Walter Scott, Fenimore Cooper and others, crossed over to children’s literature with the
children’s books of Captain Marryat in the 1840s. There followed the long runs of ‘boys’
stories’ by R.M.Ballantyne, W.H.G.Kingston, G.A.Henty and others, offering as role
models for those growing out of childhood the upright, clean-living, Empire-building
young men who were seen as Britain’s, and therefore the world’s, best. This line of
development led eventually to Robert Louis Stevenson, who acknowledged in his
prefatory verses to Treasure Island (1882) the influence of ‘Kingston, and Ballantyne the
brave’—while, paradoxically, writing a book whose power derives in part from its lordly
disregard of conventional ethics.
For girls a different kind of book was thought appropriate: the domestic dramas of
such writers as Charlotte M.Yonge, Mrs Molesworth, Mrs Ewing and others, now
forgotten by all except a few enthusiasts. Frances Hodgson Burnett has sometimes been
bracketed with this group of writers, but should properly be placed above them. Her
reputation has suffered from the notoriety of Little Lord Fauntleroy (1885), whose
eponymous hero has been much maligned: he is actually a friendly, unaffected small
boy who would surely have detested the ‘Fauntleroy suit’ in which the artist dressed him.
Mrs Burnett’s A Little Princess (1905) and The Secret Garden (1910) are still living books.
It was acknowledged even by Victorians that girls disliked ‘goody-goody’ books,
preferring their brothers’ adventure stories. This preference may be assumed to have
extended to school stories, which were almost invariably set in boarding schools, to
which only boys went. School was in fact a promising setting: an enclosed world within
which the boy was a fully participating citizen. The school story sprang to prominence
with Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857) and F.W.Farrar’s Eric, or Little by
Little (1858), a passionately moral tear-jerker which now seems preposterous but went
through some thirty editions by the end of the century. The classic school stories were
written by Talbot Baines Reed in the 1880s and 1890s, but their values were fatally
undermined by Kipling’s Stalky and Co (1899) which portrayed—though not quite at full
length—the unregenerate young male animal.
Kipling’s contribution to children’s literature was rich and various: it included the
much-loved Jungle Books (1894–1895), more fantasy than animal story, but in fact
defying classification; the sounding and memorable Just-So Stories (1902), which could
be described as beast fables for the very young, and Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906), a time
fantasy celebrating the land and people of England. Edith Nesbit also resists pigeon-
holing; her best-known books are three family stories about the Bastable children,
beginning with The Story of the Treasure-Seekers in 1899, and three that are about a
family of children but also introduce magical creatures: the furry, bad-tempered
Psammead in Five Children and It (1902) and The Story of the Amulet (1906), and the
Phoenix which hatches in the fire in The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904). The characters
in Kenneth Grahame’s many-layered classic The Wind in the Willows (1908) are people,
although lightly disguised as animals. For children, the adventures of the incorrigible Mr
Toad have ensured continuing popularity; adults surely are seduced in part by an air of
poetic nostalgia. The play of Peter Pan (1904), by J.M.Barrie, has been a lasting success
on the stage, but in book form it has a whiff of coyness and condescension and an after-
taste of saccharine.
THE WORLD OF CHILDREN’S LITERATURE 673