‘Sources and responses’ in Haviland 1980:85They might, of course, be consoled by C.S.Lewis’s robust defence in ‘On three ways of
writing for children’:
Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of merely a descriptive term,
cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the
grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these
are the marks of childhood and adolescence... The modern view seems to me to
involve a false conception of growth...surely arrested development consists not in
refusing to lose old things but in failing to add new things?
Lewis 1966:25A preliminary question is, who do children’s authors write for? A specific child or an
abstract child or a specific age-group—or for themselves? One school of thought can be
traced at least to Robert Louis Stevenson. In writing about Treasure Island to
W.E.Henley, he said: ‘It’s awful fun, boys’ stories. You just indulge the pleasure of your
heart, that’s all; no trouble, no strain’ (Colvin 1911:49). Arthur Ransome famously
quoted these lines, in a letter to H.J.B.Woodfield, editor of The Junior Bookshelf in 1937:
That, it seems to me, is the secret. You just indulge the pleasure of your heart. You
write not for children but for yourself, and if, by good fortune, children enjoy what
you enjoy, why then you are a writer of children’s books ... No special credit to you,
but simply thumping good luck. Every writer wants to have readers, and than
children there are no better readers in the world.
Crouch and Ellis 1977:6Ransome then went on to a much-imitated dictum:
I do not know how to write books for children and have the gravest doubts as to
whether anybody should try to do any such thing. To write for children seems to me
to be a sure way of writing what is called a ‘juvenile’, a horrid, artificial thing, a
patronising thing, a thing that betrays in every line that author and intended victims
are millions of miles apart, and that the author is enjoying not the stuff of his book
but a looking-glass picture of himself or herself ‘being so good with children’...
Crouch and Ellis 1977:6This view can be refined, as by Lucy Boston: ‘If you write for the child that was, in your
own mind there’s no division between that child and yourself now, so that it should be
valid for both’ (Wintle and Fisher 1974:283). Equally, writers feel that when they are
absorbed in the act of writing, audience ceases to be a problem; Susan Cooper’s first
book was started as a competition entry, but rapidly became something else:
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