Gleanings from Nicholas Tucker

For the last sixty years Nicholas Tucker has been reading and writing about children’s literature. These are some of the notes he’s made and thoughts he’s had, which we are delighted to share with readers now in a sporadic series, Gleanings.

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A serious man who came to detest urban Californian life and its emphasis on money, guns and television, Scott O’Dell could also be very amusing. When asked about his popularity with children, he often used to quote the letter he once received from an unwilling pupil in Minnesota as part of a class assignment. After a passage of dutiful praise, it ended abruptly with the words ‘Goodbye for now, you old jerk.’

Nicholas Tucker, obituary of Scott O’Dell, 1989

She is certainly at a loss concerning a letter she recently received from the companion of a lady who, as an ardent admirer of William over the years, had written to her from time to time and who had died at the age of ninety. ‘During the last few days of her life the old lady had evidently imagined that William was staying with her,’ Miss Crompton relates. ‘She made her companion write to the headmaster at Hadley to say that William was in good health and would not be coming back to school for a while.’

Michael Moynihan talks to Richmal Crompton, 1966

In fact, she is not an out-and-out cat-lover. When people write to tell her long-life stories of their pussies, Kathleen Hale is apt to say, ‘To hell with that,’ and to send a letter back suggesting they should take out a child from an orphanage once a month on Sunday, children being more rewarding. At present, in her cottage, there is not a cat in sight.’

Mary Cadogan, Orlando and Tinkle the Delinquent, 1969

There is a wonderful item in the advice column of Boy’s Own Paper, 1892, replying to a poor youth who complained of a tendency to blush. The paper advises him to practice ‘blanching with rage’ instead, thus replacing a natural humble human response to embarrassment with an aggressive and furious one.’

Quoted in Girls Only, Kimberley Reynolds, 1991 

Here’s a more positive example:

My parents were alcoholics and drug addicts and both ended up in prison. I spent time in a children’s home and then was fostered and finally adopted. I do not exaggerate when I say that Jennings was my saviour. Here were boys away from home who survived and thrived. I read them and escaped from my pain and sense of loss. I still have 25 year old copies which I will not bin because they mean so much to me. I have three children and am happily nay ecstatically married and my oldest is Jennings to a tee.

From a letter quoted by Eileen Buckeridge at the funeral of her husband and Jennings creator Anthony Buckeridge, 2004  

‘You are a great deal too much afraid of the public for whom I have never cared a   twopenny button.’

Beatrix Potter writing to her publisher, 1912

LAST WORDS

Chesterton is always worth reading on any topic to do with childhood or reading.               

I must heartily confess that I often adored priggish, moralising stories…the men who denounce such moralising are men; they are not children…. Adult have reacted against such morality, because they know it often stands for immorality…. (The child) sees nothing but the moral ideas themselves, and he simply sees that they are true. Because they are.

The Autobiography of G.K.Chesterton, 1936

Russell Hoban was another brilliant writer both for and about children.

People who write books for children and other people write about the books written for children but I don’t think it’s for the children at all. I think that all the people who worry so much about the children are really worrying about themselves, about keeping their world together and getting the children to help them do it, getting the children to agree that it is indeed a world. Each new generation of children has to be told, ‘This is a world, this is what one does, one lives like this.’

An essentially serious man, he found himself unable to write a sequel to his prize-winning story The Mouse and his Child. I believed that the winning of a dolls’ house was truly a victory and I believed that victory might be a permanent thing. That’s why the book is a children’s book. Now I know that the winning of a dolls’ house may be a proper triumph for clockwork mice in a story but for human beings in real life it won’t do. Nor can any victory be permanent.

Russell Hoban, Books for your children, 1976

But I am sure he would still have been out of sympathy with the following sour comment.

I was with Martin Amis once when he was asked if he’d ever considered writing a children’s book. He thought for a few minutes before drawling “I might…if I had brain damage.”

Will Self, Tales of the unexpected, 2009

Children’s writers have always been super-sensitive when accused of writing down to their audience. For at their best children’s books have over the years provided a wonderful enrichment for the imagination, and even at their worst they have still often had much to offer at the time. But with increasing school and library closures and a decline in family reading aloud sessions, how safe is their future?

Fewer than one in 10 youngsters had read such classics as Anne of Green Gables and Swallows and Amazons, researchers found. The names Jemima Puddleduck and Pippi Longstocking meant nothing to three quarters of children, and 17 percent thought a wardrobe was the gateway to The Secret Garden. Only half of the 500 seven to 14 year-olds questioned had heard of Harry Potter, a slightly higher proportion than were aware of Robinson Crusoe (46 percent) and Alice (45 percent). One in five thought Long John Silver was a character from Peter Pan, while the same proportion believed that Aslan, the lion in CS Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia, was a giraffe. Some 12 percent believed that Tracy Beaker, and not Heidi, lived in the Alps.

Nick Collins, Aslan’s a giraffe; Long John Silver’s in Peter Pan, 2012

There may well have been a further decline in such percentages since. But it will be children themselves who ultimately decide whether their literature still has a future. Let’s hope they choose well.

Nicholas Tucker is honorary senior lecturer in Cultural and Community Studies at Sussex University.