Table Of ContentFROM ALICE TO HARRY POTTER:
CHILDREN’S FANTASY IN ENGLAND
Colin Manlove
F A H P :
ROM LICE TO ARRY OTTER
C ’ F E
HILDRENS ANTASY IN NGLAND
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Copyright © 2003 Colin Manlove
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ISBN 1-877275-54-9
CONTENTS
. Introduction
. Victorian Children’s Fantasy
. The Long Idyll: –
. Into a New World: –
. Rebellion and Reaction: the s
. Playing with Reality: the s
. Frightened of the Dark: the s
. Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
FOR EVELYN
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am grateful to Macmillan Press for permission to use six pages from my Th e
Fantasy Literature of England (1999) at the beginning of Chapter 2.
I should also like to pay tribute to the late Mrs Sheila Campbell of Edinburgh
for the devoted secretarial work done for me over the past twenty-fi ve years.
To my wife Evelyn, more thanks for her help than a dedication can convey.
C. M.
Edinburgh, February 2003
1 INTRODUCTION
In 1817 Robert Bloomfi eld, author of Th e History of Little Davy’s New Hat, wrote
‘Th e longer I live … the more I am convinced of the importance of children’s
books.’1 Th at similar statements are still being made two hundred years later
shows us how much children’s books have always had to prove in England. And
it has been harder still for children’s fantasy, since it supposedly goes against
that hearty empiricism which has been as much the hallmark of the standard
Englishman as once was his roast beef. Bloomfi eld, after all, was talking about
‘realistic’ children’s books which could be made useful by being directed to the
moral and social education of children. Towards the comic or fantastical others
he harboured nothing but scorn, and directed parents to put them to the one use
for which they were fi tted, namely, lighting fi res.
My broad intention in this book is to support Bloomfi eld’s enthusiasm and
answer his scorn, showing how excellent English children’s fantasies often are as
literature, and how ample the range of originality that has gone into their mak-
ing. Indeed I want to show that they often have the amount of depth and literary
skill we fi nd in more evidently sophisticated texts. Th e issue has nothing to do
with children’s literature’s popularity, which is a wayward thing that comes and
goes, but with its cultural acceptance. Th ough this might seem a fait accompli
in the growing numbers of courses in children’s literature in universities, anyone
who teaches it will know the veiled condescension with which it is regarded
by colleagues who teach more ‘academically respectable’ texts. To remove the
grounds for such condescension seems an essential goal.
Indeed in recent years just such a goal has been pursued through current lit-
erary theory, which has found strangely fertile soil in children’s literature. Now
such procedures as intertextual, ‘new historical,’ metafi ctional, reader-response,
ideological or feminist readings can be applied to texts from Sarah Fielding’s Th e
Governess to J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter. But while these approaches have often
benefi ted children’s literature, they have also tended to confi ne themselves to
particularly responsive examples of it: so that they have established something
of a literary canon, the very thing to which they are theoretically opposed.
Th is canon involves texts which are suffi ciently complex or problematic to
aff ord ready handholds for what are complex critical methodologies. Th us we
fi nd an odd crew of the acceptable, such as Mopsa the Fairy, Charlotte’s Web,
Th e Mouse and his Child, Where the Wild Th ings Are, Th e Chocolate War or Th e
Stinky Cheese Man: but rarely if ever an account of the whole kind, nationally or
7
INTRODUCTION
internationally. Further, by using critical procedures that have current academic
vogue, these approaches sometimes have the appearance of giving priority more
to the theory than to the literature. Jack Zipes puts it this way: ‘Th ere is still a
certain sentiment or ideological attitude that the work in the fi eld is not as de-
manding and deserving of recognition as the work in other areas.’2
What I want to do here is try to make sense of the whole tradition of English
children’s fantasy, covering as many texts as possible. More specifi cally, this book
will give a critical survey of English children’s fantasy from about 1850 to the
present day, placing all the texts in a current of development. Each chapter will
consider a phase of the growth of the genre, whether as long as the Victorian pe-
riod or as short as each decade from 1970 to 2000. Each of these periods marks a
particular idiom or concern which all the works in it share, though there will be
transitions and discriminations to be observed. Th e sequence of these diff erent
impulses will be shown to constitute an ongoing cultural and spiritual process be-
hind the whole development of English children’s fantasy. Th ereafter there will be
a consideration of how the various characteristics discussed make this fantasy pe-
culiarly English. Th e whole subject has not yet received the attention it deserves.
Children’s and young adult literature is the one area of writing where one age
group writes for another. Children’s literature is therefore written at a distance,
by people who have to try to remember what it feels like to be a child, or try to
construct a childhood to write at. Th e tendency either to talk down to the child,
as in Victorian improvement literature, or to talk up to it, as in Wordsworth
or the ‘Golden Age’ writers of the 1890s, is ever-present. We are insatiable evo-
lutionists, seeing childhood either as a time of ignorance from which we have
grown up, or else as a paradisal time from which we have declined. Th ere have
been those such as Jacqueline Rose or Karen Lesnik-Oberstein3 who argue that
this means there cannot really be a children’s literature, and that what children
are given is a series of images of themselves by adults. While there is much truth
in this, it does neglect the points at which there is contact and genuine commu-
nication between adult writer and child reader, where as Peter Hollindale puts it,
there is ‘childhood intensity and urgency of storying’ because ‘childhood is alive
in memory and present existence.’4
Some of the best books written for children are those in which the author
seems to forget he or she is doing so, because adult and child worlds of discourse
are so perfectly joined: Hollindale calls this ‘childness’; authors speak of writing
to the child in themselves. When Lewis Carroll talks in an adult voice about the
wonders of childhood before and after the stories of Alice, and when he devotes
Sylvie and Bruno to the glorifi cation of a precocious infant, he is awkward and
embarrassing: when he is preoccupied within his imagination in the Alice stories,
the years have not dimmed his magnifi cence. His stories may be told to and for
8
INTRODUCTION
children (as to the Liddells in the boat in 1862) but when he tells them he too
seems partly in a child’s world. Th at too is the power of Hans Andersen’s stories,
or Kingsley’s Th e Water-Babies, of Kipling’s Jungle Books and E. Nesbit’s magic
tales; of the adventures of Masefi eld and Tolkien, of the best of C. S. Lewis’s
Narnia books; of Roald Dahl and Richard Adams and Diana Wynne Jones.
Th ere is arguably no diff erence in status between the child and the adult; only
ignorance separates them.5 To a greater or lesser extent we are still children, only
with diff erent ends in view. (In Germany children now have equal rights with
adults.) Indeed both Rose and Lesnik-Oberstein have said that the child contin-
ues in the repressed (and largely inaccessible) unconscious of the adult.6 And in
the same way there is not any fi nal diff erence between children’s and adult litera-
ture. Children’s literature will often have less complexity of plot, less profundity
of psychological analysis, and more simple pleasures and pains than are found in
adult writing; and it will, usually, have the security of the happy ending; yet in
its creations of new worlds, its explorations of alien points of view, its subtle in-
vestigations of language and metaphysics, and its continual spiritual penetration,
it gives us a creative country as ‘mature’ as the adult’s. In the ‘Golden Age’ of
American children’s literature from 1865 to 1914, there was often little felt distinc-
tion between adults’ and children’s literature, and Little Women and Tom Sawyer
were reviewed beside Moby Dick and Th e Marble Faun. Children’s literature was
in a similar position in England from about 1890–1924; and throughout the
nineteenth century, authors from Th ackeray and Dickens to Wilde and Kipling
wrote children’s fantasy as well as their more ‘adult’ fi ction.
Here, then, there will be less interest in children’s fantasy specifi cally as chil-
dren’s, than simply as a certain kind of fantasy literature, to be set beside more
‘adult’ works such as William Morris’s tales, Herbert Read’s Th e Green Child
or Mervyn Peake’s Titus Groan. Th ere really is no categorical diff erence here
between Tolkien’s Th e Hobbit and Th e Lord of the Rings, between C. S. Lewis’s
Narnia books and his Out of the Silent Planet, or between E. Nesbit’s fairy-tale
parodies and Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels. George MacDonald, whose
adult fantasy Phantastes is no more ‘advanced’ than his children’s book Th e Prin-
cess and the Goblin, once said, ‘I do not write for children, but for the childlike,
whether of fi ve, or fi fty, or seventy-fi ve’;7 and many writers of children’s fantasy
would agree with him. Th e present-day fantasy writer Philip Pullman has put it
in these terms: ‘“Down with children’s books!”’.8
What makes children’s fantasy a genre at all, is – apart from the features we
have noted already – that it usually has child characters, and that publishers
market it for children. Until their recent fi nancial empowerment, it has not gen-
erally been children who buy it, but adults for them: many children would often
rather buy less approved objects. Librarians, teachers, publishers, prize-awarders
9
