Coming of Age in Children's Literature

This is the fifth book to appear in this series of critical studies, and I wouldn’t argue with the description of the works of the authors under discussion – Philippa Pearce, Jan Mark and Cynthia Voigt – as contemporary classics. Yet, after reading the book, I’m still uncertain about how these authors all fit into the main theme.

I had understood coming of age to be about the point at which children become adults and so, in modern times at least, to be concerned with adolescence. In his introduction, although he goes back as far as Bunyan and Defoe, Watson gives some support to this idea by considering a number of important figures in recent writing for young adults, from Salinger to Aidan Chambers; and his contribution on Voigt continues in this vein. However, his preference for the term ‘maturation’ begins to stretch the notion of coming of age; and in Meek’s essays on Pearce and Mark, which cover the whole range of the authors’ work from picture books to texts for older children, it becomes completely elastic. Here, the discussion is around the wider theme of personal development, or, as Watson puts it, ‘significant moments in personal history’, which can happen at any time in childhood or adulthood.

The deeper focus makes for some interesting criticism: about how these writers address crucial points in children’s development and provide their child and young adult readers with imaginative resources to understand and reflect upon their own and others’ experience. Fascinating though this is, I am not entirely convinced by the argument that the relationship between author and readers in these books is ‘collaborative and exploratory’, as Watson writes of Voigt. The discussion lacks the support of an explicit critical framework and overview. The essays are lengthy and a blow-by-blow examination of one text after another can be heavy going when you are not quite sure where it is all leading. To my mind, Watson and Meek don’t pay enough attention to the wider social and cultural values that shape the narratives of writers of even this calibre.