International Companion Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature

I could, of course, have got back to the publishers and made tremendous waves...

but equally of course I didn’t. I bowed in the end to the inevitable economic

pressures.

Ure 1989:19

This whole question of what adults allow writers to give children opens up many curious
questions about adults’ approach to childhood. As Penelope Lively points out, childhood
itself is a gross oversimplification:

One of the oddest things we do to children is to confront them with someone else

who is also eight, or ten, or seven, and insist that they be friends... What concerns

me is the misconception that people are fossilised at any particular point in a

lifetime. We are none of us ‘the young’ or ‘the middle-aged’ or ‘the old’. We are all of

these things. To allow children to think otherwise is to encourage a disability—a

disability both of awareness and communication.

‘Children and memory’ in Heins 1977:229–230

Consequently, it is a mistake ever to underestimate the child reader: Ann Fine:

I don’t underestimate children, especially those who read a lot. They will have come

across many ideas through books and through talking with intelligent people. They

are more sophisticated and advanced in their thinking even though they may not

be able to articulate these ideas. Just because they can’t reproduce ideas at an adult

level is no reason to think they can’t take them on board.

Bierman 1991:16

Shirley Hughes, in a Woodfield Lecture in 1983, ‘Word and image’ linked this idea to the
role of the illustrator:

With a child audience you can never assume any level of literacy. But it is a great

mistake to think that an unlettered audience is necessarily an unperceptive one, or

that their visual reactions are crude or undeveloped. I suspect that children are at

their most perceptive in this way before they start to read, and that after they have

acquired this thrilling and prestigious skill their visual awareness tends to drop a

little... Our job as illustrators probably starts from that wonderful moment when a

baby gets hold of a book and suddenly realises that the image on one page connects

with the one overleaf.... What we are after is to build on this excitement...

Fearne 1985:74

For all this faith in the reader, questions like—should books be frightening?—
constantly arise. Catherine Storr, in an article, ‘Things that go bump in the night’ in the
Sunday Times Magazine (March 1971), wrote:

I believe that children should be allowed to feel fear...Walter de la Mare ...believed

that children were impoverished if they were protected from everything that might

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