was partly to provide them with a good example of independence, rationality, diligence,
and triumph over a hostile environment, very much in keeping with contemporary
ideology. There were numerous editions and versions for children, including John
Harris’s in 1821, ‘A new and improved edition, interspersed with reflections, religious
and moral.’ Similarly, versions of The Swiss Family Robinson were extended to include a
wealth of natural history illustrations (for instruction) and further episodes of adventure
and bravery (for moral improvement). W.H.G.Kingston’s 1889 edition omitted ‘the long
sententious lectures found in the original, and [incorporated] some slight alterations
calculated to enliven the narrative’.
Often, then, story types and themes are ‘adopted’ by writers for children and given new
forms, re-contextualised in terms of contemporary needs and conceptions about what
children should read and how they should behave. So sermons might be interpolated
into an adventure story (‘powder and jam’), illustrations supplied to enhance didactic
impact, or death-bed repentances taken out as too melodramatic or lugubrious. Such
‘adoption’ points not merely to what authors and publishers see as timely commercial
advantage: what is adopted in this way, and how texts are adapted and distributed to
young readers, are implicitly ideological statements, ideologically informed acts of
mediation. Accordingly, acts of adoption and adaptation throughout the history of
children’s literature inform us about prevailing cultural and ideological paradigms of
each period—views that children were innately sinful, eighteenth-century rationality,
views of natural nurture from Rousseau and Thomas Day, the Evangelical movement’s
stress on personal grace, and, in the twentieth century, the policing of racism, sexism
and ageism in children’s books. Without denying opportunities for spontaneous choice
and response in children’s reading, it is as illogical to analyse the process of adoption out
of context, and detach adoption from dominant contemporary ideologies, as it is to
decouple them from the shaping effect of changes in the publishing trade.
The urge to make children ‘good’, general to early children’s books, was also an
important impetus behind adaptations. Sentiments like this lay behind Mrs Trimmer’s
distrust of fantasy and her insistence on moral exhortation, even through myths and
fairytales. Later works, like Jean Ingelow’s Mopsa the Fairy or Christina Rossetti’s
Speaking Likenesses, show how influential nineteenth-century children’s writers
adapted the themes and sentiments of fantasy and folklore for moralistic purposes.
Humphrey Carpenter convincingly argues that many writers during that period were
so successful (that is, they adapted their manner of writing so that their works were
adopted by children) because their work appeared to present to children a world
separate from, and even opposed to, the world of adults (Carpenter 1985). E. Nesbit
parodied earnest moralising in her witty no-nonsense stories of play and magic,
accounting for their popularity then and now. Adoption by children is always more likely
to occur if readers can identify the authentic tone of their own culture in a work, and if
the illusion of the reader’s having ownership of the text’s referential world can be created
and sustained. This aspect of adoption is of particular importance in understanding the
appeal of comics and magazines for the young, and of the many ‘nameless’ writers of
sub-culture spin-offs in horror and fantasy.
The assumption of an adaptation is that, regardless of any enjoyment children might
get out of the work, there is a strong probability that children would not spontaneously
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