that is why children have appropriated many modern writers who do not write for them’—
and she cites Buchan, Masefield, Hammond Innes, C.S.Forester and Nevil Shute (Fisher
1964: 207). Of course, those layers of meaning may make it improbable that an adult
work is adopted, while some children’s books—Alice in Wonderland, The Water Babies,
and The Wind in the Willows—contain inaccessible meanings or sub-texts.
Adoption and the Common Cultural PoolAdoption entails taking over something from somewhere else. Yet it may be fair to say that
both children’s and adult literature derive historically from a common cultural pool of
folk and fairy tales, myths and legends, the ingredients of oral tradition and folklore.
Equally, only if children were regarded as distinct from adults in the past could the
notion of adoption, in this sense, be meaningful. Themes common to adults and children
(like monsters, magic and tragedies) appear in early chapbooks, and influence the
contents of eighteenth-century books. It is clear that adaptation often preceded adoption,
as can be seen from fairy stories like Perrault’s, and conceptions of the child, as innately
sinful or good were influential factors on what was provided as distinctly for children’s
reading during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and in consequence what
became available for adoption.
Evidence about responses to early children’s books is elusive, though some can be
found in autobiographies and diaries, records of child nurture and some (exceptional)
contemporary criticism. It may also be inferred from children’s books themselves.
Currently, research into reading response by writers like Protherough, Fry and Applebee
helps us to identify reasons for adoption. They range from the excitement of the
forbidden to active identification with exciting storylines and characters. Comparisons
between heroes as widely separated as Jason and Rambo, Gulliver and Indiana Jones,
Beowulf and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, typically show how adoption crosses both
historical tradition and types of media, and ultimately show this derivation from a
common cultural pool.
Comparisons can also be made between adult and children’s books which emerge from
the same cultural (and even anthropological) tradition: the quest in Don Quixote and in
the works of Sid Fleishman and early Alan Garner; religious allegory in The Pilgrim’s
Progress and Arthur Calder-Marshall’s The Fair to Middling; the Arthurian cycle in
Malory and T.H.White; the evil in mankind in the Faustus legend, James Watson’s The
Partisan, the works of Leon Garfield, and William Golding; and rites of passage in
Brobdingnag with Gulliver, in the love triangle in The Owl Service, and in Ged’s initiation
into magic in A Wizard of Earthsea. These comparisons emphasise the extent of the
common tradition between adult and children’s books without which a comprehensive
understanding of the process of adoption cannot be obtained.
Any area of generic fiction, such as fantasy, crosses easily between readerships, adult
and child, general reader and cult/specialist. (This is also true—perhaps for a related
reason—of hobby- and sport-orientated magazines.) Such materials contain many
themes and styles of treatment which characterise the genre itself rather than any
specific appropriateness for children. Talking beasts are in Genesis and Animal Farm,
Robert C.O’Brien’s Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, the Narnia books and Watership
TYPES AND GENRES 419