
This article is in the Beyond The Secret Garden Category
Beyond the Secret Garden: Growing up away from Birth Parents
In the latest in our long-running Beyond the Secret Garden series, Darren Chetty and Karen Sands-O’Connor look at representations of lone children of colour.
Part one – books published before the 21st century
Children’s literature features many orphans – from Cinderella, Rapunzel and Mowgli to Dorothy Gale, Harry Potter and of course Mary Lennox. Many scholars have suggested reasons for this; including removing the child’s most common obstacle to adventure, diminishing the character’s back story (at least initially), eliciting sympathy for the child protagonist, and making space for the making of elective family, something that young readers will later encounter in in their own lives.
Children have, throughout history, been looked after by people other than their biological parents, but in Britain it wasn’t until the mid-19th century that formal structures for fostering and adoption were created. Prior to this, abandoned, orphaned and abused children had to hope for the help of relatives or institutions, such as the Foundling Hospital in London (founded in 1739), or face the dangers and deprivations of the workhouse or begging in the streets. Against this backdrop, the loss of parental care was difficult for all children, but for children of colour there was an additional layer of threat. While any child might be ‘adopted’ only to be turned into a criminal (Charles Dickens’ 1838 novel Oliver Twist is the classic example) or a house servant (something described at the start of L. M. Montgomery’s 1908 novel Anne of Green Gables), a child with African heritage risked being enslaved in the Caribbean; children of African or Asian heritage risked being turned into ‘pets’ or ‘ornaments’ for rich white women in British country houses (something explored by Corinne Fowler in her Colonial Countryside project).
Children’s books have included the fate of some 19th-century Black children looked after by people other than their parents. Charles and Mary Lamb’s collection, Poetry for Children (1809), includes two Black schoolchildren as subjects of individual poems, one (‘Conquest of Prejudice’) in Yorkshire and one (‘Choosing a Profession’) at Westminster School. The school-teachers seem to have sole responsibility for these Black boys, particularly in ‘Choosing a Profession’ where the teacher acts as ‘mother’ and tries to help the boy find a career (ironically, the boy wants to be a chimney sweep because he thinks the sweeps have the same skin colour as him).
This idea that white parents are better equipped to care for a child, even if the child’s biological family is privileged, has continued in the literature of the late twentieth century. Nina Bawden’s 1985 picture book, Princess Alice, illustrated by Phillida Gili, is about an African princess growing up in a working-class British home. The home includes three other adopted children and three biological children of Mr and Mrs Maclusky. Although the two oldest children are biologically related, it is Alice who cares for the younger children while the older children read or do projects. When Alice finds out her father is an African prince, she visits him, only to be told he prefers her to be brought up by the Macluskys, as he is busy and Alice’s mother was born in Britain. Alice therefore returns to a mice-ridden house and a life as a young carer, which is apparently preferable even to her than being a princess.
Historically, of course, most children in foster care have not from privileged families; and most have had parents that are still alive but are unable to care for them (or in the worst case, are abusive). The foster care system (as other institutional systems, including the prison system) in England has expanded greatly since the 1948 Children Act, particularly during the period between 1960 and 1990. Some children’s books written in that period by white authors suggest that Black families, and particularly Black fathers, were incapable of proper parental care. Gail Knight in Marjorie Darke’s Comeback (1981) is in a care home run by a white foster carer named Pat. Despite being an almost entirely background presence (the action mostly takes place in school or the gym where Gail is training to be a gymnast), Pat cares for Gail’s mother, who abandoned her daughter. Gail is left with nothing more than a letter to represent her biological parents.
In Bernard Ashley’s The Trouble with Donovan Croft (1974), Donovan is sent to the Chapmans, a white foster family in a different part of London when his mother returns to Jamaica to visit her sick father. Donovan’s father works long hours and is unable to look after him. The Chapmans are kind, but remind their biological son Keith how it is their duty to help the unfortunate, electively mute, Donovan. Ashley employs what we might term as a near-omniscient narrator; the inner thoughts of Keith Chapman and his parents are often shared. However, Donovan remains curiously unknowable, save for chapter eight, near the story’s mid-point. As we observe his silence and his tears we are invited to feel sympathy for Donovan, but we gain little insight into his thoughts and feelings. The resolution of the story, where Donovan speaks for the first time to prevent Keith from being run over, invites us to think about the possibility of brotherly friendship between Donovan and Keith. Yet while Keith now has a foster brother who talks to him, little has changed for Donovan regarding his family or the racism he has endured at school and in the neighbourhood. One might argue that this gives the story a realism. However, the book’s conclusion, which brings a reunion of sorts between Donovan and his father, appears to accentuates the white family’s ‘better’ qualifications as carers, as Donovan’s father seems to not even know how to talk to his son.
The Trouble with Donovan Croft won The Other Award in 1976 and has remained in print. In a foreword to the 2008 OUP publication, Ashley notes that that many changes in British schools since the 1970s, including taking racism seriously. He describes Donovan as having ‘elective mutism’ and writes that ‘the book was one of the few books to be published with a black hero’. However, we might argue that Donovan is not the hero or the subject of the story; indeed, he is more akin to an object that, on arriving in Keith’s life brings trouble. As Karen has written in her book, Children’s Publishing and Black Britain, 1965-2015, when Donovan is racially abused and struck by his teacher, Donovan’s feelings are given one sentence while Keith’s are given an entire paragraph. References to Donovan’s ‘brown legs’ (in a scene where it is stated he is wearing trousers) and his father’s ‘Jamaican eyes’ do not appear in the 2008 edition.
In part 2, we will explore the how more recent books have centred the experiences of children of colour growing up away from their birth parents.
Dr Darren Chetty is a writer and a lecturer at UCL with research interests in education, philosophy, racism, children’s literature and hip-hop culture. He contributed to The Good Immigrant, edited by Nikesh Shukla, and has since published five books as co-author and co-editor. He tweets at @rapclassroom.
Karen Sands-O’Connor is a Visiting Professor of Education at the University of Sheffield. Her book British Activist Authors Addressing Children of Colour (Bloomsbury 2022) won the 2024 Children’s Literature Association Honor Book Award.
Darren and Karen’s book Beyond the Secret Garden: Racially Minoritised People in British Children’s Books is out now, published by English Media Centre.