BOOKS FOR CHILDREN
A Hundred Years of Children's Books
By ARTHUR RANSOME MR. GREEN'S first intention was to answer the ques- tions that might be asked by children about the authors of the books they were reading and to tell them ofpther books they were likely to enjoy. He ended by writing a general review* of rather over a hundred years of children's books, beginning with Catherine Sinclair's Holiday House of 1839. It is just the book to give to any child beginning to enjoy the miracle of reading. At the same time grown-up people are going to be grateful to Mr. Green for renewing their youth by reminding them of the books they read when they were young. They will find a new parlour game in looking back on their childhood's reading and comparing their lists with his.
In my own family, for example, between 1887 and 1897, we knew Holiday House at secondhand from the storytelling of a favourite aunt. We knew The Rose and the Ring very nearly by heart . . . some of Lear . . . the two Alice books, Sylvie and Bruno and The Hunting of the Snark . . . four Kingsleys, several Charlotte Mary Yonges, a row of Mrs. Molesworths, Mrs. Ewing's Jackanapes and A Flat-Iron for a Farthing .. . the whole spectrum of Andrew Lang's fairy books, collecting them one by one at Christmas and on birthdays. Robinson Crusoe was the first book I read through to myself. We had Marryat's Masterman Ready and Ballantyne's The Young Fur-Traders, White Ice and Coral Island ... (My grand- mother took me out to tea in a garden where, silently, worship- ping, I shook hands with Ballantyne in the summer before he went to Italy to die). Treasure Island we knew and loved, but I remember my father's shocked astonishment that I did not realise that The Black Arrow was in comparison a poor machine-made thing. We had the Jungle Books hot from the press. Henty was never a favourite; his heroes were flat and colourless beside John Ridd and Carver Doone and the three- dimensional lively characters I met in the pages of Scott. My mother read much of Scott aloud to us and at the same time I was racing through him for myself at a speed that my father (who died when I was thirteen) tried to check by cross-
* Tellers of Tales. By Roger Lancelyn Green. (Edmund Ward. 10s. 6d.)
examining me on the book I had been reading before letting me take the next from that magic shelf. Then, of course, we knew Andersen and Grimm and As Pretty as Seven and Collingwood's Thorstein of the Mere, a book 'that we counted peculiarly our own. George Macdonald and Rider Haggard seem surprising omissions. I did not find them till much later.
I do not think we were an exceptionally well-read family, Our friends knew 'the books we knew and could share with us in the endless make-believe those books inspired. Are children today as fortunate ? I do not think so. The wireless and the cinema have lessened the number of families in which daily reading aloud is a matter of course. There are many more books and less time in which to read them. In the Eighties and Nineties we had no more than a rivulet of books to explore. We could look back almost to its source. It is now an ever- widening sea, and old mariners as well as young will be thankful for Mr. Green's pilot-book and sailing directions. Too many delightful books are being neglected merely because they are not new. Parents, aunts, uncles and librarians would do well to disregard Mr. Green's final chapter with its kindly remarks on living authors, at least until they have made sure that they and their children have not missed the best of the books he mentions in the sixteen chapters that precede it.
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