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Introduction
Margaret Meek
Acts of DefinitionEncyclopedias are usually designed to assemble and to encompass, for the purposes of
recognition and study, as much of what is known about a subject of interest and
concern as the conditions of its production and publication allow. Children’s literature is
an obvious subject for this purpose. Its nature and social significance are most clearly
discerned when activities associated with children and books are brought together.
These activities may be as diverse as creating a book list, a publisher’s catalogue, a
library, an exhibition, a school’s Book Week, a rare collection, a prize-giving ceremony,
as well as the compilation of scholarly works of reference. Children’s literature is
embedded in the language of its creation and shares its social history. This volume is its
first avowed encyclopedia, and thus, a representation of children’s literature at a
particular time.
The by-play of an encyclopedia is the view it offers of the world as reflected in its
subject matter. Promoters and editors long for completeness, the last word on the topic,
even when they know there is no such rounding off. Instead, there is only an inscribed
event, which becomes part of the history of ideas and of language. When this moment
passes for works of reference, we say the book has gone ‘out of date’, a description of
irrelevance, calling for revision or reconstitution. But later readers continue to find in
encyclopedias not simply the otherness of the past, but also the structures of values and
feelings, which historians teach us to treat as evidence of the perceptions a culture has,
and leaves, of itself. The appearance of this Encyclopedia in the last decade of the
twentieth century, the end of a millennium and the traditional teleological judgement
time, lets it become a significant mirror image of certain aspects of childhood and of a
distinctive literature.
In this, as in other ways, the present volume differs from many of its predecessors.
Earlier compilations of information about children’s books were more heroic, written by
individuals with a commitment to the subject, at the risk, in their day, of being
considered quaint in their choice of reading matter. It is impossible to imagine the
history of children’s literature without the ground-clearing brilliance of F.J.Harvey
Darton’s Children’s Books in England (1932/ 1982). But although Darton’s account has
a singleness of purpose and matching scholarship, it is not the whole story. There is
more than diligence and systematic arrangement in John Rowe Townsend’s careful