International Companion Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature

A children’s book uses simple vocabulary geared to the untrained mind? Compare a

little Kipling to a little Hemingway and think again. Opening sentence of A Farewell

to Arms; ‘Now in the fall the trees were all bare and the roads were muddy’.

Opening sentence of How the Rhinoceros Got His Skin: ‘Once upon a time, on an

uninhabited island on the shores of the Red Sea, there lived a Parsee from whose

hat the rays of the sun were reflected in more-than-oriental splendour’. So much

for that!

Babbit 1973:157

One side-effect, incidentally, of the idea that ‘children’s literature’ originated from a
historical revelation of the ‘child’ and ‘its needs’ (John Locke and JeanJacques Rousseau
are quoted as standard in this context as the ‘discoverers’ of childhood) is that many
(although not all) critics tend to describe and define ‘children’s literature’ in evolutionary
terms: consciously or unconsciously ‘children’s literature’ is described as progressing
towards an ever better and more accurate inclusion of the ‘child’ in the book. As Boel
Westin writes with respect to the history of Swedish children’s literature:

After the Second World War, new trends in child psychology and a freer

educational approach, prompted by such figures as Bertrand Russell and A.S.Neill,

gained widespread acceptance in Sweden. The child’s urge to play and seek

pleasure was now to be gratified at the different stages of growth. In children’s

literature the world was now to be portrayed through the eyes and voice of the child

itself.

Westin 1991:22

Within this type of thinking the ‘classics’ of ‘children’s literature’ are often described as
being avant garde or exceptionally and anachronistically perspicacious with respect to
the ‘child’. Barbara Wall, for instance, explains the classic status of Alice in Wonderland,
by arguing that

Alice’s became the first child-mind, in the history of children’s fiction, to occupy the

centre... No narrator of a story for children had stood so close to a child

protagonist, observing nothing except that child, describing, never criticising,

showing only what that child saw.

Wall 1991:98

The children’s literature critics’ didactic-literary split continues and maintains its career
as one of the ultimate judgements of the value—and therefore definition —of ‘children’s
literature’. It is in these statements that the ‘child’ in the book—in all its various
manifestations—is defined by each critic. Sheila Egoff, for instance, writes:

May I suggest that the aim of children’s writing be delight not edification; that its

attributes be the eternal childlike qualities of wonder; simplicity, laughter and

warmth; and that in the worldwide realm of children’s books, the literature be kept

inside, the sociology and pedagogy out.

24 THEORY AND CRITICAL APPROACHES