there are the Roald Dahl books, immensely popular but disliked by many commentators
for an underlying unpleasantness and appeal to the less likable of childish
characteristics.
Last to be mentioned here of contemporary prose writers for children is William
Mayne, perhaps the most distinguished of them all: bewilderingly prolific and protean. He
has written, it seems, in every genre and for every age group, and a small selection from
his more than one hundred titles must be arbitrary and subjective: a possible sampler
would be A Swarm in May (1955), No More School (1965), The Jersey Shore (1973) and
Drift (1985).
From Garden to StreetMost books of poetry for children published since 1945 have been anthologies, selected
with children in mind but drawn from the body of poetry at large. Some poets however
have written specially for children. In 1950 and 1952 James Reeves published The
Wandering Moon and The Blackbird in the Lilac, containing some of the best children’s
verse of the post-war period. Ted Hughes wrote the comic Meet My Folks! in 1961, and in
more serious vein Season Songs in 1976 and the mysterious and haunting moon poems
which were brought together in Moon-Whales (1988). Charles Causley, a poet with a
vigorous narrative gift, did much for children over the years, both as writer and
anthologist; his collection of short poems with Cornish settings, Figgie Hobbin (1970),
showed him continually at his best. In the 1970s and 1980s came a wave of ‘urchin
verse’, representing a childhood of the street rather than the garden and inspired
particularly by Michael Rosen’s Mind Your Own Business (1974).
For many years the picture book as a distinctive contemporary art form developed
more strongly in the USA than in Britain; but in 1962 Brian Wildsmith, essentially a
painter, opened many eyes with his rich and glowing ABC. Later in the same decade
came the early books of Charles Keeping, an uncompromising artist with a strong and
increasingly sombre line, thought by some to be too stark for young children, but clearly
a powerful talent. Several artists—John Burningham and Raymond Briggs notable
among them—created picture books that looked like, and perhaps were, comedy, but
beneath whose surfaces there were serious concerns. Shirley Hughes drew solid, flesh-
and-blood children, and understood what adventures can be contained in a small child’s
ordinary day; Quentin Blake used a light sketchy style to create visual fantasy; Janet
and Allan Ahlberg appealed to the very smallest with Each Peach Pear Plum (1978),
Peepo! (1981) and Bye Bye Baby (1989) and were among many picture book creators to
exploit the physical properties of the book in gaining their effects. Paper engineering,
well known to the Victorians, though not under that name, became part of the
vocabulary of the trade.
Many good artists were active in the field besides those mentioned, and at the start of
the 1990s the picture book seemed to be in a reasonably healthy state. Children’s fiction
was less so; it had for some years been having a hard time in Britain, as schools and
libraries had less money in real terms to spend on recreational reading, while the price of
books rose remorselessly and was driven higher in a vicious spiral by the shortening of
print runs. The chill economic wind seemed to cause, or at any rate to be accompanied
678 BRITISH CHILDREN’S LITERATURE: A HISTORICAL OVERVIEW