Children's Books in England: Third Edition

After its first publication in 1932, F J Harvey Darton’s history of juvenile literature began to be regarded as a definitive reference work on children’s books and their social significance. His study sprawls across five centuries – from Caxton’s English edition of Aesop’s Fables in 1485 to early twentieth-century perennials like Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows.
He skilfully traces from the legacy of the Middle Ages threads of romance, chivalry and allegorical folk-lore which at various periods disappeared from adult literature, but happily ‘took refuge in the nursery library’ where they flourished. He not only discusses the contents of the books but the motivation of their authors and publishers.

Darton is at his best when considering early works such as the ‘good Godly books’ of the Puritans and the salvationists, whose repressive fantasies were designed to save children from Hell, and the eventual sugaring of the didactic pill by adept story-spinners like Maria Edgeworth, Mrs Sherwood, the Lambs, Charles Kingsley and others. He rightly considers the publication in 1865 of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll as a break-through book which heralded the admission of liveliness and freedom into children’s stories.

In Darton’s descriptions of late Victorian fiction, however, there are flaws of both judgement and omission. His broad and balanced view occasionally breaks down under the slightly patronising attitudes of hindsight: there is an over-emphasis on the importance of some of the ‘quality’ books and an ignoring of some extremely influential popular publications.

Brian Alderson, who has revised this Third Edition with his customary aplomb, has added a useful appendix to flesh out Darton’s late-Victorian and Edwardian assessments. But Alderson too is rather weak on some of the ‘popular’ fiction that has surely now become ‘classic’. Perhaps as we enter the twenty-first century we can look forward to a fourth revised edition in which Alderson will advance this study to cover the seminal children’s books and magazines and story-papers of the first quarter of the twentieth century. An ‘update’ of this nature would ensure the continuing resilience of this outstanding reference book. MC