Children's Books and Reading
9781465683731
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
The field of children’s books is by no means an uninterrupted host of dancing daffodils; it is not yellow with imperishable gold. In fact, there is a deplorable preponderance of the sere and yellow leaf. Yet there is no fairer opportunity for the writer than that which offers itself in the voluntary spirit of a boy or girl reader. Here are to be met no crotchets or fads, no prejudices or unthinkable canons of art. Because the body is surcharged with surplus energy necessary to growth, because the mind is throwing out delicate tendrils that foreshadow its potential future, one realises how vital is the problem of children’s reading, how significant the manner in which it is being handled. At the outset, it is essential for us to distinguish between theory, history, and practice. The field, with all its rich soil, is in need of weeding. Not so very long ago, it lay unrecognised by the library, as of sufficient importance for separate and specialised consideration. But now, with the prominence being given to children’s reading rooms, the field needs to be furrowed. Let us not ignore the salubrious under stratum of the past; it has served its mission in asserting the claims of childhood; it has both negatively and positively marked the individuality of childhood, in a distinctive juvenile literature. Perhaps the writers who were inspired by the Rousseau doctrine of education, and those who abetted the Sunday school movement of the last century, were deceived in their attitude; for they considered the machinery by which they hoped to mould character, rather than the nature of the heart and soul upon which they were actually working. A right action, a large, human, melodramatic deed, are more healthy for boys and girls than all the reasons that could be given for them. In literature for children, as in life, the moral habit should be unquestioning. All leading educators and ethical teachers recognise this fact. The whole matter simply resolves itself into a difference in viewpoint between the past and present. Smile as we must over the self conscious piousness of early juvenile literature, it contained a great deal of sincerity; it did its pioneer work excellently well. To the writer of children’s books, to the home, where one essential duty is personal guidance, to the librarian whose work is not the science of numbers, but a profession of culture distributing, some knowledge of the past harvests from this field would appear indispensable. For the forgotten tales of long ago, the old fashioned stories represent something more than stained pages and crude woodcuts, than stilted manners and seeming priggishness; they stand for the personal effort and service of men and women striving with staunch purpose in the interests of childhood, however mistaken their estimates of this childhood may have been. These books, to the library, are so much fallow material as a practical circulating proposition, but they represent forces significant in the history of children’s books. I would much rather see a librarian fully equipped with a knowledge of Miss Edgeworth’s life, of her human associations, together with the inclinations prompting her to write “The Parent’s Assistant,” than have her read a whole list of moral tales of the same purport and tone.
