169
See also: Robinson Crusoe 94–95 ■ Gulliver’s Travels 104 ■ Children’s and Household Tales 116 –17 ■ Fairy Tales 151 ■
Little Women 199 ■ Treasure Island 201illustrated folktales, originally
collected for adults, were criticized
as being inappropriate for young
people because of their sexual and
violent content—later editions were
adapted to be more child friendly.
Hans Christian Andersen, who
wrote his Fairy Tales (1835 –37)
specifically for children, caused an
outcry by failing to include a moral.A golden age
In the late 19th and early 20th
centuries, writing for children
enjoyed a golden age, founded
on increasing literacy, the growth
of commercial publishing, and
recognition of the imaginative
potential of a child’s world. TomBrown’s School Days (1857), by
English author Thomas Hughes,
started the tradition of the school
story; another new genre was the
coming-of-age tale, such as Louisa
May Alcott’s Little Women (1868– 69)
in the US. Other classics include
Johanna Spyri’s Heidi (1880 –81),
from Switzerland, and Scotsman
J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan (1911).
Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland is one of the most
influential books of this flowering.
Regarded as the first masterpiece
for children in English, its
fantastical story is a marked
departure from the prevailing
realism of literature at the time.
On a July day in 1862, CharlesDodgson, a young mathematics
don, went rowing with a male
friend and three young sisters on
the Thames near Oxford, and told
a story about a girl named Alice—
which was also the name of one
of his passengers, Alice Liddell, ten
years old. So Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland took shape, appearing
as a handwritten book, and then as
a publication under the pseudonym
Lewis Carroll.A surreal world
In the story, seven-year-old Alice
falls down a rabbit hole and finds
herself in a surreal universe. She
negotiates alone a world of strange
creatures, strange attitudes, ❯❯DEPICTING REAL LIFE
Scale
A child can grow or
shrink, usually as a result of
drinking or eating something,
just as children are often
told to “grow up.”Behavior
Characters are often
rude, aggressive, or
frustrating, as adults can be,
incomprehensibly, in a
child’s world.Justice
Power and perversity
prevail over fairness, mirroring
the arbitrary nature of adult
power over children.Time
Clock time has no
meaning, reflecting the adult
world of rules, regulations, and
schedules that make no
sense to a child.Animals
Animals have human
characteristics, though
exaggerated or distorted,
functioning as stand-ins
for adults.In Wonderland, the
laws of both nature and
society are turned on their
heads: time and space
behave unpredictably;
animals talk; at tea parties
and games, anything might
happen. The child’s sense
of threat in an adult world
is evoked through fantasy.US_168-171_Wonderland.indd 169 08/10/2015 13:06