CHILDREN'S BOOKS
ONLY the best writing is good enough to show to children. But just when we have learnt the importance of a child's earliest experi- ences, it has become much more difficult to supervise the influences to which children are exposed. For children and adults alike, gratuitous violence and killings make the perfunctory drama of inescapable mass entertainment. Is there any essential difference between the gangster picture- strips for children and most of the books for adults on the railway bookstalls? The virtuous- sounding 'reading habit' should be delayed and controlled as long as possible. It is much better for a child to go on reading the same books and reciting the same rhymes, than to become a will- ing victim of the printing presses and 'writers for children.' In any case, parents cannot escape the Best Books B y
G. D. KLINGOPULOS
duty of evaluation, even if it is limited to the ques- tions 'Is this book too easy or too difficult? Is it too emotional or too callous?' These simple ques- tions can be hard to answer, and one may take years discovering that an apparently innocuous story is pernicious and coarsening, by which time the nightmares and obscure worrying will have begun. Again, children often reject trivial books much more absolutely than would their parents, though, their reasons for doing so may not be very clear. And they sometimes value books only for the illustrations.
Though one may justifiably assume, from the abundance of publications for children, that the indefinite prolongation of juvenility would suit some people, no one could doubt the need for reading-matter between the age when a child begins to read for itself and the age when it can be introduced to the simpler classics. One criterion for such books may be that they should prepare children for reading some Shakespeare or Silas Marner or 7'yphoon. But we are, by now, so much on the alert lest even the most precocious child should omit any phase in the process of grow- ing up—(the Potter-Andersen-Carroll-Kingsley phases especially)—that we possibly fail to pre- pare and to guide as much as we should. The majority of books for children vie with one an other in reproducing a stereotyped childishnest, playfulness, and spirit of adventure, all of which, no doubt, faithfully reflect a culture which believes in 'the moral efficacy of cold baths and dumb-bells.' But too many of such books may actually impede the normal deepening of experi- ence. Perhaps the warning which I. A. Richards gave recently about the situation in America is not without relevance to conditions here.
Since the days when The Shorter Catechism was believed to be good for children, the pendu- lum has swung far, and it is a sound complaint now that children's school books, in the United States at least, have recently been far too multi- farious and trivial in content. They have been made so in the interests of quantity and rapidity of perusal, which pays the publisher.
When two novelists of the standing of Dickens and Thackeray write especially for children, we might feel justified in putting down our money with complete confidence, particularly as the illustrations to the longer story in this volume* are by Thackeray himself. The publishers have been at pains to reproduce his original manuscript sketches, some of them in colour. They are cer- tainly more delicate than the familiar engravings, though not always as clear. Thackeray wrote the story in 1853 for the children of the English colony in Rome, and described it as a 'fireside panto- mime,' which suggests well enough the zest and quality of humour aimed at throughout. In my experience, The Rose and the Rim: is one of the 'best books' that children read once but seldom re- read. Its characters and rhymes are not part of the language. It is obviously written by a novelist on his mettle as a story-teller, but there are times when the humour becomes self-conscious or • THE ROSE AND THE RING by W. M. Thackeray, and THE MAGIC FISH-BONE by Charles Dickens. (Dent, 10s. 6d.) envisages an adult reader rather than a child. The style of G. P. R. James's novels is repeatedly scoffed at, and that of the historian Sir Archibald Alison (the Mr. Wordy of Disracli's Coningsby) is parodied without note. I believe children are bored by stories 'which 'have a palpable design' upon them: names like Prince Bulbo and Count Hogginartho have little magic in print though they might do for pantomime. The story Of a royal usurpation and a magic ring, a lost princess and a fairy godmother, is sufficiently traditional, but the charm and emblematic quality, which such tales sometimes have, do not emerge from Thackeray's settled heartiness. He is so comic that children may not find him amusing. Dickens is represented by the second or the four stories in Holiday Romance, which he con- tributed to an American magazine in 1868, Un- expectedly, he appears more orderly than Thackeray. He tells a story with a typically Vic- torian moral ('fairies help those that help them- selves'), but without any trace of sanctimonious- ness. It is less crowded than Thackcray's, yet seems more vivid and distinct. In fact, the shorter story might prove the more useful portion of this well- bound, well-printed volume.
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