Fin de Sièclism

Just as the end of the twentieth century prompts us to look back over the last hundred years of children’s books, were our forebears at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries similarly engaged? Brian Alderson investigates.

The idea that an arbitrary date on a calendar can influence human affairs seems to me rather a whacky one. People who stay in bed every Friday the 13th, or who make (and keep?) New Year’s Resolutions may choose to disagree, but the contrived junketings soon to be upon us look to have far less to do with historical causes than with mountebanks out to sell us kitsch and wreck the fair borough of Greenwich.

So when Books for Keeps ’ editor asked me if the fins of previous siècles had exerted any influence on children’s literature I was inclined to be dismissive. On the other hand though, there is no denying that the end of both the eighteenth and the nineteenth century saw some remarkable, if not exactly revolutionary, events take place. (There is no point in looking back to the end of the seventeenth century since children’s literature did not then exist as a clearly defined genre.)

The year 1800

If a single word can be used to describe what was going on around the year 1800 then it might be diversification. Up to the 1790s much of the material produced for children’s recreational reading followed a fairly standard pattern, both in terms of content and physical appearance. Around the turn of the century however change and experiment emerge. Authors who – rightly enough – were to become household names for decades to come published their first works: Maria Edgeworth, for instance, with The Parent’s Assistant (1796), Ann Taylor with her earliest contribution to The Minor’s Pocket Book (1799). The format and presentation of material took on hitherto unexploited forms, with the anonymous Picture Gallery for All Good Boys and Girls: beautifully coloured (April 28, 1801) turning up as perhaps the first larger format, hand-coloured picture book (soon to be followed by a veritable explosion of picture books), and with all kinds of new play-way approaches to children’s reading being tried, from picture-sheets (forerunners of today’s Big Books) and jig-saw puzzles to tiny books put out as ‘miniature libraries’ in wooden boxes that were got up to look like book-cases. By 1802 the nation even had its first specialist reviewing journal: Sarah Trimmer’s monthly Guardian of Education , much mocked for its Establishment foibles, but undertaking its critical duties with a vastly more serious demeanour than what little reviewing goes on today.

The year 1900

In its very different way, the end of the nineteenth century also had a distinctive character (and this was, of course, the period that lumbered us with the concept of fin de siècle). Obviously the diversifications of 1800 had diversified themselves in many directions over the intervening century so that by the time you get to the nineties the changes may not seem so dramatic, but it is arguable that that period saw the arrival of writers, illustrators, or just individual books, which have held greater sway in the twentieth century than much that preceded them: Rudyard Kipling, Kenneth Grahame, E Nesbit, Helen Bannerman, Beatrix Potter, J M Barrie… And conjoined with them go the ‘artistic’ picture books like William Nicholson’s Alphabet of 1898 and Edward Gordon Craig’s Book of Penny Toys of 1899, premonitions of the gift-book fashion that would soon be exploited by such as Arthur Rackham and Edmund Dulac. L Frank Baum’s Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Chicago, 1900) never really caught on in Britain, perhaps because of its reach-me-down text, but if you’re looking for revolutionary events then Denslow’s illustrations deserve recording as having a manic inventiveness never before seen in a printed book.

Generational cycles

Now while it may be satisfying for fin de sièclists to be able to point to these changes in the small-scale world of children’s literature as evidence of a spirit of renewal, the sense of a beginning, rather than the sense of an ending, inspired by the wholesale change of dates on the calendar, I wouldn’t care to argue the point myself. As I see it, the history of children’s literature is governed more by generational cycles than by arbitrary dates, although, since these cycles each go on for about thirty years, decade dates can provide rough stepping-stones across the morass. If clearly documentable history begins c. 1740 then it is quite easy to perceive 30-year transitions right down to the present in both the kinds of book produced and the social/economic/technological factors that govern that production.

Thus, round about 1800, the market for children’s books, after sixty years of growth, was sufficiently well-established to offer possibilities to lively entrepreneurs. The two or three publishers who dominated the preceding thirty years were subject to competition that was bound to stimulate new and original approaches, and within a year or two the transformed companies of Newbery/Harris and John Marshall found themselves players in a game which included such busy rivals as Darton & Harvey, Wallis, Tabart, Godwin and Dean & Munday (which last only lost its independence circa 1960). At the same time, improvements in print technology, the spread of trade wood-engraving from the Bewick workshop, and above all the use of copper-plate engraving for the making of illustrated sheets and picture books opened up opportunities for much more varied design.

New processes

And, round about 1890 (to keep to the 30-year sequence), a slightly similar set of circumstances is to be found. New publishers with new ideas about children’s books emerge: Dent, Heinemann, John Lane, Grant Richards, Martin Secker, Fisher Unwin; established firms furbish themselves up; and new processes – especially involving photo-techniques – are in the offing. (It is possible that the frontispiece to the privately-printed Peter Rabbit of 1901 is the first example of 3-colour half-tone to appear in a printed book.) In addition, this period sees rapid changes in the nature of the reading public, brought about by changes in education after the 1870 Act, one feature being the colossal growth in newspaper and periodical publishing. (It is not generally realised today how many of the Victorian and Edwardian ‘children’s classics’ were first published in serial form.)

Today’s fin de siècle

Undeniable then the fruitful activity going on in these two turnings of a century, but undeniable too that the dates had nothing to do with it and the evolutionary cycles everything. And that is borne out by today’s experience too. We are currently in the generation that started round about 1980 which saw the implosion of the hopes and the excitements of the previous thirty years. Unlike the other fin de siècles, the scope for independent publishing has contracted and – in the face of single-issue fanatics – the scope for individual expression too. The economics of book-production are tending to impose uniformity in design and in the use of materials which breeds among historians like myself an admiration for the taste and ingenuity that characterised the hard times of the 1940s and the early 1950s. Above all this though is a change so radical that it is as yet impossible to determine how far it will affect human thought-processes, let alone responses to the written word. The speed of progress (if that is the right word), the complexity, and the apparent uncontrollability of electronic communication may prove so influential during this current cycle that by 2010 ‘children’s literature’ may be a thing of the past – but the coincidence of that transformation with the imminent millennium is entirely fortuitous.

Brian Alderson is Chair of the Children’s Books History Society and the chief children’s book consultant for The Times

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