International Companion Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature

frighten them... Once one has answered this basic question...the second problem

arises of how it is to be presented. This is really a technical problem which has to

be faced by every writer for children...

Meek et al. 1977:123

What is fear, in this context? Jan Mark:

It is debatable whether or not fear of the unknown is greater than fear of the

known, but in childhood so much is unknown that a child, in order to make sense

of fear, must isolate and identify it; only the known can be dealt with.

Mark 1986:9

Or, as Lloyd Alexander put it, ‘Children...have the same emotions...They may be not as
complex...but as primary colours, fear is fear, happiness is happiness, and love is the
same sense for a child as it is for any other’ (Wintle and Fisher 1974:212). His answer is
that ‘the child...can experience and come to terms with unsettling emotions within the
safety of a work of art’ (Alexander 1982: 67). In some senses, as Bernard Ashley notes,
the problem has to be resolved through technique:

We will want to share things with older children, argue a case, show what evil is

before it’s conquered by good... Walter de la Mare...said that a child who has not

experienced fear will never be a poet. It isn’t what we include, I suggest, it’s how we

include it.

Ashley 1986:27–28

Much of this argument becomes bound up with our concepts of ‘rubbish’. Mollie Hunter
is characteristic of those who take their position of responsibility seriously:

There is a need for heroes in children’s literature... There is no particular harm in

children’s reading rubbish as long as they also have plenty of good stuff available

for comparison. But it has to be recognised that the [Superman-type] presentation

of the concept of hero could also be pernicious rubbish in that its equation of might

with right elevates the use of force to a prime ethos.

Hunter 1983:146

But perhaps the most important and suggestive comment was Peter Dickinson’s, in his
‘A defence of rubbish’. His sixth defence of children’s ‘unrespectable’ reading-matter was:

it may not be rubbish after all. The adult eye is not necessarily a perfect

instrument for discerning certain sorts of values. Elements—and this particularly

applies to science fiction—may be so obviously rubbishy that one is tempted to

dismiss the whole product as rubbish. But among those elements there may be

something new and strange to which one is not accustomed, and which one may

not be able to assimilate oneself, as an adult, because of the sheer awfulness of the

rest of the stuff; but the innocence—I suppose there is no other word—of the child’s

556 THE CONTEXT OF CHILDREN’S LITERATURE