John Gordon and Sylvia Engdahl. Issues of this type are particularly interesting in
popular generic writing, like westerns and science fiction and horror. Difficulties of
classification also arise because writers may write for overlapping readerships, as with
much of Jean Plaidy’s historical fiction (even though there are works, like The Young
Elizabeth, which are advertised for young readers). Writers known mainly for their work
for adults (like E.B.White, Rumer Godden, J.B.S. Haldane, Eric Linklater, Howard
Spring, Ray Bradbury, Roy Fuller, H.G.Wells, and T.H.White) have all produced
significant works for children, like E.B. White’s Stuart Little, or which children have
adopted, like H.G.Wells’s The Time Machine.
Fundamental to whether a book is a children’s book are the expectations about what
intellectual and emotional experience the implied reader can bring in reading response,
and it enables us to contrast works as different as, on the one hand, the Paddington and
Babar books and, on the other, Russell Hoban’s The Mouse and his Child and Richard
Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Marcus Crouch argues that Mary O’Hara’s My
Friend Flicka and Eric Knight’s Lassie-Come-Home ‘betrayed by their extreme
emotionalism that they were really books for adults’ (Crouch 1962:93). Other criteria
sometimes used for differentiating adult and children’s books are (1) the inclusion of
concrete events rather than abstract discussion; (2) the use of happy endings; (3) firm
moral frameworks; and (4) a distinctive style and vocabulary, and suggest that children
have adopted works like The Sword in the Stone and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
because such characteristics can be found in them; such works as T.H.White’s Mistress
Masham’s Repose and Frank Herbert’s Dune series despite the fact that many of them
cannot; and that works like The Pilgrim’s Progress and Homer’s Odyssey have been
adapted because ways of mediating them have been found.
Another critical factor in evaluating adoption and adaptation is dialectical. Children
may like a work despite adults and/or because of adults; liking and disliking works is
often influenced by what children read or have to read (an important distinction) at
school. A deeper level of this dialectic hinges on ‘the impossibility of children’s fiction’
owing to the fact that it must always be an adult construct (see Rose 1984: passim). So
in books as ostensibly simple as those about Babar, Tintin and Peter Pan, there are
ideological and psychological resonances unrecognised by children, even though the
works are regarded as children’s books. The dialectic is also given a commercial and
elitist spin because of the division between ‘book people’ and ‘child people’.
Successive layers of meaning in a work do not prevent its being adopted by children;
for example, in Henry Williamson’s Tarka the Otter, the action and empathy of the story
grip the reader, even if the intricate poetry and meanings of the tragic denouement,
which the book shares with the author’s complex and mature vision of nature (evident in
his large adult output), elude many child readers. (Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn
presents similar challenges.)
There are many writers of adventure stories adopted by children for their ability to tell
an exciting fast-moving adventure and create plausible heroes. Among them are John
Buchan, Alistair MacLean, John Masefield, C.S.Forester and Conan Doyle with his tales
of Sherlock Holmes. Margery Fisher, in Intent Upon Reading, refers to Robbery Under
Arms, Lorna Doone, and King Solomon’s Mines as works likely to go on appealing to
children for their ability to tell a good story about heroes and danger and victory: ‘and
418 BOOKS ADOPTED BY CHILDREN