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Books Adopted by Children
Stuart Hannabuss
It has always been difficult to define exact boundaries between children’s literature and
the broader domain of reading material read by adults. This has arisen for many
reasons, some based on what the reading material intrinsically happens to be, and
others on social and cultural factors. Adoption occurs when children ‘take over’ a work
(book, cartoon, film or video) and make it their own, so that it becomes generally
associated in the public mind as ‘a work for children’ or ‘a work that children are
expected to enjoy’. This process may entail making the work their own to the general
exclusion of adult readers (who will then read it only for nostalgia, as story-tellers, or as
children’s book specialists), or it may remain popular with both adults and children.
There are times when adults encourage children to read particular books, making it
easier by producing versions attractive or intelligible to them. This may be motivated by
the desire to present ‘great literature’ or ‘good books’ to children, for imaginative,
educational and moral reasons. Such works may be retold or abridged or censored or
updated or provided with new illustrations: this may be regarded as adaptation. Adopting
and adapting are complementary aspects of the process of reading provision which takes
place in a diverse cultural setting where strict divisions between children’s and adult
reading are ultimately impossible to make. The cross-over between adults and children
has arguably been greater in recent decades because of television, video, and computer
games.
Some books written for adults, like Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels
(particularly the journey to Lilliput), end up being liked by children. Some books written
for children, like The Hobbit, end up being liked by adults, particularly those taken up
with Tolkien exegesis. There are also many works, like Sue Townsend’s The Diary of
Adrian Mole, written about children rather than for them, and which appeal—or fail to
appeal—to both groups. Distinctions are fraught with problems about what ‘child’,
‘juvenile’, ‘young adult’, and ‘adult’ categories actually mean, both demographically and
in terms of reading, and these change historically. During the nineteenth century, the
works of Charlotte M. Yonge or Evelyn Everett Green were widely read by women and girls
alike; in the same way, the works of Ballantyne and Henty were read by men and boys
alike. In the twentieth century the work of Terry Pratchett and Steven Spielberg has
equal impact on child and adult audiences.
Distinctions may arise from publishing conventions, for example, when Anne
McCaffrey’s Dragon fantasy series is marketed as juvenile in one country and adult in
another, and there is similar ambiguity over the work of Alan Garner, William Mayne,