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Scotland
Stuart Hannabuss
Scotland has a distinctive place in the history and development of British children’s
literature. Peter Pan (J.M.Barrie) and Henry Baskerville (Arthur Conan Doyle), Mr Toad
(Kenneth Grahame) and Kevin and Sadie (Joan Lingard) were all created by Scottish
writers. Writing and publishing for children in Scotland has been active for several
hundred years, arising in the beginning out of a unique tradition with three languages
(Scots, Gaelic and English) and two cultures (Highland and Lowland). Writing for
children both merges with and diverges from writing for adults, and before the thirteenth
century flows from a rich oral tradition of sung ballads and chivalric romance. Best
known are the ‘border ballads’ which Sir Walter Scott, among others, brought together
in the nineteenth century. Joseph Jacobs’s collections of Celtic fairy tales (1892 and
1894) are still favourites with children.
Many ballads and folk-tales, on subjects like Robin Hood and King Arthur, appeared
in chapbooks between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries. Many were for readers
of all ages, although some publisher/booksellers specialised in cheap entertaining works
for children. Among them were James Lumsden (1750– 1830) of Glasgow (the Newbery or
Harris of Scotland), whose nursery tales and stories were popular, some making known
the work of writers like Berquin and Thomas Day. The fairy and folktale tradition
emerges through George MacDonald and, today, in writers like Winifred Finlay and Iris
MacFarlane, as well as in compilations by Norah and William Montgomerie. A
characteristic of Scottish children’s literature is the closeness of its writers to oral story-
telling and the story-tellers’ relationship with their audience.
Education has been another distinctive strand in Scottish writing for children. Some
‘books of nurture’ (early works on how young people should behave) found their way to
Scotland or were translated there (for example, Sir Gilbert Hay’s Buke of the Governance
of Princes in the fifteenth century). Grammars, like Lily and Murray, remained in print
and in use in schools up to the eighteenth century, and as the educational market grew
such works became a major source of revenue and copyright contention among
publishers. Many works were distributed from London into Scotland by way of
Edinburgh. Thomas Ruddiman (1674–1757) produced a famous grammar in 1714 and
also introduced the ideas of John Locke to Scotland. Later traditions of educational
publishing for children and young people developed with firms like Nelson and Blackie
in the nineteenth century, particularly after the Education Acts of the 1870s.
Many early chapbooks were ‘small godly books’ and found their way into children’s
hands. There were simplified versions of Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, for example,