
Obituary: Morag Styles 1947-2024
By Victor Watson
Morag Styles, who died a few days after Christmas, was an inspirational and much-loved teacher. Morag spent most of her working life as a tutor at Homerton College, Cambridge, working with Education students. A typical week in her life at that time would have included several hours of teaching. It was called lecturing but that wasn’t Morag’s style – her sessions were usually lively and unpredictable seminars or workshops, much-loved by students. She also spent up to two days a week in local schools, with trainee students, and ran after-school in-service classes for practising teachers. These courses were usually over-subscribed.
In 1981 the English Faculty of the University decided it no longer wished to take responsibility for the English course at Homerton. The reasons for this were mainly logistical and administrative, but there was rancour too – and an open contempt of courses designed for schoolteachers, especially women schoolteachers. The Education Faculty, however, warmly welcomed us – and it became possible to develop radically new programmes. One of these was a fresh and ambitious Tripos course on literature for children. Morag, I, and Eve Bearne eagerly set about it. We were not alone. Other institutions (notably Exeter, Warwick, York) were similarly developing new attitudes to the books children read and how they learn to read them. There was a big cultural change at that time – and Morag was at the heart of it.
In the 1990s she compiled a number of anthologies of poetry for children and co-edited a range of books on children’s literacy and literature. These included the first three of the publications arising from Children’s Literature conferences at Homerton. The first was After Alice – Exploring Children’s Literature; then came The Prose and the Passion, and Voices Off – Texts, Contexts and Readers (all co-edited with me and Eve Bearne). She also co-edited Opening the Nursery Door (with me and Mary Hilton) and Talking Pictures, also with me. The last of these derived from directly working with very young early readers. In 2000 she co-edited (with Holly Anderson) Teaching Through Texts.
Throughout this period she developed her deep and abiding love of poetry – especially poetry for children. In 1998 she published From the Garden to the Street: 3 Hundred Years of Poetry for Children. This was not co-edited and it was not an anthology of other people’s work. It was hers, solely hers, the first history of children’s poetry in the UK. The book covered three centuries of poetry from John Bunyan to the present day, written with a keen critical eye, and her own distinctive enthusiasm. It gave a sharp tweak to the lazy prevailing assumptions about the irrelevance – or even childishness – of the subject.
This was an exciting time. In 1997, a chance discovery took us back to the early eighteenth century. It was inspired by a tiny unknown archive of poems and stories for children written by Jane Johnson (1706-59), wife of a Buckinghamshire vicar. This discovery captured the scholarly interest of social anthropologists, historians, literary scholars, educationalists and archivists. It led to the publication in 1997 of Opening the Nursery Door (co-edited by me and Mary Hilton). This was followed in 2006 by Reading Lessons from the Eighteenth Century – Mothers, children and texts (with Evelyn Arizpe and Shirley Brice Heath).
In 2009, Morag published Acts of Reading – teachers, text and childhood (with Evelyn Arizpe), followed in 2010 by Poetry and Childhood (co-edited with David Whitley and Louise Joy), which included contributions from Andrew Motion, Michael Rosen, and Peter Hunt. Her last project involved current Caribbean poetry, connecting the University of West Indies and the UK Poetry Archive.
It is impossible not to be impressed by this account of her publications – and not to wonder that the production and editing was shared with so many colleagues.
As this incomplete summary indicates, she was a natural collaborator, with an unshakable conviction that this approach releases creativity, inclusivity, and fulfilment. For her, the most promising way to teach a class of primary school children was to make it an informal and collaborative workshop. The same conviction is apparent in her writing: she would conceive an idea for a book – and gather in as many contributors as she could find, encouraging them to share their findings and writings. So most of her publications were co-edited collections of essays by academics, practising teachers, children’s writers, illustrators, psychologists, and sociologists. I worked with her on many of those books; a good deal of the planning took place over meals, in pubs, or with tea and cakes at her house. One international literary conference – and an outline of the book that was to follow it – was almost entirely designed over lunch at the George Hotel in Stamford.
I do not think her faith in collaboration was particularly based on ideological thought. It was part of the bent and grain of her character to inspire others to work together. This warm and welcoming generosity of spirit is why she has been so widely loved and will be remembered by so many. She was a presence wherever she went, inspiring creativity and joy, empathy, generosity, and inclusiveness.