liberty to regard Biblical stories simply as stories’ (Martin 1993:33). Faith in Print, an
initiative of the Christian Book Promotion Trust, was set up in 1971 to promote good
quality, readable children’s books; its advisory panel includes representatives of the
Anglican, Roman Catholic and Free Churches, and its Young People’s Book List 1994/95
draws on mainstream as well as specialist publishers, with recommendations including
E.Nesbit’s The Railway Children (1906) and Anne Holm’s I am David (1965).
In twentieth-century Britain it is very unusual to find a book such as Cecily Hallack’s
Adventure of the Amethyst (1937) coming from a mainstream publisher, in this case
Macmillan. The production is in the best traditions of the 1930s, with black and white
line drawings scattered through the well-spaced text. At first glance it appears to be a
holiday adventure story about a family of middle-class children, typical of the period.
The children ride, explore the Sussex village and its surroundings and even find a secret
room in the large house to which they have just moved. But in this story the secret room
is an old Catholic chapel containing a long lost statue of the Virgin, and the adventures
are subservient to the story of how the children are converted to Roman Catholicism
under the guidance of a Canadian bishop recuperating in the area after an air crash.
Catholic beliefs and ceremonial are described and discussed at great length as the
children move from being ‘heathens’, through baptism to confirmation.
In contrast to this, a species of all-purpose religion prevails in most mainstream
books. Children’s fiction generally encourages the kind of qualities that are promoted by
all religions—honesty, truthfulness, integrity, sympathy for others, particularly the
weaker or less fortunate, patience, positive action as opposed to idleness, hard work,
helpfulness and so on. God is only approached through prayer in times of stress when
characters are cut off by the tide or lost in caves or underground passages or,
occasionally, in times of illness or bereavement when close friends and relatives are
involved. There is often an implication that people usually go to church on Sundays, and
particularly at Christmas and Easter, school prayers are taken for granted, but there is
little mention of specific religious content, customs or beliefs.
Christmas may be an important occasion in a book, but it could well be replaced by a
similar festival from the calendar of any other religion. The performance of a nativity
play may be a set piece or may be used to point a simple moral message. For example, in
Barbara Robinson’s The Best Christmas Pageant Ever (1974), a family of badly behaved
children of whom most of the local mothers disapprove, join the Sunday School and take
all the best parts in the Christmas play – and people’s attitudes towards them begin to
change as the play comes to have more meaning than ever before. In 1966 Alan Garner
and William Mayne collaborated on Holly from the Bongs: A Nativity Play, produced in
Goostrey in Cheshire in 1965 and subsequently published, illustrated by coloured
photographs of the production, as what must be one of the most distinguished literary
nativity plays ever to be written.
The parish church or the vicarage family feature in numerous twentieth-century
British children’s books, almost as a form of shorthand since certain facts can be taken
for granted about both. Churches may feature as worthy of being saved but there is little
mention of their spiritual significance. Nor are the churches or vicarage families always
idyllically rural. In K.M.Peyton’s Marion’s Angels (1979), the plot centres on a campaign
to save an old rural church from becoming a ruin, but Janet McNeill’s church in The
276 TYPES AND GENRES