I have spent part of the holidays doing a deep dive into my young grandchildren’s chosen selection of books and getting to know their pages very well – reading them more slowly and more times over than you would normally do with the average adult equivalent.
As experts in the subject of children’s literature would easily confirm, it goes without saying that books for kids change as contemporary concerns do. They are good reflectors of adult anxieties (a children’s book has always been a convenient place for grown-ups to confess to their own fears). Only a few very special ones last many years beyond the time of their creation.
I realize that those I have been studying are no random sample, but simply what the kids picked off their shelves as they were leaving to come away for Christmas, or what they bought with the “book money” I gave them to spend as they wanted at the local National Trust shop. But they certainly play to a certain type, aim and set of ideologies in the genre: identity politics, social justice, care of the earth and burgeoning ambition.
Of course, by and large, those are aims and ideologies that I share. So what’s not to like? And, in the end, it doesn’t matter very much what the kids are reading, so long as they are reading something. But I was struck by the moral complacency of so much of it. And I was very uncertain about how effective they might be (playing to the concerns of the parent rather than necessarily opening the eyes of the child).
One very attractive book, for example, told an engaging story of a group of animals who decided to get rid of all the annoying bugs and insects that seemed to plague their little world. The result, of course, was that they had no fruit etc, and all their old poo (plenty of laughs here) was left lying around, for the simple reason that there were no bugs to degrade it. The moral is fine: insects are necessary in our collaborative world; we can’t do without them. But I wondered how effective that message would be, a few weeks later, when a couple of wasps invaded the children’s picnic.
There was then a curious tale about a fashionista vampire (sic) with pink cheeks – very embarrassing for a vampire, who is supposed to be all black. But he eventually discovers that one of his vampire friends has been disguising her own pink hair. The moral is that we are all a bit different and there’s no reason to be ashamed. Fine, but is it really so simple?
There’s not much room for debate in any of this. Nor was there in the mini-biography of Jane Austen I was asked to read, one of a very popular series about kids who follow their dreams, aren’t put off their ambitions and go on to be recognized as great human beings – from Ella Fitzgerald to David Beckham. True, you wouldn’t want a series of books that told kids that it was pointless to have a dream, because people like you would just never make it. But I found it quite hard to get over to a perky six-year-old exactly how the young Austen’s writing career had been launched because her boyfriend had gone off to marry a wealthy heiress (and the meaning of Sense and Sensibility was even more of a challenge to explain).
But as I looked through the other titles in the series, I had further misgivings. How on earth, for example, did they handle Virginia Woolf’s career? A triumph as a writer, minus the suicide presumably?
In the end, it wasn’t that different from those old Ladybird books I was brought up on, and that now seem so old-fashioned. They were the dashing tales of heroism that managed – as I recall – to turn Sir Francis Drake from a pirate into an “explorer” and kept Florence Nightingale firmly in the “female” role as nurse. I still remember my mother querying some of this as she read them to me (“maybe she would have preferred to be a doctor?”). They were built on a different set of prejudices, that’s for sure, but it was the same kind of simplification.
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