Down; dystopias exist in the work of Kafka and Huxley as well as in John Christopher
and Peter Dickinson; supernatural events are as common in Christopher Pike as in
James Herbert and Stephen King. Given the common cultural inheritance of these
works, and in the case of popular fiction a strong array of textual similarities, it becomes
essential to ask whether the process of adoption is in fact one where children’s and
adult writing are taking place not in two areas but in three: children’s, adult’s, and both
together.
Where the boundaries come will always be a matter of context and interpretation.
Does ‘Dr Who’ lie somewhere between Nicholas Fisk and Philip Dick? What makes
Shane family viewing/reading, while the Edge and Sudden Western series of George
C.Gilman remain, and probably should remain, on the adult shelves in a library? What
makes Mary Norton a fantasist for children with her Borrowers books, while Andre
Norton, with her speculations into future societies, and the effects on identity and
evolution of shape-shifting, is a writer for both adults and young people? Why should
‘B.B.’ and Meindert DeJong, Rene Guillot and Margery Sharp be clearly tellers of animal
stories for the young, yet Gavin Maxwell and T.H.White be for everyone? What happens
between the preoccupations of Tom Brown’s Schooldays and George MacDonald Fraser’s
‘sequels’ about Flashman? What characteristics of story-telling—language, plotting, style
—make Wanda Gág a reteller of folk and fairy tales for children, Nathaniel Hawthorne
and Charles Perrault (in the original) writers for much older readers, and Rosemary
Sutcliff, Andrew Lang, and Roger Lancelyn Green writers for both groups?
Behind answers to these questions will lie some of the reasons for successful and
willing adoption by children of these works. Some tales are too complex structurally or
emotionally (like those of the Kalevala or Weland or Undine or Scheherezade). Some
stories use irony or self-parody, qualities usually reserved for older readers and adults
with a frame of reference and experience, and a repertoire of speech acts and
intentionalities, large enough for them to understand oblique modes of narration.
Probably these account partly for why Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth and the
work of Reiner Zimnik and Wilhelm Hauff will never be universally popular with
children, and why the more adventurous works of Raymond Briggs are popular only
with older readers. Reasons for rejection at one age may be reasons for acceptance at
another. Adoption of the reading materials of an older age group with which the reader
wishes to be identified may in itself be a motivation for adopting particular works (thus
‘adult’ reading at puberty).
Adoption and Generic FictionOne of the major sources of works for adults adopted by children is the field of popular
adult fiction. From their inception many adventure stories appeal both to children and
to the child in every adult (see Turner 1948). It is easy to see how adventure stories were
adopted by children because there was action and not introspection, straightforward
resolutions and a clear-cut morality. Examples include Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s
Mines, Anthony Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda, A.E.W.Mason’s The Four Feathers, John
Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps, Edgar Wallace’s Sanders of the River, and Baroness
Orczy’s tales of the Scarlet Pimpernel. These stories may have been adopted because of
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