International Companion Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature

eye can take or leave in a way that I feel an adult cannot, and can acquire valuable

stimuli from things which appear otherwise overgrown with a mass of weeds and

nonsense.

Dickinson 1970/1976:76

After all, this is the same argument as that used by Lewis Carroll, who wrote of The
Hunting of the Snark: ‘As to the meaning of the Snark I’m very much afraid I didn’t mean
anything but nonsense! Still, you know, words mean more than we mean to express
when we use them: so a whole book ought to mean a great deal more than the writer
meant’ (Carroll 1973:22).
What, then, should be changed? Of form and content, the simplification of language
might seem to be the less problematic, but here again, authors express great faith in their
audience, and a reluctance to bow to simplistic arguments. Eleanor Cameron takes a
firm view of this: ‘A writer...should feel himself [sic] no more under the necessity to
restrict the complexity of his plotting because of differences in child understanding...
than he feels the necessity of restricting his vocabulary’ (Cameron 1969:87), and
E.B.White, himself an expert on style, links this with ‘writing down’:

Anyone who writes down to children is simply wasting his time... Some writers

deliberately avoid using words they think the child doesn’t know. This emasculates

the prose, and, I suspect, bores the reader. Children are game for anything. They

love words that give them a hard time, provided they are in a context that absorbs

their attention.

Haviland 1974:87

That context is a matter of craft and skill, as Jill Paton Walsh points out:

The children’s book presents a technically more difficult, technically more

interesting problem—that of making a fully serious adult statement, as a good novel

of any kind does, and making it utterly simple and transparent ... The need for

comprehensibility imposes an emotional obliqueness, an indirection of approach,

which like elision and partial statement in poetry is often a source of aesthetic

power.

‘The rainbow surface,’ in Meek et al. 1977:192–193.

Consequently, we may assume that many writers will continue to tackle such problems;
as Chris Powling, author, and editor of the British children’s book magazine, Books for
Keeps put it: ‘We could be in for some real advances in children’s writing. The most
significant writing for children always takes risks!’ (Mills 1992:17).
Can such risks be taken with ‘content items’, where censorious adults are inclined to
intervene? The historical novelist Ronald Welch, once a teacher: ‘I know from my own
experience that children detest people who talk or write down to them; they are eager to
accept the challenge of a more adult approach’ (Crouch and Ellis 1977:77). And yet the
position of the adult can be untenable, simply because of being an adult: Eleanor
Cameron:

WHAT THE AUTHORS TELL US 557