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Major Authors’ Work for Children
Marian Allsobrook
Established authors, when they address the child reader, often have in mind a
particular individual, occasion and objective. This may give the narrative a frame or
determine its texture, especially its field of reference. The author’s voice, intimate and
personal in some texts, may invite ironic exploration of the material set before the young
reader.
The work is often completed alongside a major text and reflects the writer’s
preoccupations at the time, to the extent of sharing textual features; however, it is often
one in which an author may feel inclined to seek diversion, relax or experiment in a
newly encountered readership. For a variety of reasons publication may be delayed.
Early works in England by major authors for children sought to guide the child into
the adult world. Chaucer, in Tretis of the Astrolabie (1391), for example, instructs his
young son in the medium of ‘light Englissh’ since the adult sources in Latin would be
less accessible. Comparing the astrolabe’s rings to the ‘webbe of a loppe’ [spider]
Chaucer constructs the meshes of a text which supports technical substance as it
empowers the young reader. A title attributed to this work, Bread and Milk for Children,
illustrates the tendency to revise/recharacterise titles of works for children, reflecting
both a concern for commercial profit and ideological tensions as authors and publishers
sought to reconcile instruction with entertainment.
Caxton’s translation of Aesop’s Fables in 1484 generated a sequence of fabulist works
by major authors for more than five centuries in Britain. His advice to ‘lytel John’ to
read Chaucer, Gower, Hoccleve and others would seem to include literate children in an
adult readership. Recent studies indicate increased estimates of general literacy levels
and that the child reader by the late fourteenth century was no longer an anomaly.
Lydgate wrote Isopes Fabules, moral beast fables; he is also attributed with the fifteenth-
century verse translation of Stans Puer ad Mensam, an influential courtesy book, to be
followed in 1513 by the widely used Latin Aesop, translated by Erasmus, who in 1532
produced the similarly popular Lytil Book of Good Maners for Children. In 1659 the first
illustrated book for children, the Visible World, of Comenius (1592–1670) became
available in English.
That the combined impact of printing in Britain (1474) and of the sixteenth-century
European Reformation increased literacy levels is reflected in the sudden huge increase
in sales of popular chapbooks during the decades of 1640–1660, a period free of
censorship in Britain during which a new reading public had been created. Bunyan
(1628–1688), competing for readership with the chapbook writers, sought to capture