CHILDREMIS BOOKS
In Ages Past
By ELAINE MOSS
EVERY age has its architecture, its literature, its music—and its children. Nash, Jane Austen and Beethoven are still in a sense with us, but the Regency child who gazed in wonder at the new terraces, read Pride and Prejudice in the first edition and listened awe-struck to the latest sym- phony from Vienna, grew up into a Victorian papa and lies buried under heavily ornamented marble : we should know little of him but for contemporary children's books in which he is embalmed for us to look at. And looking at Harry Sandford, and his successors the Fairchilds and the Bastables, we see not only the children of Regency, mid-Victorian and Edwardian England but, because adults give to children what they consider to be best for them, we see also the ideals of ages past. In Sandford and Merton Thomas Day embodies the principles of the Age of Reason; in The Fairchild Family Mrs Sher- wood preaches the Victorian doctrine of the wages of sin; and E. Nesbit, in her books about the Bastable children, gives a long-overdue free rein to childhood imagination.
Gillian Avery explores such territory in Nine- teenth-Century Children (Hodder, 35s.), a study of the social significance of heroes and heroines in children's stories of that period, well worth reading for its intriguing ideas and observations spiced by the author's delectably dry wit. But this book is awkwardly planned, and Miss Avery's rigid academic integrity (which will allow her to skip nothing, whether it supports her thesis or not) makes it hard going for the uninitiated. Flora L. Shaw's Castle Blair, for example, that glorious anti-authoritarian Irish romp first pub- lished in 1878 and now reissued for the delight of modern children by Hart-Davis (21s.), is as un- typical of the Victorian spirit, apart from a few trappings, as any book could be. Yet Miss Avery gives it, as an honourable exception, abundant space.
Her brief stops short at 1900, leaving us to look at ourselves in the light of her contention that we are reflected in the children's books of our era. What clue to our identity do we give? Authors' respect for childhood has kept our largely amoral ethos and its attendant literary realism out of children's books: it is therefore perhaps not in the book as literature, but in the book as a physical object that we see the positive image of our times. Morally adolescent but tech- nologically mature we give our children not our philosophy of life but our expertise: a full-colour picture book at one end of the price scale and a Puffin-for-every-pocket at the other. At a moment of urgent necessity we are able to woo children towards books.
A splendid suitor is Brian Wildsmith, whose full-colour edition of Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses (O.U.P., 25s.) is a perfect example of the highest standards of book design and illustration. Every page has balance, every picture glows in a riot of tones, and teems with the ideas inspired by Stevenson's rich verses. Wildsmith, like Stevenson, re-creates the child's colourful microcosm with utmost simplicity and total dedication; this marriage was truly made in Heaven. For children, since all teachers do not have the Leonard Clark/David Holbrook tech- nique, do need to be drawn towards poetry; Elizabeth Jennings's The Secret Brother (Mac- millan, 16s.), poems with deep understanding of children's fantasies and feelings, expressed deftly in modern, often humorous, idiom, should make a direct appeal to some who stand hesitantly on the touch-line. Miss Jennings does not stoop to pick up readers, she gives of her best; but Carson McCullers in Sweet as a Whistle, Clean as a Pig (Cape, 12s. 6d.) has her eye firmly on Dad who thinks it cute to read verse to junior.
But for value there is, as its own commercial tells us, `nuffin' like a Puffin.' Puffin Books cele- brate their silver jubilee this year with paper- back editions of children's books that have already proved themselves, like Richard Church's The Cave (3s. 6d.) and Eleanor Farjeon's Martin Pippin in the Daisy Field (5s.), and with a most unusual 'original,' Clive King's The 22 Letters (5s.). This is an enthralling reconstruction of life in and around Gebal (Byblos) in 1500 Bc, where Aleph, a young scribe, and Beth his sister are working out in secret a new way of writing, using only twenty-two letters instead of the six hundred or so hieroglyphs Aleph has to grapple with in the Temple. Their sailor brother, meanwhile, is learning to navigate by the stars, and their soldier brother to ride a horse (proving that centaurs are really horse-men, not, as his people believe, men- horses). Though structurally weak (the four threads of the story come together only in the tremendous climax) The 22 Letters is intel- lectually a vastly exciting book for over-tens, whereas Madeleine L'Engle's Meet the Aaiun' s (Collins, 13s. 6d.) deserves notice because it takes one small step towards filling the yawning spiritual gap in novels for the young. As un- fashionable as covered' knees, it explores, from the secure anchorage of a happy American family, the meaning of life and death.
Perspective, we learn, is everything, and how Eleanor Farjeon would have loved The Eleanor Farjeon Book (Hamish Hamilton, 21s.), a gay and affectionate pageant staged in memory of her by her fellow authors, with Naomi Lewis as sensitive pageant-mistress. For this is neither 'the best of Farjeon,' nor a series of sober adulatory essays with Eleanor in the limelight, a place she always shunned. It is a diverse collection of stories, articles and poems specially written by the finest of our children's writers at the top of their form; it therefore both honours Eleanor Farjeon fittingly and is destined to give pleasure to thousands of children, a bi-product she would have been the first to applaud. Edward Ardizzone, who has illustrated so many Farjeon volumes, contributes a charming set of headpieces to adorn these varied offerings.
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