350 Years of What the Kids Heard
 Dinitia Smith - NYTimes
| | The Norton Anthology of Children's Literature. (Tony Cenicola/NYTimes) |
Before Harry Potter there was "Slovenly Peter."
Written by Heinrich Hoffmann and published in Germany in 1845, it is one of the best-selling children's books ever, translated into more than 100 languages. And what a piece of work it is. A girl plays with matches and suffers horrendous burns, on all her clothes "And arms, and hands, and eyes, and nose;/ Till she had nothing more to lose/ Except her little scarlet shoes." A little boy who sucks his thumb has his thumbs cut off by the Scissor Man.
And in the difference between Harry and Peter lies the lesson of children's literature, said Jack Zipes, general editor of the new Norton Anthology of Children's Literature, published this month by W. W. Norton & Company. "These works reflect how we view children, and something about us," said Mr. Zipes, 68, a professor of German and comparative literature at the University of Minnesota, in a telephone interview from Minneapolis.
The anthology joins the 11 other definitive compendiums by Norton. It is one of the first modern, comprehensive, critical collections of children's literature. And it is intended not for children, but for scholars.
"It's a huge event, a real arrival of children's literature in academic studies," said John Cech, director of the Center for Children's Literature and Culture at the University of Florida in Gainesville. Although the academic study of children's literature is an exploding field, there are only a handful of Ph.D. programs in children's literature in English departments. One purpose of the anthology, said Mr. Zipes, is to encourage departments to add courses.
The anthology, 2,471 pages long and weighing three pounds, covers 350 years of alphabet books, fairy tales, animal fables and the like, and took Mr. Zipes and four other editors four years to compile. Some stories are reprinted in full, sometimes with illustrations; others are excerpted.
In it, the editors trace the history of juvenile literature from what is probably the first children's book, "Orbis Sensualium Pictus," an illustrated Latin grammar by Johann Amos Comenius published in 1658, up through works as recent as "Last Talk With Jim Hardwick," by Marilyn Nelson, which came out in 2001.
Most early children's books were didactic and had a religious flavor, intended to civilize and save potential sinners - albeit upper-class ones, since they were more likely to be literate. As today, publishers were shrewd marketers of their wares. When John Newbery published "A Little Pretty Pocket-Book," in 1744, he included toys with the books - balls for boys, pincushions for girls.
It is striking in the anthology to see the way certain forms cross cultures. Lullabies, for instance, have a nearly universal form, with elongated vowels, long pauses and common themes of separation, hunger, bogeymen, death - as if singing of these terrors could banish them from a child's dream world. One stunning entry is "Lullaby of a Female Convict to Her Child, the Night Previous to Execution," from 1807. "Who then will sooth thee, when thy mother's sleeping," the mother sings. "In her low grave of shame and infamy!/ Sleep, baby mine! - to-morrow I must leave thee."
The book traces the evolution of various works, including "Hush-a-bye, baby, on the tree top" from its origins as an African-American slave song, "All the Pretty Horses." That version ends with the horrifying image, "Way down yonder in the meadow lays a poor little lambie/ The bees and the butterflies peckin' out his eyes/ The poor little thing cries, 'Mammy.' "
The editors write that attitudes toward children began to change in the mid-18th century. In 1762, in his revolutionary work, "Ιmile; or, On Education," Rousseau wrote that children are intrinsically innocent and should be educated apart from corrupt society, a view later taken up by the Romantics. In the mid- to late-19th century, with the rise of the "isms," as Mr. Zipes put it - Darwinism, Freudianism, communism, Shavian socialism - children were recognized as people, and their literature became less heavily didactic.
Schools were established for the lower classes, and increased literacy created new markets for books. This was the golden age of children's literature, of Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, Louisa May Alcott, Mark Twain and Lewis Carroll.
Throughout the text, in editors' notes and introductions, are tidbits about the hidden messages in the literature. "London Bridge Is Falling Down," say the editors, contains coded references to the medieval custom of burying people alive in the foundations of bridges.
But children's stories, especially fairy tales, have always been hiding places for the subversive. "The Griffin and the Minor Canon" by Frank Stockton is a condemnation of cowardice and social hypocrisy; "The Happy Prince" by Oscar Wilde, a critique of the aristocracy.
In the late 1960's and early 70's, as the anthology demonstrates, children's stories began to be rewritten and children's literature was approached in a different way. Black writers like Julius Lester and Mildred Taylor came to prominence along with Latino and Native Americans authors. Nowadays, the boundaries between adult and children's fiction are disappearing. Nothing is taboo. Included in the anthology are both Francesca Lia Block's story "Wolf" (2000), about rape, and "The Bleeding Man" (1974), a story about torture by Craig Kee Strete, a Native American writer.
There is also a hefty selection of illustrations that parents may remember fondly - Sendak's wild things, Dr. Seuss's goofy animals, Babar the elephant king - as well as comics and science fiction, officially bringing those genres into the canon. The book also includes the full text of the play "Peter Pan," never before published in the United States, as far Mr. Zipes knows.
Notably absent, however, is Harry Potter. That was because the cost of excerpting the Potter books was too high, Mr. Zipes said. Besides that, he said, "the Harry Potter books are very conventional and mediocre."
"The plots are in the tradition of the schoolboy novel," he said, citing "Tom Brown's School Days," which was published in 1857.
Mr. Zipes called the Potter books, "the ideological champions of patriarchal society," adding: "They celebrate the magical powers of a boy, with a girl - Hermione - cheerleading him. You can predict the outcome."
Never mind, though. Harry Potter is doing just fine. |
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Entertainment | Books | December 2005 
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