simultaneously provides a list of pranks for the child’s delectation’ (Rudd 2013, 32). Seeing the pleasures in didactic literature sometimes involves reading against the grain, as Rudd does here.
Readers in the pre-modern and early modern periods did not feel compelled to make a choice between ‘instruction’ and ‘delight,’ feeling instead that the didactic and the pleasurable could be co-mingled, and certainly that both might have a role to play in childhood reading. For example, John Comenius’s Orbis Sensualium Pictus, an early non-fiction picture-book, declares the intention to teach children ‘by sport and merry pastime’ (Comenius 1659, A4v). Illustrations form part of this pleasurable teaching: ‘Children (even from their Infancy almost) are delighted with Pictures, and willingly please their eyes with these sights’ (Comenius 1659, A4r). This is not to assume that all children’s texts, early or contemporary, balance pleasure and instruction. It does, however, challenge scholarly accounts that paint an image of earlier children’s literature as marked only by a grim didacticism. Later in this chapter we will consider how recent scholars have looked more sympathetically at the ‘rational moralists,’ a group of writers in the 18th century who stressed the power of didactic children’s literature to cultivate young people’s reason.
Moving towards a dedicated literature for children
Technological innovation was a major contributing factor to the development of children’s books, with the advent of the printing press and technologies such as the hornbook. The hornbook was originally a primer for study, where a sheet of paper with the letters of the alphabet or a religious text was mounted on a wooden frame with a protective sheet of transparent horn (or bone). Hornbooks, used from the 15th to 18th centuries, often had a hole punched in the handle so they could hang from a child’s belt or girdle. Battledores were a related technology, with a similar shape but made from cardboard with a paper overlay; they dropped out of production in the 19th century. Chapbooks were also popular; these were inexpensive booklets written in a wide variety of genres including tales of adventure, folk, and fairy tales. Chapbooks were read by children and adults alike and are often regarded as one of the first iterations of ‘popular culture.’
Renaissance humanism also had an impact on children’s literature, since it fuelled secular, as opposed to sacred, learning and encouraged a return to Greek and Roman thought. Roger Ascham’s The Schoolmaster (1570) is one example of such a book. Not intended for schools, The Schoolmaster focused on the teaching of Latin for individual youths in the houses of gentlemen and noblemen. In some ways, the early modern period can be seen as a reinvigoration of some of the ancient and classical traditions discussed by Lerer in his history of children’s literature. In other ways, the development of new technologies anticipated the development of children’s literature as a separate phenomenon for children. Edel Lamb notes, ‘the expansion of print culture in England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries resulted in a significant increase in the range of texts produced for children’ (Lamb 2012, 70).
Many scholars contend that the 17th century was the time when a distinct children’s literature began to emerge. Maria Nikolajeva’s remarks are typical of this approach: ‘The very emergence of children’s literature on a large scale is due to the fact that sometime in the seventeenth century society became conscious of childhood as a special period of life and that children had their own special needs’ (Nikolajeva [1996] 2016, 3). One group frequently credited with a distinct children’s literature is comprised of the English Puritans, an amorphous religious group that refused to conform to the requirements of the national religion as practised by the Church of England, feeling that its organization and forms of worship needed both reform and simplification. To Puritans, the Church of England still included too many Catholic elements in its organization and worship practice, making the Protestant reformation incomplete.
In Seth Lerer’s words, ‘Puritanism was a movement for the future,’ insofar as it sought quite radical change (Lerer 2008, 81). This future orientation involved commitment to the kind of literacy that became newly urgent after the Protestant reformation, as individuals were granted the opportunity—and given the responsibility—to engage with scripture on their own. In the late 17th century and after the restoration of the monarchy, John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) was one of the most important Puritan texts, subsequently widely adapted for children. This allegorical story of Christian’s journey through spaces such as the Slough of Despond and Vanity Fair, and his struggles with Apollyon the monster, offered not only a vivid and concrete representation of abstract spiritual values but also vicarious participation in the protagonist’s journey. As late as Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868–1869), the young girls in the novel are still using Bunyan’s formulation to guide their play. Alcott structures her novel in accordance with its various incidents and scenes.
The Puritans are also known for the ‘joyful death’ tradition, most notably James Janeway’s A Token for Children (1671). In a preface directed to parents, Janeway severely asks: ‘Are the Souls of your Children of no value? … They are not too little to dye, they are not too little to go to Hell, they are not too little to serve their great Master, too little to go to Heaven, For of such is the Kingdom of God’ (Janeway [1671] 1676, A3v–A4r). Several of Janeway’s own brothers had died of tuberculosis; he lived in London during the great plague, and so the pious words and deaths of children felt urgent to him personally. Cotton Mather, a New England preacher, wrote his own version, A Token, for the Children of New England (1700), and attached his version to Janeway’s in the New England edition.
To contemporary readers, the ‘joyful deaths’ tradition might seem alien due to both its resolute piety and its unflinching engagement with the deaths of very young children. Yet A Token for Children must have appealed to some portion of the reading public to be so frequently reprinted; perhaps the courage of the children and their heightened spiritual awareness impressed young readers. Perhaps they appreciated a book that engaged with their worst fears and helped them face up to them. We might think of a contemporary work such as John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars (2012) as a throwback to this older tradition, with the philosophical discoveries made by teenage characters like Hazel Grace Lancaster and Augustus Waters as they face their terminal illnesses (Coats 2018, 21).
Puritan children’s writers did reach out deliberately to child readers. Bunyan’s poetry book, A Book for Boys and Girls, or Country Rhimes for Children (1686), for example, appeals to children’s sensibilities in 74 short verses meant to capture spiritual realities; in one, ‘Upon the Frog,’ religious hypocrites are compared to the slippery titular amphibian. Isaac Watts wrote gentle lyrics for children espousing piety and morality, publishing Divine Songs Attempted in Easy Language for the Use of Children in 1715. Watts’ poems became part of the hymn tradition, with such well-known works as ‘Joy to the World’ and ‘O God, our help in ages past.’ Roderick Cave and Sara Ayad note: ‘In these poems written for children it is clear he recognized that gentleness in tone was far more likely to engage juvenile minds than making them afraid’ (Cave and Ayad 2017, 73).
When considering the social and political thought that shaped the development of children’s literature in the Anglo-American world specifically, John Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) is a landmark text in many ways. For Locke, children are a tabula rasa—or blank slate—needing sensory experience to gain human knowledge. Locke argued, first of all, that innate ideas did not exist, which implied that individuals were the products of their education; as Lerer observes, ‘by focusing that education on sensible experience, writers of children’s literature could tell stories of growth as encounters with the things of this world’ (Lerer 2008, 105). Locke also urged parents to make children’s literature as pleasurable as possible, while cultivating reason and virtue.
With this stress on the ‘things of this world,’ it is hardly surprising that one of the subsequent developments of children’s literature in the 18th century is the growth of a commercialized children’s literature, emerging, in the words of Andrew O’Malley, as a ‘complex nexus of historical, economic, social and cultural factors unique to this period in England’ (O’Malley 2004, 1). For O’Malley and other critics, the 18th century is the moment when ‘child’ audiences were separated from ‘adult’ audiences (O’Malley 2004).
This period saw the emergence of booksellers who worked with authors to produce commercially viable books. Mary Cooper’s Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song Book for All Little Masters and Misses (1744) was the earliest collection of nursery rhymes, with 39 rhymes including ‘Bah, Bah, a black sheep’ and ‘Lady Bird, Lady Bird.’ Another innovator was Thomas Boreman, whose Gigantick Histories of the Two Famous Giants and other Curiosities in Guildhall, London appeared in 1740. Cave and Ayad comment:
Histories of children’s literature often name John Newbery’s A Little Pretty Pocketbook (1744) as the first book of children’s literature. Newbery is said to have created ‘the first children’s book’ because he also includes toys marketed to children (a pincushion for girls and a ball for boys). Noel Chevalier and Min Wild note perceptively, ‘Newbery recognized the importance of being what we today would call a “brand”’ (Chevalier and Wild 2013, 126). Books emerge as consumer products that can be made specifically for children, and sold to them, or that can be bought for children as an act of love, care, or instruction. This involves, as we have seen, a consideration of the design and format of books for children. For example, William McCarthy credits Anna Laetitia Barbauld with ‘the use of large type and wide margins to make the books reader friendly’ in Lessons for Children (McCarthy 2005, 88). In this period, and moving into the 19th century, there were clear economic motivations to write and publish children’s literature. Speaking of the publication of 18th century nursery rhymes, Cave and Ayad note: ‘The reasons were commercial and technological: there was a need for awareness that such productions could be profitable, that they could be distributed widely through the country (and in the colonies), and that they would be attractive to potential buyers and the children for whom the books would be purchased’ (Cave and Ayad, 2017, 16). M.O. Grenby notes that this emerging trade depended not just on producers and distributors, but also on the zeal and commitment of book users of various kinds: ‘it was the first consumers whose willingness to purchase, at extra expense, a separate set of books for children enabled the form to live and later thrive’ (Grenby 2011, 289). He notes the presence of many gift books, which in his estimation challenges ‘any assumption that early children’s books were bought primarily as instruments of education and improvement’ (Grenby 2011, 285).
Mary V. Jackson argues that children’s literature helped contribute to the expansion of the middle classes ‘for they helped to promulgate ideals of polite social usage as surely as they sharpened worldly ambition. Thus, just as we can chart a shift in the literature from otherworldly piety to pious social propriety, so also can we trace the diffusion of ideals of social refinement’ (Jackson 1989, 55–56). One of the landmark texts of the period, often described as the first novel for children, is Sarah Fielding’s The Governess (1749). Set in an all-girl’s school, The Governess weaves the life stories of the pupils with moral advice from their governess, Mrs Teachum, interspersed with fairy tales. Fielding’s book is a clear addition to the literature of social refinement outlined by Jackson.
Many of the producers of children’s literature imagined it as the articulation of a new ‘middle-class’ identity designed to purge children’s literature of its plebian roots, although these works also contained less refined elements. For example, Newbery’s A Little Pretty Pocket Book (1744) included the story of ‘Jack the Giant Killer,’ a character from the older, plebian tradition of the chapbooks. Once again an evolutionary history which offers a story of children’s literature as constantly improving, and getting closer to the needs of children, requires to be supplanted by one that acknowledges both continuity and change.
Given the emerging market forces that shaped children’s literature, should the definition of children’s literature be predicated on its growth as a commercial form? Gillian Adams, for example, objects to the idea that the ‘very existence’ of children’s literature ‘as a separate entity is tied to commercial interests’ (Adams 1998, 19). Research on children’s literature before the 18th century challenges the notion that children’s literature needs its own economic niche to exist, as we see in Adams’ own work on ancient Sumer or on medieval literature. It is hard to deny that consumer forces from the 18th century onward have indelibly shaped children’s literature. Whether the very definition of children’s literature should be staked on those consumer interests is another matter.
What the child should signify: Evangelicals, Romantics, and rational moralists
Continuing with the notion that children’s literature possesses contradictions in each part of its history, David Rudd, engaging with Andrew O’Malley’s work, notes that childhood in the late 18th century ‘saw a huge struggle over what the child should signify’ (Rudd 2013, 24). Elaine Ostry notes three main discourses that share ‘a concern with the roles of morality and fancy in children’s literature’ (Ostry 2002, 36). These are the Evangelicals, with their focus on religious salvation, the rational moralists, who stressed the inculcation of reason in young people, and the Romantics, who sought imaginative freedom for their children. Ostry notes the difficulty in classifying many of the tales children read in the 19th century: ‘the author may be known as an Evangelical, but writes a fairy tale, a form disparaged by strict Evangelicals as a lie. Or a fanciful tale has a strong tone of moral didacticism, which is what the fantasists claimed to avoid’ (Ostry 2002, 36–37). With this caution in mind, it is nonetheless helpful to consider how late 18th and early 19th century children’s literature is marked by competing ideals of children’s reading.
As we noted earlier, much of the history of children’s literature in the Anglo-American world is bound up with religious practice, and the Evangelical movement of the 18th and early 19th centuries is no exception. Anna Laetitia Barbauld published Hymns in Prose for Children (1781), and Hannah More, a founder of the Sunday School movement, produced the Cheap Repository Tracts, which contained moral tales.
The rational moralists were a group of authors and educators that included Mary Wollstonecraft and Maria Edgeworth, working with her father Richard Edgeworth. They believed that children’s literature had a particular responsibility to cultivate the child’s independent reasoning. We see this unfold in one famous story, Edgeworth’s ‘The Purple Jar,’ in which seven-year-old Rosamond is tempted in a London shop by a beguiling purple jar filled with liquid. She begs her mother to buy it, but is cautioned that there is not enough money to buy both the new shoes she urgently needs and the pretty jar. Rosamond persists, but the jar turns out to be an ordinary clear glass jar filled with a foul-smelling liquid. Rosamond’s shoes become increasingly worn, to the point that she can no longer walk in them, and her disgusted father excludes her from a family outing rather than allow her out with such inadequate footwear. Many have found the mother in the story unsympathetic, and Rosamond’s attraction to sensual beauty has struck a chord with many appreciative readers. Yet such works, in the words of Adrienne Gavin, ‘emphasize the need for children to make rational decisions and bear the consequences of giving in to irrational desires’ (Gavin 2012, 8). Feminist scholars have also drawn attention to the ‘rational mother-teachers like Rosamond’s, the educating heroines of girls’ fiction who helped keep alive enlightened notions of female education in the reactionary period of the French wars’ (Myers 1989, 54). The rationalist moralists were determined to educate girls as well as boys, ‘granting girlhood the potentiality for rational agency and self-command’ (Myers 1989, 55).
The rational moralists were often dismissed as humourless and heavy-handed, but Mitzi Myers was one of the first critics to open up an understanding of their aesthetic and cultural virtues, as we see in her astute remarks about Richard and Maria Edgeworth’s Practical Education (1798):
This inclusion of children’s actual voices in some ways connects to contemporary engagements with children as readers, which are self-consciously attentive to children’s ‘doings and sayings.’
Because they are literary works, tales by Edgeworth and others are, to be sure, multivalent. Within many a tale of discipline and self-control, as we have already seen, lies a streak of mischief. David Rudd cites several of Edgeworth’s contemporaries who expressed pleasure that, like Rosamond, they struggle to attain self-control, often retaining a streak of the naughty and untameable that becomes associated with such children’s literature protagonists as Dennis the Menace, Pippi Longstocking, or the early Anne of Green Gables (Rudd 2013, 91). Mary V. Jackson notes perceptively: ‘What saves these stories is the little girl who, unlike her meek, dutiful, dull sister … is innocently incorrigible. She intends to do right, means to recall the rules, but all too humanly forgets’ (Jackson 1989, 163).
Roderick McGillis points out that the early history of children’s literature is animated by a tension between our desires to let children indulge their own instincts as freely as possible and an equally pressing sense that they are in need of guidance:
It is fascinating to see such a contradiction at work in tales such as ‘The Purple Jar,’ where the reader both sympathizes with Rosamond’s headstrong desire for the prettiest and flashiest thing, as an affirmation of her own desires and pleasures, and the knowledge that she must learn to curb those desires to avoid disappointment.
From a contemporary viewpoint, the rational moralists seem prescient about some of the woes and temptations of a consumerist society. In a later ‘Rosamond’ story, ‘The Bracelet of Memory,’ Rosamond encounters a travelling salesman who presents her with a variety of mechanical wonders, among them a bracelet that pricks its wearer when ‘there is anything you wish to remember at a particular hour, or minute, this day … the prick of this talismanic bracelet shall remind you of it, true to the second’ (Edgeworth [1821] 1836, 275). Invented in Geneva, it anticipates the ‘smart watches’ of today. Rosamond’s father offers her a choice between a very useful horse and this appealing ‘bauble.’ With her newfound maturity she decides to forgo the watch in favour of the more practical horse, with her family’s approval. While Rosamond makes mistakes throughout the various story sequences devoted to her, she is able to resist buying what we today would call ‘the latest thing.’ Early children’s literature can sometimes anticipate some of our ongoing cultural dilemmas.
Romanticism had an enormous impact on the literature and culture of childhood, creating a fresh vision of the romantic child, summarized by Rudd as: ‘one with nature, beginning as a blank slate outside the complexities of language, hence requiring vocabulary that is simple and transparent’ (Rudd 2013, 24). Like any transnational aesthetic movement, Romanticism is complex, but it could be described as stressing subjective experience, supernatural or non-rational experiences, and sensitivity to the natural world. One key difference between the Romantics and the rational moralists, in the words of James Holt McGavran, Jr. and Jennifer Smith Daniel, is that ‘children had special knowledge to teach their elders as well as the other way around’ (McGavran and Smith Daniel 2012, xiii).
Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Émile, or On Education (1763, first published in French as Émile, ou De l’éducation, 1762) was particularly influential. Rousseau was convinced that children were innately good and that they should develop their own potential freely and without interference. Émile is a child raised in isolation and educated by a tutor who answers only his spontaneous questions; Rousseau’s book is about both education and humankind in its natural state. Yet we see another contradiction here: this theory of the free development of the child involves locking her/him up in a state of isolation.
The one book allowed to Émile is Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), described by Rousseau as ‘the most felicitous treatise on natural education.’ In the words of Andrew O’Malley, Crusoe
For Rousseau and the Romantic philosophers he influenced, Crusoe’s engagement with the material world of the island was the best possible education, entirely unmediated by social relations and the complications of human culture. Rousseau only advised reading half of the book: the material about shipwreck and survival. Of course, in its unabridged form, adult readers can see in Crusoe an abundance of disturbing social relationships,in Crusoe’s ownership of plantations and Crusoe the master’s subjugation of Friday as a slave. But the solitary man on an island was, in the Romantic period, meant to embody a certain form of experience particularly salutary for children.
Romanticism also lauded the ecstasy and spiritual insight of children. Anne Lundin notes that Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Byron, Shelley, and Keats were ‘a group associated with a philosophical stance on creativity, perception, and cognition and with popular tropes of pastoral bliss and childhood reverie’ (Lundin 2004, 5). Lundin’s own work deals with the impact of Romanticism on American librarianship in the 19th and 20th centuries: ‘[t]he language of children’s librarians resembles a Romantic text, full of childhood reverie, paeans to the power of imagination, commitment to a revolutionary cause, and a legitimization of a canon and character to literary selection and guidance’ (Lundin 2004, 6).
Ongoing research has complicated our vision of Romanticism. McGavran and Smith Daniel argue that, even at its peak, the lived reality of childhood and the Romantic ideal were not in alignment with each other:
Historically (as now) a carefree childhood functions more as myth than reality, and some of the writers credited with it may require to be read anew for signs of the strains and fissures in their depiction of innocence and pleasure. Nonetheless, the Romantic ideal of childhood persists not only in the popular imagination but also within the assumptions of many scholars and children’s advocates.
Anti-didacticism and the ‘golden age’ of children’s literature
The ‘golden age’ is termed as such in part because many of the books acknowledged as classics today were published then, from 1865–1915. Lewis Carroll’s 1865 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is often cited as the major turning point. This is due largely to its affirmation of the nonsensical over the educational and by its razor-sharp parodies of childhood lessons and didactic verses, such as those by Isaac Watts, whose ‘How doth the little busy bee’ is transformed into the amoral and nonsensical ‘How doth the little crocodile.’ For many critics, the 19th century ‘golden age’ of children’s literature is when children’s literature as we know it now begins, as we see in F.J. Harvey Darton’s classic formulation: ‘it was the coming to the surface, powerfully and permanently, the first un-apologetic appearance in print, for readers who sorely needed it, of liberty of thought in children’s books’ (Darton [1932] 1982, 260). The ‘golden age’ had its fantasists, such as George MacDonald, who created religiously inspired fantasy tales; its books that sought to inspire sympathy for animals (Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty, 1877); and its domestic morality stories, such as Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princess (1905), the story of a virtuous orphan who is restored to the prosperity that is hers by right. We find in the 19th century books that prepared young boys for leadership in an age of empire, among them Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857). There is a marked gender split in terms of genre, with books of adventure and exploration marketed more and more towards boys, and domestic fiction marketed to girls. The ‘golden age,’ much praised as a zenith of children’s imaginative culture, registered the contradictions and complications of any other period of the literary history of children’s literature: engaging with the Romantic vision of childhood while registering some of the Victorian period’s cultural, economic, and political shifts such as industrialism, class struggle, and urbanization. The character of Sissy Jupe in Charles Dickens’ Hard Times (1854) offers an intriguing example of the Victorian tension between imagination and mechanistic, rational ways of thinking. Her teacher, Mr Gradgrind, asks Sissy, who is the daughter of a circus performer who breaks horses, to define a horse. Addressing her as ‘girl number twenty,’ he notes that he is looking only for facts. She is unable to produce such a purely factual definition, unlike her classmate Bitzer, who offers:
This definition is the quintessence of the mechanistic and soulless rationality that Gradgrind was looking for. In contrast, Sissy represents creativity and wonderment, gained from her life in the circus. Intriguingly she is also the most practical and sensible of all the characters in the novel, and she helps them change their way of life when it is clearly unsuitable for them. Sissy finds the harmony between imagination and rationality that so many of the other characters lack.
Anne Lundin points out that ‘Many of the best-selling novels of the nineteenth century were works we now consider children’s literature,’ written for a dual audience (Lundin 2004: 60). Beverly Lyon Clark (2003) argues that, in the 19th century, books like Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy (1885) were appreciated by adults and children alike. Echoing Harry Steele Commager, Clark notes that ‘[t]he nineteenth century was a time “when majors wrote for minors.”’ (Clark 2003, 48). But these audiences increasingly split from each other in the early 20th century, with the result that many of these works for children were subsequently devalued in terms of the mainstream literary canon. At the same time, several of these works were reinvented as ‘classics’ and marked by the determination of older generations to pass on this material to younger generations.
Modernism and the avant-garde
In The Case of Peter Pan (1984), Jacqueline Rose argued that children’s literature was firmly cut off from modernism and from ‘avant-garde’ movements, including experimental art forms such as surrealism, Dadaism, and pop-art. However, critical re-evaluation has revealed that children’s literature had a profound role to play in modernism and was in its turn influenced by modernist and avant-garde movements. Juliet Dusinberre’s Alice to the Lighthouse: Children’s Books and Radical Experiments in Art ([1987] 1999) showed how so-called high modernist authors like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf were deeply influenced by the formal and cultural innovations of the ‘golden age’ of children’s literature: ‘Radical experiments in the arts in the early modern period began in the books which Lewis Carroll and his successors wrote for children’ (Dusinberre [1987] 1999, 5). Here, by the phrase ‘early modern,’ Dusinberre means the modernist movements of the early 20th century, and the kinds of radical experiments covered include everything from stream of consciousness to nonsensical language play and rapid shifts of perspective, all of which are present in some way in Carroll’s Alice books. Kimberley Reynolds, in her work on radical children’s literature, identified experimental and radical forms of children’s literature as harbingers of other forms of social change. If daring innovation is possible in children’s literature, what kinds of transformation can be effected in the sphere of the political and social?
Modernist and avant-garde children’s literature has also been considered within the frame of transnational aesthetic movements, as we see in Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer and Elina Druker’s edited collection, Children’s Literature and the Avant-Garde (2016), which demonstrates how children’s literature was influenced by movements such as pop-art, experimental film, the global impact of geometric design in Soviet picture-books, and many other avant-garde forms and conventions: ‘What is manifested in these children’s books is a general idea of progression and change—change in norms and mindsets, and changes that can be traced to movements within arts, education, social systems, and ideologies’ (Druker and Kümmerling-Meibauer 2015, 8).
There has also been renewed interest in children’s literature in terms of modern and postmodern engagement with technology. For Nathalie op de Beeck, ‘children’s texts of the twenties and thirties pursued a national myth of progress in a proletarian vein, fetishizing powerful machinery and human labor alike’ (op de Beeck 2010, 119). According to op de Beeck, ‘American picture books and illustrated texts respond to cultural uncertainty with the fairy tale of modernity … they tend to demystify mass production to show humans and machines working as intimate partners, or to introduce uncanny machines operating solo but doing beneficial deeds’ (op de Beeck 2010, 140). The Romantic era privileged what James Kincaid terms ‘the Child Botanical,’ but the 20th and 21st centuries saw the rise of what Patrick Cox names the ‘Child Mechanical’:
Some of the association of childhood with machinery and technology hearkens to a notion of children as ‘early adopters’ of technological and social innovation. Others point to the kinds of posthumanism that I will explore more in Chapter 5. We see in the association of children’s literature and the mechanical a changing sense of childhood away from the pastoral and towards the technological, but also a sense of children’s literature serving the emerging economic and social needs of industrialization.
Children’s literature as challenge to periodization
Some critical conceptions of children’s literature move it entirely away from literary periods, arguing that children’s literature is one of the best literary fields from which to challenge prevailing notions of literary history. Karin E. Westman, in ‘Beyond Periodization: Children’s Literature, Genre, and Remediating Literary History,’ contends that Children’s Literature scholars tend to organize the field around genre rather than chronology, locating genres such as ‘verse,’ ‘picture books,’ ‘science fiction’ or ‘adventure fiction’ across periods. For Westman, children’s literature provides a fresh ‘organizing principle for literary history’ (Westman 2013, 464):
One reason that children’s literature can elude conventions of periodization, argues Westman, is that ‘It can be difficult to find children’s literature within the broader landscape of literary history’ (Westman 2013, 466). Scholars, therefore, tend to emphasize genre more. In particular, Westman points to genre as performative, by which she means it shifts with each context and between generations. Westman’s case study for this assertion is Margaret Wise Brown and Clement Hurd’s 1947 Goodnight Moon, a text that has not been ‘claimed’ by modernist scholars but one that has over several decades been established as a children’s classic. The text of Goodnight Moon is spare and lyrical, bringing to mind modernist writers such as Gertrude Stein and the imagist H.D. The bright and simple visuals created by Hurd are reminiscent of modernist painters like Picasso and Matisse. But Westman asks: ‘To which “period” does Goodnight Moon belong, if it exists in many? The answer does not lie with the ahistorical or the synchronic, but resides instead with multiple and varied instances of generic performance across established periods’ (Westman 2013, 467). Goodnight Moon, then, belongs to children’s literature, not to modernism. Such performance of genres across time periods can be very helpful in encouraging us to attend to the ways in which the same text transforms and morphs through time for different audiences, belonging less to one period than to multiple periods. Generic performance takes precedence over the temporal pressures of historical change.
In her earlier reflections on children’s literature and modernism, Westman considers other ways in which children’s texts are removed or deracinated from their historical roots:
One way in which Westman’s remarks are borne out is in the many excellent histories of genre. As one example of many, Michael Levy and Farah Mendlesohn’s Children’s Fantasy Literature: An Introduction (Levy and Mendlesohn 2016) roots the genre in the fantastic tales of the 16th century but moves forward through figures such as Lewis Carroll, L. Frank Baum, C.S. Lewis, Roald Dahl, and J.K. Rowling, with attention to the ways these authors have shaped the popular imagination. The fairy tale is another genre that could be seen as unbound by chronological periods. The fairy tale is, of course, a major genre within children’s literature, even though fairy tales were not originally meant for children. Fairy tales by Charles Perrault, Madame D’Aulnoy, the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, and Oscar Wilde are central to children’s literature. They have both an oral and a written history that crosses multiple centuries, even extending back to ancient mythological roots. In some ways the fairy tale is the perfect genre to think about trans-temporality, since it seems to exude a self-conscious ‘timelessness.’ Fairy tales have their own organization as a genre quite apart from periodization.
Westman’s ideas about how children’s literature seems to escape historical placement do, then, ring true in many ways. She pinpoints a cultural desire to think of children’s literature as ‘timeless,’ yet it is also true that much invigorating work in the field seeks to restore children’s literature to its historical and cultural contexts. Going back to the example of Margaret Wise Brown, for example, Leonard Marcus has tied Brown back to the aesthetic concerns of the modernist movement, also noting that she edited arch-modernist Gertrude Stein’s book for children: The World is Round (1939). Therefore, even though Westman argues that we do not tend to think of Goodnight Moon within the modernist context, some scholars attempt to do so. Thus, an understanding of children’s literature as ahistorical quickly gives way to an understanding of children’s books as embedded in their literary periods in complex ways.
Global histories
Critics now grapple with the need to consider a more global history that moves beyond the Anglo-American framework. Such an expansive focus is challenging for several reasons: it involves breaking through language and culture barriers, understanding more than one national or regional history, and challenging disciplinary boundaries to work across fields.
Karen Sands-O’Connor describes ‘internationalism’ as ‘increasingly focused on global movement, multiple voices, and the clash of ideologies between groups that might or might not be tied to a particular nationality.’ She explains:
Scholars have responded in various ways to the call to internationalize the field. There is an International Research Society for Children’s Literature, with participation from more than 40 countries and an explicit goal of creating communication between scholars across the world. The Children’s Literature Association, based in North America, notes on its website that it ‘actively pursues the internationalization of North American children’s literature research by broadening the spectrum of primary and secondary literature discussed at the annual meetings and in the publications of ChLA.’ Klaus Doderer’s 1975–1982 Lexikon der Kinder- und Jugendliteratur and Peter Hunt’s International Companion Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature (Second Edition, 2004) are two examples of children’s literature reference sources with an international focus.
Some of the impulse towards a more global children’s literature emerged from the crucibles of the two world wars, with a sentimental vision of a ‘universal republic of childhood’ out of which a brighter future would be built. However, Emer O’Sullivan, for example, expresses scepticism towards this cultural project. She characterizes a work like Paul Hazard’s Les Livres, les enfants et les Hommes (1932), published after the First World War, as ‘a site on which adult difficulties are addressed and often placated; it is about promises which the adults’ generations could not keep, amongst them international understanding and world peace’ (O’Sullivan 2005a, 9).
Yet O’Sullivan does see some promise in the notion of a ‘universal republic of childhood’:
O’Sullivan has called eloquently for a comparative children’s literature focused on cross-cultural transmissions of individual works for children, considering what is lost and gained in translation. One of the biggest impediments to a genuinely global approach to children’s literature is that ‘The children’s book industry in the United States, the leading market, is increasingly dominated by a handful of large media conglomerates whose publishing operations are small sections of their entertainment businesses’ (O’Sullivan 2005b: 189). Furthermore, these large media conglomerates have a global reach, as ‘they sell their products beyond the borders of individual countries, further changing and globalizing what were once regionally contained children’s cultures’ (O’Sullivan 2005b, 189). Comparative children’s literature, then, is ‘a natural site in which to tease out the implications of these recent developments’ as ‘a discipline that engages with phenomena that transcend cultural and linguistic borders and also with specific social, literary, and linguistic contexts’ (O’Sullivan 2005b, 189). Like many emerging methodologies in the field of Children’s Literature, O’Sullivan’s work puts two academic fields into conversation with each other, noting that Children’s Literature has much to contribute to the discipline of Comparative Literature, opening up a new corpus of literary works for consideration. In its turn, Children’s Literature can benefit from a comparatist approach; this includes the study of genre, comparative histories, the theorization of children’s literature itself, comparative poetics, and the study of contact and transfer.
How we write the history of children’s literature, and our appraisal of individual writers, is shaped by national differences. Helene Høyrup offers the following reading of Hans Christian Andersen’s reception both in an Anglo-American context and in his native Denmark:
Andersen, in short, is read more as a Romantic writer in the Anglo-American context but more as a modernist in Denmark. National differences have stressed entirely different aesthetic achievements and shaped different literary histories.
There are also ways to work across national lines using monolingual comparisons, as Kiera Vaclavik, responding to O’Sullivan’s work, notes:
project of children’s literature, there are many possible national, regional, and linguistic axes of comparison that can be developed.
There are rewards to be had from working both multilingually and monolingually. New histories of children’s literature within specific national contexts are also making a contribution. One example among many is Mary Ann Farquhar’s Children’s Literature in China: From Lu Xun to Mao Zedong (2000), which focuses on post-Confucian children’s literature as an instrument of the country’s modernization, leading into the Cultural Revolution. Many scholars engage with the history of empire and children’s literature in a postcolonial context; I will discuss postcolonial children’s literature in more detail in Chapter 5. Here I will simply note that much contemporary literature emerges not from national frameworks but from diasporic experience; as we see, for example, from a work like Akata Witch (2011) by Nnedi Okorafor, which features a Nigerian-born but American-raised protagonist, Sunny, who returns to Nigeria and discovers her own magical ability. She is one of the ‘Leopard people,’ set apart from the non-magical ‘Lambs.’ ‘Akata’ is something of a derogatory term for African Americans in Nigeria, gesturing to some of the complex frictions that the book explores. Okorafor’s book has been described as a ‘Nigerian Harry Potter.’ Rather than compare it to Rowling’s blockbuster series, however, it is more revealing to consider how its inventive magical framework draws on the practices and beliefs of the Ekpe people, a Nigerian secret society.
Each national or transnational case offers a potentially fresh vision of how children’s literature functions socially and politically. In thinking about ways that Children’s Literature scholars might internationalize the field, there are as many possible comparative axes as countries, regions, and areas in the world.
Case study: Edward Lear, A Book of Nonsense (1846)
Kimberley Reynolds notes that nonsensical children’s literature has ‘challenged authority, released subversive energies, [and] refused to condescend and preach to readers …’ (Reynolds 2007, 10). Edward Lear’s first collection of limericks, A Book of Nonsense (1846), offers this kind of disruption in its most extreme form. Like Lewis Carroll, Lear explored both the pleasures and the perils of a world turned upside down, explicitly eschewing any moralistic content. Characters like the ‘Old Man on a hill,’ for example, flout the mores of Victorian society:
There was an Old Man on a hill, who seldom, if ever, stood still;
He ran up and down, in his Grandmother’s gown,
Which adorned that Old Man on a hill
(Lear [1846] 1875, 4).
These breaches of convention had a special appeal for Lear’s initial audience; they can be read in part as a reaction to the strictures of Victorian propriety. The limericks, Ina Rae Hark notes, spoke to
The emergence of an explicitly ‘anti-didactic’ subversive literature was, perhaps, as much a vicarious flouting of the strictures of adult life as a child’s relish in subverting orderly behaviour.
At the same time that many of Lear’s characters revel in their transgressions, we might question how free they really are to pursue their eccentricities. Sara Lodge claims that most of Lear’s eccentrics do quite well: ‘Sometimes, as many critics have noted, these eccentrics are “smashed” or “banged”: but for the most part, their energies exceed those of the forces that endeavor to suppress them’ (Lodge 2016, 77). For a poet credited with moving away from the moralistic ‘cautionary tales’ that preceded him, however, he presents some severe punishments for bad behaviour. Citing food historian Margaret Visser’s comment about the limerick ‘There was an Old Person of Buda’—‘Manners, and table manners in particular, are no laughing matter’—Peter Robinson argues that Lear often establishes dire consequences for social transgressions (Robinson 2016, 125). This is the harsh fate of the Old Person of Buda:
There was an Old Person of Buda, whose conduct grew ruder and ruder;
Till at last, with a hammer, they silenced his clamour,
By smashing that person from Buda
(Lear [1846] 1875, 24).
It is hard to read the ‘silencing’ of ‘his clamour’ as anything but murder or intense violence. Perhaps Lear is parodying traditional cautionary tales, but he also reproduces their essential structure. A person deviates from acceptable behaviour and is then punished. Furthermore, there is not enough glee or archness or irony here to distance it adequately from traditional cautionary tales. Ultimately Lear oscillates between a point of view that preserves eccentrics intact and unapologetic, and one where they pay a terrible price for their oddness.
Speaking in formal terms, James Williams notices that Lear ‘observes with close fidelity’ the ‘constraints of form and rhyme … The rules of poetic form often resemble grown-up authority’ (Williams 2016, 26). For John Rieder, the wild nonconformity of Lear’s poetry is less a permanent state of affairs than an ‘interlude’
There is room for experimentation, but it has limits, which are quickly revealed through the regularity of the poetic form. The tight limerick form reminds children that, as wild as things can get, there is still a pattern and order to their literature. Throughout much of its history, children’s literature made similar gestures inviting children to experiment and take risks, with the game ultimately coming to an end.
At the same time that Lear looks backwards to the punitive moral tales of earlier children’s literature he is also a precursor to the unsettled angst of much 20th century literature, even absurdists such as Ionesco and Beckett. Joyce Thomas picks up a certain eeriness in Lear’s work: ‘That protean characteristic of nonsense and its unpredictability account for much of the discomfort it evokes in us, a discomfort which is reinforced by the verse’s various paradoxical tensions. A vague sense of disturbance, difficult to articulate, constitutes the ultimate effect of nonsense’ (Thomas 1985, 121). Many characters in Lear’s limericks, rather than celebrating their own oddness, find themselves bemused by it. Consider, for example, the first limerick in the book:
There was an Old Man with a beard, who said, ‘It is just as I feared!
Two Owls and a Hen, four Larks and a Wren,
Have all built their nests in my Beard!’
(Lear [1846] 1875, 1).
Nothing is as it should be; the human and avian worlds are all tangled up. The poem is also strangely static; the old man does nothing to remedy the situation, and his reaction is a gentle alarm. Here Lear anticipates a children’s literature that is less clear on what children should believe or understand, and more open to a state of continued confusion. The presence of these very different affective registers reveals how any given work of children’s literature, in Lear’s time and in ours, can simultaneously act as a force to license the imagination and one that reins in imagination’s subversive energies.