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Books for Younger Readers
Colin Mills
The history of books for the young is a fascinating and intricate narrative about the
tension between entertainment and didacticism; the need to socialise the young into
dominant values; the twentieth-century concern for the inner life of the young child. We
still hear arguments about the perceived dichotomy between pleasure and the business
of learning in the debate in the 1980s and 1990s in Britain, the USA and Australia as to
the most ‘suitable’ books for children learning to read in school classrooms. More than
one contemporary commentator has seen similarities between the arguments of those
like Mrs Trimmer in the early nineteenth century about the need to protect young
children and the debates about the ‘suitable’ content of books for the young in the
1980s. The concerns of the latter-day Janeways and Trimmers have resonated in
modern times: books for the young have been the arena for debates about the
inculcation of attitudes and stances towards racism, sexism and views about those with
disabilities, or those who are, in some way, ‘different’. The contemporary arguments
perhaps reached their most dramatic pitch when there were letters to The Times and a
parliamentary discussion about the compulsory removal from London schools of a book
which featured a little girl growing up (quite happily) with a gay male couple (Bosche
1987). Another puzzling and depressing aspect of that contentious debate was that the
term ‘real books’, as opposed to structured schemes specifically designed to teach
reading, became a term of abuse (Meek 1992).
If before 1850 books written for the young were judged largely on extra-literary merits
—books were there ‘to preach, teach, exhort and reprimand’ (Egoff 1980: 412), the
watershed was probably the publication, in 1865, of Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. This
moved imaginative writing to the foreground and became a touchstone for subsequent
writing for the young (see Butts 1992: x). There have been three periods in which major
classics for younger children were produced. The middle decades of the nineteenth
century saw the publication of Alice in Wonderland, the works of Edward Lear and
Robert Louis Stevenson. The late Victorian and Edwardian years saw the early flowering
of A.A.Milne, J.M.Barrie, Kenneth Grahame and Beatrix Potter. The post-Second World
War period saw an expansion of themes and genres and the most extraordinary
emergence of writers and artists for the young.
Two key factors influenced expansions in creative activity for younger children in
these ‘golden ages’. One was the gradual spread of state education—from the earliest
Sunday School movements to universal primary schooling—which meant that more
children were learning to read. There was an accompanying ‘professionalism’ of the