International Companion Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature

Moral Purpose and Didacticism

It is useful, in the first instance, to recognise the historical nature of the debate, a
debate that initially centred around questions of didacticism and moral purpose. In the
‘Preface’ to The Governess or Little Female Academy in 1749, Sarah Fielding wrote:

Before you begin the following sheets, I beg you will stop a Moment at this Preface,

to consider with me, what is the true Use of reading: and if you can once fix this

Truth in your Minds, namely that the true Use of Books is to make you wiser and

better, you will then have both Profit and Pleasure from what you read.

Fielding 1749/1968:91

Lest it should be thought that such overt moral purpose is a thing of the past, here is
Fred Inglis: ‘Only a monster would not want to give a child books she will delight in and
which will teach her to be good. It is the ancient and proper justification of reading and
teaching literature that it helps you to live well’ (Inglis 1981:4).
Contrary views have almost as long a history; for instance, Elizabeth Rigby writing in
1844 in The Quarterly Review, while admitting that no one would deliberately put what
she calls ‘offensive’ books in the way of children, goes on:

but, should they fall in their way, we firmly believe no risk to exist—if they will read

them at one time or another, the earlier, perhaps, the better. Such works are like

the viper—they have a wholesome flesh as well as a poisonous sting; and children

are perhaps the only class of readers which can partake of one without suffering

from the other.

Hunt 1990:21

The debate was lively in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but for the bulk of this
century it appeared largely to have been settled. Thus Harvey Darton, in 1932, could
introduce his history with the words: ‘By “children’s books” I mean printed works
produced ostensibly to give children spontaneous pleasure, and not primarily to teach
them, not solely to make them good, nor to keep them profitably quiet’ (Darton 1932/
1982:1, his emphasis).
For a considerable time, then, the question of values was left in abeyance. There was
discussion about both how to write for children in ways that were not condescending,
and about what the differences might be between fiction written for children and fiction
written for adults, but considerations of moral purpose were not an issue. In the 1970s,
however, the debate was revived, albeit in another form, and it was at this point that
ideological considerations came to be labelled as such.

Ideology

Ideology is a problematic notion. In the current general discourse of the electronic media,
for instance, it is often considered that ideology and bias are one and the same thing,
and that ideology and ‘common sense’ can be set against each other. This distinction
continues into party political debate: ‘ideology’ is what the other side is motivated by

40 THEORY AND CRITICAL APPROACHES