publisher wanted to censor a line from The Tale of Tom Kitten. At one point in the story,
Tom falls off a wall and loses his clothes in the process. The line in the story reads ‘all
the rest of Tom’s clothes came off on the way down’. The publisher wanted to change the
line to ‘nearly all’, but Potter refused. Not wanting to alienate one of their best-selling
authors, the publisher relented (Linder 1987:187).
One author who openly violated many of the taboos associated with children’s
literature was Mark Twain. In both The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn, Twain portrayed adults in a negative light and allowed his boy heroes
to misbehave with impunity. Since these books were brought out by a subscription
publisher rather than a standard publishing house, no one tried to censor these books
before they were published. Soon after their publication, however, they became quite
controversial. Many librarians refused to purchase Twain’s books, and others removed
them after reading them (Jordan 1948:34–35). The librarians at the public library in
Concord, Massachusetts, for example, decided to take The Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn out of circulation, a move that received praise from the editor of the Springfield
Republican. In an editorial reprinted in the New York Times, the editor noted:
The Concord public library committee deserve well of the public by their action in
banishing Mark Twain’s new book, Huckleberry Finn, on the ground that it is trashy
and vicious. It is time that this influential pseudonym should cease to carry into
homes and libraries unworthy productions... The trouble with Mr Clemens is that
he has no reliable sense of propriety...[The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’s] moral level is low, and their perusal cannot be
anything less than harmful.
West 1988a: 22Twain’s books sparked a great deal of controversy, but they were not the most frequently
censored children’s books published during the nineteenth or early twentieth centuries.
That distinction belonged to a series of inexpensive publications that children generally
purchased on their own. Known in Britain as ‘penny dreadfuls’ and in America as ‘dime
novels’, these forms of popular culture emerged in the 1860s and remained on the scene
until shortly after the turn of the century. The controversy surrounding them reflected
the fact that they were written by people who cared more about meeting the demands of
children than winning the approval of parents. Their authors tended to write about
subjects that children found interesting even if the result was the breaking of certain
taboos, for example, frequently portraying scenes of crime and violence and often
depicting adults in a negative light. Because these forms of popular culture violated so
many taboos, they often came under attack by self-appointed censors.
The attempts to suppress penny dreadfuls in Britain were tied to a fear that these
publications might lead working-class youth to engage in anti-social behaviour. For the
conservative critics who opposed the passage of Foster’s Education Act of 1870 on the
grounds that mass literacy could lead to social upheaval, the growing popularity of penny
dreadfuls among working-class boys seemed to be an ominous development. These
critics believed that the boys who read about crimes would be inspired to commit the
same sorts of crimes in real life. Edward Salmon, one of the most virulent of these
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