no one had done any historical work since the advent of Derrida.) Literary works,
manuscripts, letters and diaries are better edited than ever before...
Harwood 1995:25–26In the case of children’s literature, resources are, of course, directed towards education
and librarianship as well as literary and bibliographical studies; consequently the
resources available to bibliography is disproportionately small for both the influence of
the subject, and the amount of work which could be done. A good deal of work, then has
been the result of privately financed enterprise, or has been supported by the major
research collections (see Chapter 47). Juvenile bibliography might thus seem to be a
poor relation, a paradox compounded by the flourishing collector’s market for children’s
books.
The ‘core’ books in the area are ageing, and increasingly in need of revision as detailed
bibliographical work changes the historical map. However, nothing has been published
that matches the work of Darton (1932/1982), Muir (1954), Thwaite (1963/1972) or the
specifically bibliophile, but widely available, ‘collector’s guides’ of Quayle (1971; 1983)
(as against the avalanche of theory and ‘popular’ history). (One attempt to supplement
them has been Mary V. Jackson’s Engines of Instruction, Mischief and Magic: Children’s
Literature in England from its Beginning to 1839 (1990), which was not critically well-
received.)
F.J.Harvey Darton’s Children’s Books in England(1932/1982) laid an important
foundation (although its organisation may seem somewhat arcane to the lay reader), and
the revised edition contains extensive bibliographies, from fables to magazines (these
may be supplemented by Thwaite 1963/1972:283–313).
Similarly, no series has emerged to replace the Oxford University Press Juvenile
Library, which produced facsimiles of, for example, Sarah Fielding’s The Governess (ed.
Jill E.Grey 1968), Isaac Watts’s Divine Songs (ed. J.H.P.Pafford 1971) and John Newbery’s
A Little Pretty Pocket Book (ed. M.F.Thwaite 1966).
The journal that most seriously addressed scholarly concerns, Phaedrus (which began
as a Newsletter in 1973 and ended as an International Annual) did not survive the
1980s (it merged with Die Schiefertafel in 1989), and even by 1977 its editor, James
Fraser, was lamenting his disillusion with the fact that the ‘groundswell of serious
discussion and superior research’ had not been stimulated. (Fraser 1977:2). The most
‘respectable’ of children’s literature journals, the Yale annual Children’s Literature,
although rarely concerned with children, has published, in the most liberal definition,
two articles which have a primarily bibliographic approach in the last ten years.
While the situation is better in the USA, in Britain the establishment of major
collections, notably the Opie Collection in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and the Renier
Collection of Historical and Contemporary Children’s Books at the Bethnal Green
Museum of Childhood in London has not been backed up by the funding necessary to
adequately document them, or to provide a viable research base. None the less, Tessa
Chester of the Renier Collection has produced a number of valuable ‘Occasional Lists’ of
different types and genres of books (the first was on Struwwelpeter (Chester 1987)). An
interesting article on Peter Opie’s accession diaries by Clive Hurst appears in Avery and
A NOTE ON BIBLIOGRAPHY 123