adopt it for themselves. Reasons might be pragmatic, when adults think that the work
would simply bore children. Reasons might also be enlightened, when adults feel that a
book is well worth reading but may not be accessible in its adult form. Many myths and
legends have been adapted in this way, making tales with obscure characterisation and
complex motivation like Tristan and Iseult, Daedalus and Icarus, and the stories of the
Gorgon and the Minotaur and even of Gilgamesh intelligible through re-tellings by such
as Andrew Lang, Roger Lancelyn Green, James Reeves, and Ian Serraillier. In this way
Kevin Crossley-Holland brought as complex a tale as Beowulf to children, and Rosemary
Sutcliff the tragic death of Boudicca. Writers and adapters of this quality know that
books for children are not simply books for adults but on a reduced scale. If adaptation
is going to work, and lead to adoption, then not just style and vocabulary may have to
be simplified, but the images and event-structures translated into an acceptable texture
and sequence which children can understand and accept as natural. The popularity of
such works as The Pilgrim’‘s Progress demonstrates how pervasive was the social
pressure to read them; for example in Isaiah Thomas’s 1789 edition the dictation is ‘To
the Youth of America’. Rosenbach comments that this work, not originally intended for
the young, was one of the most popular and influential children’s books in America. He
claims that Bunyan was popular even though he was a Puritan because
he nevertheless in this work succeeded in reconciling religion and romance, so that
a century later Richard Graves in the Spiritual Quixote [another suitable
adaptation, this time from the original of Cervantes] compared the adventures of
Christian with those of Jack the Giant Killer... In this respect the work of Bunyan
is in striking contrast to the Janeway school [which preached at children and
regarded them as innately evil, ‘limbs of Satan’].
Rosenbach 1971:96If there are dominant ideologies shaping the process of adoption and adaptation, then
these ideologies take institutionalised social forms in order to implement their ideas: the
Church in general, and organisations like the Religious Tract Society and the Society for
the Propagation of Christian Knowledge in particular.
Another major channel of influence is education, through and by means of which
much spontaneous and enforced adoption of books (intended for children and for
adults, as well as adapted for children) took and still takes place. Education includes
intellectual and emotional development, may entail socialisation to the point of
indoctrination, may open imaginative doors to the ‘best’ books, and much else.
Availability is a powerful shaper of what is adopted: what is bought for schools and
libraries, as well as what is approved of as suitable reading by teachers and librarians
and parents.
It is a debate which impels us to examine what is a ‘classic’ in children’s reading, and
the extent to which classics represent what children should most be encouraged to adopt.
Classics are of two kinds here: first, books intended for children, like Marryat’s The
Children of the New Forest or George MacDonald’s At the Back of the North Wind;
second, works not necessarily written for children but regarded as ‘worth reading’. By that
token, Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s 1984, with their provocative dystopianism,
424 BOOKS ADOPTED BY CHILDREN