Why Children's Books?
lrb.co.uk
lrb.co.uk
"British children’s books have often taught other truths – that the best thing you can be is white, upper or middle class, and if you are a girl, quiet. "
Firstly, there are many exceptions. For example, Aravis in CS Lewis's The Horse and His Boy is neither white nor remotely quiet - she is aristocratic. The Telmarine descended characters in the later books in the series are (in our terms) mixed race, and this was one of the most successful chidlren's book series ever, written in the 1950s. The Family from One End Street (which i remember reading as a child) was published in 1937 and is about a working class family.
Even Kipling is better than the article gives him credit for "You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din!"
I think some bias towards middle class[1] characters and settings is inevitable because authors are middle class and write about what they know.
"You can only be a hero, we have told children, if you have that kind of name: names licked clean by kings and queens."
BS, as a non-white kid growing up in 70s and 80s Britain I never felt this. The author thinks people can only identify with characters like themselves, which is condescending.
"That is changing now, albeit slowly: books such as Malorie Blackman’s Pig Heart Boy, Patrice Lawrence’s triumphant People Like Stars and Tola Okogwu’s Onyeka and the Academy of the Sun"
Three British authors!
[1] the British definition of middle class.
But I'm also not convinced by your defence of Narnia. It's 4 white British middle class kids (Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy) who have the privilege of being sent to the country during a dangerous time. I'm happy that you were able to identify with these characters. But for the many, many people who prefer to read stories about people like themselves and can't identify with Peter and Susan, I'm glad there is something for them now.
It won't last though. When you're used to privilege, equality feels like oppression. For people who've enjoyed characters who look just like them, who've grown up with experiences just like theirs, any change feels like oppression. See the vicious backlash to any female or gay or non-white video game character nowadays. Game, book and movie producers who want to play it safe will go back to white straight males to avoid that backlash.
That is only true for one book in the series.
What about Aravis and the Telmarines who were not white British? The very working class character who founds the original Narnian royal dynasty? Those are just the major characters, what about all the minor characters? Then there are the non-human characters who are not exactly like any of us.
BTW a lot of kids of all classes were evacuated during the war AFAIK - it was not a privilege.
> But for the many, many people who prefer to read stories about people like themselves and can't identify with Peter and Susan, I'm glad there is something for them now.
One of the purposes of literature (and one endorsed by CS Lewis) is to identify and empathise with people unlike yourself. Anyone who only enjoys literature about people like themselves is missing out a lot.
Indeed, that was the whole point - Lewis wrote Narnia for his goddaughter Lucy. That's why she's the main character! He wrote it so she could enjoy a story about a girl just like herself!
Fwiw, I've also enjoyed books and video games all my life, including Narnia. None of the characters have ever looked or spoken like me, unless they were a caricature to be made fun of. I still read a lot because that's my nature. That's fine, it is what it is. But I hope the next generation experiences something better than what I did.
Frankly your comment sounds like cope. You so badly want to identify with this series so you decided that the main characters are the Telmarines.
The main characters even in books they do not appear in (The Magicians Nephew and The Silver Chair) or appear in only as minor characters (The Horse and His Boy and The Last Battle)?
The older two Pevensies are only main characters in two books.
> Frankly your comment sounds like cope. You so badly want to identify with this series so you decided that the main characters are the Telmarines.
That comment is an ad hominem and does not relate to what I sad at all.
I think the difference is that I am actually familiar with the books, and that you cannot let go of preconceived notions.
> None of the characters have ever looked or spoken like me, unless they were a caricature to be made fun of
I do not know enough about you to be able to evaluate that statement.
Edit to add:
> Indeed, that was the whole point - Lewis wrote Narnia for his goddaughter Lucy.
He dedicated one book in the series to his god-daughter. he was written about his motives and inspirations for the series elsewhere and it goes far beyond "writing a book for Lucy".
I wrote this story for you, but when I began it I had not realised that girls grow quicker than books. As a result you are already too old for fairy tales, and by the time it is printed and bound you will be older still. But some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again. You can then take it down from some upper shelf, dust it, and tell me what you think of it. I shall probably be too deaf to hear, and too old to understand, a word you say, but I shall still be
your affectionate Godfather,
C.S. Lewis
——
This speaks to
1. The sheer magic of reading a story where you are the main character.
2. CS Lewis knew that and wrote this book especially for a young white British girl, so she’d have a story where she was the main character.
You read the books, great. But guess what, I did too.
You’re unable to see the obvious because you want to so badly be right about Narnia. Cool.
> The main characters even in books they do not appear in (The Magicians Nephew and The Silver Chair) or appear in only as minor characters (The Horse and His Boy and The Last Battle)?
He does have a point and you're not answering it at all.
On goodreads the first book has 2.96 million ratings. Horse and His Boy - 371k ratings.
When people think of Narnia they think of the first 3. That’s the reason only the first 3 were adapted to film. These 3 movies crossed $1.5 Billion worldwide. Movies based on the others? Nothing, they don’t exist.
In terms of cultural cachet the books not featuring the Pevensies are afterthoughts. Anyone would know this.
Since you’ve appointed yourself the judge of points not being addressed, could you go around asking for a response to my point. Being the main character of a book feels really special, and the series being written for Lucy clinches that.
And, yes being the main character of a book feel special, there's no denying that but there's also the fact that the previous poster (and many others because even if they're less popular, 371k ratings on goodreads is nothing to scoff at) could find himself in those other books.
I wonder how that went down in, for example, the Southern states of the US at the time? Never read anything about reactions to the plot, but did it sell there? Did people let their kids read it?
Children of all social classes were evacuated- the slum child evacuated to a prosperous country farmhouse is practically a trope, while some children of wealthy families stayed in London. The only thing that decided whether children went or not was their parents' choice.
Though the Pevensies are relatively privileged in that they have a (EDIT: family friend not uncle) in the countryside who has room for them rather than being sent to a stranger's house.
(EDIT: actually, I can't remember- is there an indication that they knew the Professor before the war?)
This makes sense, because Lucy was a stand-in for Lewis’ goddaughter. It wouldn’t have made sense for her to be working class.
The Pevensies were from Finchley, a wealthy area of London at the time.
Unlike working class children who had to stay with any random family, these kids got to stay in a mansion owned by an uncle.
Peter and Susan go to boarding school in later books.
Even the way they speak - that’s how posh kids speak.
Yeah obviously, just the act of getting out of London doesn’t mean they’re poshos. Everything else about them indicates that though.
The Pevensies are definitely middle class kids. The sort of kids an academic like Lewis would have known in real life, and probably reflecting the real Lucy's family's circumstances.
However he himself stayed with an uncle when he was a child (in The Magician's Nephew)
You live in a city the Nazis are going to bomb. Your family and your home is almost certainly going to be blasted to smithereens. The government has evacuated you - unaccompanied - to some strangers, and it doesn't care who these strangers are, so long as they volunteer to put you up.
https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/the-evacuated-children-of-the...
That is not privilege. Privilege is being able to sit behind a computer screen and face no real threats to your life. (Part of what made 9/11 so tragic for Americans, beyond the indiscriminate killing of thousands of innocent people, is the Americans thought they were untouchable until that point. It ripped a hole in their national psyche and they've never really recovered)
Similar evacuations and displacement are happening around the world. There are still millions of Syrians living in temporary camps in Turkey and Lebanon, for years. There are over 6 million Ukranians displaced within Ukraine, and millions living in Poland and other countries -- where they are at the mercy of those who offer them a home: https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/news/2022/not-a-single-safe-pla...
Do you think of this as privilege ? How many times have you been bombed out of your home?
I identified with them, the Beaver family, the white witch, etc.
Do you struggle to identify with humans who do not perfectly match your income or life? Is that how most of your friends are?
I might be the weird one here but I identify with all kinds of characters in books…
Its ironic therefore that when an impoverished Scottish single mother, JK Rowling, wrote the most successful childrens books of all time in the ´90s, that they centred on wealthy kids who went to boarding school.
What let the kids go to that boarding school is the innate ability to do magic. A privilege you are born with, and that is dependent on your ancestry. Even if "blood purity" is a recurring theme for the bad guys in the books, it is made clear that the ability to do magic is like a gene, and if you are born a muggle, you will stay a muggle.
The reason it is worse than selection based on wealth or even nobility is that while it may be something you are born with, this is also something you can acquire, not so much with magic.
Not only that but there is essentially no drawback to being a wizard. Wizards tend to dislike muggle tech, but there is effectively nothing preventing their use, it is just that they can do better with magic. In the same way that being born rich comes with a lot of advantages and very few disadvantages.
The idea of innate magic ability that make those who have it strictly superior is extremely common, and honestly, it works, but if you want a story where the idea is that anyone have their chance, which is how I interpret the idea of "not just wealthy kids", then Harry Potter is not that.
That being said, as far as I'm concerned, it doesn't take anything away from the story, not everything has to be a political statement, and in fact, making a political statement often makes the story worse.
It became a problem for me when they tried to make a sequel that took the setting more seriously. Maybe one person chosen by lottery at birth shouldn't be allowed to kill heads of state without any oversight? The villains who were opposed to the chosen one's uncontested rule ended up making more sense than the enforcers of the status-quo.
There's a funny video explaining why the Disney direct-to-tv movie Sky High is actually propaganda for fascist eugenics. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIdbLUm-ez8 The "some people are just born superior" out is an easy excuse when you're trying to come up with a reason why the main character and their cohort of whacky friends have the ability to save the world while everyone else is helpless, but taken to the logical extreme is blatantly fascist.
>In children’s books, including my own, there are many orphans – largely because adults get in the way of adventure
>I would never wish to do without the power of the orphan story, however. It has a burning warmth and clarity to it. It matters to us all, because we all become orphans in the end. The orphan story has traditionally offered a way for both children and adults to imagine their fundamental aloneness. Francis Spufford writes that, among the Hopi people of the American South-West, it is impossible to be an orphan. No child could slip through the net of family bond: if parents die, a grandparent, aunt, third cousin, someone will step in to fulfil that role. But many Hopi stories centre on an orphan abandoned in the harsh wilderness: abandonment must be imagined for certain elements of human experience – our ultimate solitude and our interconnectedness – to be understood.
>The orphan story points to another possible version of heroism offered by children’s books: it opens the space for surrogacy. Think of E. Nesbit’s 1905 novel The Railway Children. The three siblings aren’t orphans, but the removal of their father and the absence of their working mother allows for other figures – Mr Perks the railway porter, the Old Gentleman on the train – to take on the role of protector and fairy godmother. To read The Railway Children is to be told: despite the spinning and chaos of the world, there will be adults who will fight for you.
Allowing that generalisations trample all over many superb exceptions, it's not a bad thing to recognise that representation matters. It matter that there be authors that you identify with, even if they aren't writing about you.
Generally speaking if you want to do something really significant in some field it's as well if you don't already have it, to ensure your own economic autonomy first. The exceptions are really exceptional people!
No, Kipling was still super racist, even if you can cherry-pick one quote out of his oeuvre and ignore "White-Man's Burden" and like everything else about him.
I think you place too much importance on your thinking she places a lot of importance on one line/paragraph out of a much larger essay.
> Three British authors!
Yes, and the article is from a magazine in the UK, from the London Review of Books? Why would she not focus on British authors then?
Indeed.
I know there has been criticism of Watership Down for gender roles that would apparently make it unappealing to girls - missing the point that Adams originally made it up for his two daughters who loved it so much they forced him to write it down. Also as far as identifying goes, the characters are RABBITS.
And the railway children, a story also mentioned in the article, has that scene where the children steal some coal from the railway yard that the family otherwise wouldn't have been able to afford to keep their home warm in winter.
Lewis, being the genius that we're all acquainted with, discovered a subtler truth... that being aristocratic is best of all. Obvious to the aristocrats reading my comment, I think, but Lewis wasn't even landed gentry.
Edit: guilty of my own snark, here is an excerpt from the conclusion that I appreciate:
> There’s no doubt that reading for pleasure as a child can change your life. It is a key predictor of economic success later in life. But the main reason to help children seek out books is this: if you cut a person off from reading, you’re a thief. You cut them off from the song that humanity has been singing for thousands of years. You cut them off from what we have laid out for the next generation, and the next. It’s in the technology of writing that we’ve preserved our boldest, most original thought, our best jokes and most generous comfort. To fail to do everything we can to help children hear that song is a cruelty – and a stupidity – for which we should not expect to be forgiven. We need to be infinitely more furious that there are children without books.
>It is the work of a writer for children to do the same for the world itself. Children have not yet built wide hinterlands: to them, the world is still opaque and full of necessary bewilderment. Those who write for children have the chance to point them towards beauty that they do not yet know exists
I think this is the kind of metaphysical flight of fancies that are not only useless, but lead astray. My observation is the opposite: children find beauty everywhere. Beauty is just the natural state of things. They have not been trained yet to see things from the lens of their own interest, which is the basis for the eye of discrimination. Things that are good for me are beautiful, things that are bad for me are ugly. Children have yet to learn what is good or bad for them.
Then there are the "rules" of children's books... but these have changed a lot in the last century, and most of what the industry takes for granted nowadays would have seemed absurd and laughable to the great authors whose legacy she claims.
what
Noteworthy!! (imho) and you can find the book below.
https://archive.org/details/bim_eighteenth-century_a-little-...
The Internet Archive scan is poor quality because it is from the BiM (Books in Microfilm) collection, which is expansive and a huge cultural value, but also is made up of scans of black and white microfilms which is a rather lossy way to store book scans. But it made a lot of sense before computers!
The SiM (Serials in Microfilm) is really a treasure: https://archive.org/details/sim_microfilm
It was multiple literal truckloads of microfilm canisters, with 500 million pages of material in 27000 canisters: https://archive.org/details/SerialsOnMicrofilmCollection/IMG...
The stats at the end about access for the poorest are heart breaking. My son loves his books and it’s so nice to see.
Dolly's 'Imagination Library' is a children's book-gifting program that mails free high-quality, age-appropriate books to children from birth to age five, no matter the family's income.
They gifted 1 million books in its first 8 years. By 2018 they had gifted 100 million.
As of 2024, at least 1 in 7 children in the U.S. were receiving books the Imagination Library; which sends roughly 3 million books to children around the world every month.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollywood_Foundation#Dolly_Par...
When my children were young, we went so often that once, a friend's child when a trip to the library was scheduled, stated that he was looking forward to seeing my daughter there. When it was gently explained that they couldn't be certain of that, announced, "Of course we'll see her, <daughter's name> _lives_ at the library!", having arrived at that conclusion because for the better part of a year, both families had had similar schedules of library visits and so the children had always seen each other there.
They give stickers to the kids every time they go, give them free books to keep, and allow things like dropping your books back to any other library ino the area, and renewing them online.
I had previously thought that libraries in the UK were dying, but since having kids I have come to realise that they are still an incredibly useful resource, and are still alive and well.
Also, the schools get really involved. In the last school term my kids primary has had 2 kids book authors visit to do talks and read their books to the kids. Regularly the kids come home with new free books provided by some council/government funded initiative or other.
The UK feels to me to really be on top of this issue. Hopefully other countries can see how important these resources are and not let them die anywhere.
We even get a kids book with every dr visit.
If you didn’t read. Children are being captured by phones and tablets. Help them escape.
The Gruffalo inhabits a territory never before seen in children's literature. It goes beyond existentialism and metaphysics and yet retains an adorable accessibility that a 2 year old can understand. Spoilers follow if you are still in the pre-Gruffalo phase of your life.
Already in line two of the whole book our protagonist, the mouse, is in mortal danger when the fox thinks "the mouse looked good" (to eat).
The mouse digs deeps into his dark imagination and concocts an enemy so abominable, based on his own worst possible fears, in the hope that it also scares away the fox. And by some miracle, a few burnished details and a roaring old wives' tale ("his favourite food is roasted fox") he actually extricates himself from mortal danger in front of this fast and formidable foe.
The process is repeated again with the owl and the snake. Each time the mouse digs deeper, building up a fictional image of a catastrophically horrendous creature that no sane animal would ever wish to encounter. Each time scaring off an increasingly deadly enemy. The ongoing survival of the mouse against all odds leads him to a fleeting moment of relaxation...
But then, before his own eyes, looming a footstep away...the very projection of his own and his enemies' worst fears. The Gruffalo - that he himself merely imagined - has been instantiated. His nightmare cannot be undone. The mouse must face his own creation.
But, we are dealing with a mouse of such pluck and chutzpah we know the story must continue. He tickles the Gruffalo with the preposterous assertion that the mouse is in fact the scariest animal in the wood. Chuckled by this, the Gruffalo entertains himself by following along for a few moments.
As they encounter again the snake, owl and fox, each runs in fear of the Gruffalo. But each time the mouse appears to demonstrate that it is in fact him they are running from, not the Gruffalo. Doubts form in the Gruffalo's mind (itself created by the mind of the mouse) and his confidence ebbs (as the mouse's grows).
Finally, in the greatest stanza in children's literature, the masterstroke.
"Well, Gruffalo," said the mouse. "You see? Everyone is afraid of me! But now my tummy's beginning to rumble. My favourite food is - gruffalo crumble!"
This teasing patronisation dispatches the Gruffalo with immediate effect. The mouse has won, against his worst enemies, and against his worst nightmare. From mortal danger he created something even more terrible, and then defeated his own demons with wit and confidence. What a journey!
There is no other children's book like this.
That doesn't make either "The Gruffalo" or "The Hug" comparable to the depth of works like "Winnie the Pooh", "Where the Wild Things Are", or "The Story of Ferdinand".
Why send it over the wire, then try to hide it?
Usually when it's that obvious, it's general courtesy not to go pointing it out.
* There's an animation hiding it.
* If you disable javascript, the content doesn't load.
* Copying is disabled.
* There's some kind of javascript function constantly toggling state so that if you right-click inspect, the content div collapses before you can further unroll it.
Someone really wanted users to see the article, then watch it disappear, and make them feel a sense of loss.
Once the manager wasn't able to see the text whoever did this was able to click "done" on the ticket and move on.
This is how I open 99% of any links on HN or anywhere else (i.e. wanting to read a news article)(I always open in reader view to avoid menus/columns/ads/etc.)
FWIW I'm a subscriber at least in the main because I want it to exist. Most months I don't read more than I'd get for free anyway. But it's gloriously chewy content of a kind that you can't quite find anywhere else.