International Companion Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature

63

The Netherlands

Anne de Vries

The Origin of a Separate Children’s Literature

Until recently it was commonly thought that a separate children’s literature in The
Netherlands emerged at the end of the eighteenth century, when Hieronymus van
Alphen published his famous poetry for children (1778). This view was slightly adjusted
by the appearance of De hele Bibelebontse berg [The Whole Meeny-Miny Mountain]
(Heimeriks and van Toorn 1989)—‘The History of Children’s Books in The Netherlands
and Flanders from the Middle Ages until now’. However, the authors do not name any
children’s books from the Middle Ages; and from the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries they mention mainly didactic literature: schoolbooks, catechisms, and so on.
There are only a few exceptions, such as the collection Kinderliedekens [Songs for
Children] (1630).
At the end of the eighteenth century one can see a distinct watershed. There was an
explosive increase in the number of books for children, with fiction becoming dominant.
In other words, children’s literature as we know it came into being, and that is exactly
how it was perceived at the time. In 1779, the author Elisabeth Wolff, famous for her
epistolary novels for adults, wrote in an essay on education: ‘In one respect, our era can
be distinguished very well from all previous times. This is the era, in which one writes
for children.’
But one thing became very clear thanks to De hele Bibelebontse berg: a separate
children’s literature did not come into being suddenly at the end of the eighteenth
century: it was the result of a process which took more than two hundred years, and
which was connected to the discovery of childhood as a separate stage of life (Ariès 1960).

Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries: From Morality to

Entertainment

This process was accelerated during the Enlightenment. The doctrine of empiricism,
implying that man was moulded completely by experience and that virtue was the
natural result of knowledge, stimulated great interest in education. This led to the
creation of a separate children’s literature: children’s books were considered as an
outstanding way of expanding knowledge: learning through playing. Hardly any