International Companion Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature

One cannot help looking with secret envy on the children of the present day, for

whose use and entertainment a thousand ingenious and beautiful things are

provided which were quite unknown some few scores of years since, when the

present writer and reader were very possibly in the nursery state. Abominable

attempts were made in those days to make useful books for children, and cram

science down their throats as calomel used to be administered under the pretence

of a spoonful of current jelly.

‘On some illustrated books for children’, Salway 1976:286–287

If the majority of writers do not see their role as specific to a child or to education or
manipulation, why do they write for children? Some, like Alan Garner, follow Ransome:
‘Simply, children make the best audience. Connect with a child and you really connect.
Adolescence is the same only more so’ (quoted in Philip 1981:154). Other writers take an
even more noble position: Paula Fox (‘Some thoughts on imagination in children’s
literature’):

When you read to a child, when you put a book in a child’s hands, you are bringing

that child news of the infinitely varied nature of life. You are an awakener.

Hearne and Kaye 1981:24

Some, like Paul Zindel and Ralph Steadman have a high sense of mission: Zindel:

You realise the enormity of the responsibility that you’ve brought children into the

world, and if you don’t like life and what you’ve given them is something you don’t

like, then it’s a terrible thing. So I think there is a big responsibility that you pass

on to the children a sense of faith, that life is good, that it’s an adventure and that

it’s something to be chosen over oblivion.

Clark 1989:15

Steadman:

Each child has a unique view of our world. Our world, that is, for now.

In the meantime, we have a duty, a clear duty to help sustain the openness of a

child’s pure vision and its wholesome acceptance of what it sees and feels in the

world around it and within its own private world...

In a child we’re presented with the raw material, the clean slate, the possessor of

potent senses, the ready absorber of the slightest whim. We must realise that every

confrontation, every spark of human intention and every touch is registered by this

miracle, and the life force within it will use whatever it can grasp to further the

motives of a tender captive mind.

The best of children’s books are secret doors [which you can only enter if you

believe what is on the other side]... They are readily available with a child to help

you and yet inaccessible if you spurn the child’s natural delight in the possibility of

everything impossible.

Steadman 1990:25

552 THE CONTEXT OF CHILDREN’S LITERATURE