First Page Excerpts for SIGNAL APPROACHES TO CHILDREN'S BOOKS Issue 98, May 2002 [please, note that italics and other formats are not reproduced in this excerpt] ---------------------------------------------------------- Tune, Argument, Colour, Truth John Mole 79 Transformations of Pastoral and Gothic in Children’s Fiction Tess Cosslett 91 Charting the Territory: The Cambridge Guide to Children’s Books in Engllish Clive Barnes 102 Books about Children’s Books 2001 Sheila Ray 111 Ethel Talbot the Writer David Grugeon 133 Endpapers 148 including Dorothy Devlin on Ethel Talbot in Edinburgh Contributors 151 ---------------------------------------------------------- Tune, Argument, Colour, Truth JOHN MOLE ‘Oh brave new world that has such people in it,’ exclaims Shakespeare’s Miranda, to which her father Prospero replies ‘’Tis new to thee.’ I think that anyone setting out to compile an anthology of poems for children must attempt to be both Miranda and Prospero, alert to the complex, shifting relationship between innocence and experience. In a ‘A Note for Interested Adults’, with which she introduced I Like This Poem, a collection chosen by children for children in aid of The International Year of the Child in 1979 and still in print, Kaye Webb observed that ‘what has emerged is a salutary reminder that we have to “begin at the beginning”, and that a poem which may have come to seem almost trite to a grown-up can mean an abrupt falling in love when it is encountered for the first time.’ The most popular poets were Robert Louis Stevenson, Walter de la Mare, A.A. Milne and Spike Milligan, though already Michael Rosen was an established favourite. Charles Causley was well represented, although, interestingly, there was no sign of Ted Hughes. This was, of course, before the arrival of the full-time, professional, school-visiting ‘children’s poets’ whose amazingly prolific output of amiable verse fills the numerous wackily titled and enthusiastically marketed anthologies which come out now in clusters every publishing season. The world of poetry for children has certainly become, for better and worse, a much more densely populated place, less dominated by an established aristocracy. The children who sent their choices to Kaye Webb were, she admitted, from a particular group, the Puffin Club, which in 1979 had approximately 65,000 members across the world, and ‘not necessarily indicative of what all children like’ but it was, as she pointed out, the only collection in existence chosen by children. Surveying the choices made, she offered some illuminating observations. The very young were charmed by ‘funny words’ and ‘good rhythms’ while nine- and ten-year-olds—though remaining susceptible to jokes and rhyme—were more interested in exotic animals, people, places and ‘a spot of action’. The eleven- and twelve-year-olds’ choices suggested that they ‘were more into feelings, hidden meanings and beautiful phrases’ and ‘by the time we arrived at the thirteen-, fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds we had a good sprinkling of religion, philosophy and what might be called “aids to living”’. When it cameto a general summing up, Kaye Webb concluded, ‘Perhaps this book should really have been entitled It Makes Me Happy, because this was the reason most often given for sending the best-loved poems.’ ---------------------------------------------------------- Transformations of Pastoral and Gothic in Children’s Fiction TESS COSSLETT In David Lodge’s Nice Work a lecturer in English literature claims there are only four possible endings for the Victorian industrial novel: ‘a legacy, a marriage, emigration, or death’. Her formula certainly applies more widely to other realist novels, and it has been hard for modern and postmodern novelists to escape from some version of these endings. Replace ‘Victorian industrial novel’ with ‘fiction for children’ in the formulation, and a different set of possibilities suggests itself: bedtime, the end of the holidays, parent/child reconciliation, waking up. It is my purpose in this article to suggest that in other ways, too, the characteristics of adult genres are changed by the address to a child audience and by what the text assumes is suitable for children. The two genres I want to look at are the pastoral and the gothic. Children’s literature, especially of the ‘Golden Age’, has often been described as pastoral or Arcadian (Carpenter, 1-22, 103-209, 210). Where this idyll is threatened, it is often opposed by another adult mode, the gothic. Both genres involve conventions of space and time—they are chronotopes, in Bakhtin’s definition, shaping the space/time dimension of narratives. Pastoral involves a protected space and a ‘holiday’ time; gothic has sinister links to the past, embodied in claustrophobic buildings. But the time-orientation of child protagonists avoids the nostalgic escapism of pastoral and the destructive hold of the gothic. In order to explore these ideas, I will refer to a number of twentieth-century children’s classics: Five Children and It by E. Nesbit; The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett; The Wind the Willows by Kenneth Grahame; Mary Poppins Comes Back by P. L. Travers; Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome; The Borrowers by Mary Norton; and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis. I have chosen these novels, published from 1902 to 1952, as they construct a clear demarcation between adult and child worlds, though Norton, in The Borrowers, is beginning to challenge this boundary (Reynolds, 4, 36-40). Pastoral For many readers the word ‘pastoral’ evokes an idealized, bygone countryside retreat, populated by happy shepherds and shepherdesses, far removed from the stresses of ‘real’ life. It is not surprising that the word has been applied to children’s literature, especially by critics who see this literature as nostalgic and escapist. The concept of childhood itself could be said to be pastoral, a sheltered time and space outside the serious adult world. In several of these books a secluded, ideal space is also created within the story, where children live in harmony with nature and with each other, engaging in simple rural pastimes: gardening, swimming, camping, picnicking (alongside less idyllic pursuits like hunting, exploring and getting lost in woods). By attending more closely to what pastoral is and how it works, we can see both important differences in the ways it is reworked in children’s literature and similarities that are not based on escapism. ---------------------------------------------------------- Charting the Territory: ‘The Cambridge Guide to Children’s Books in English’ CLIVE BARNES The Cambridge Guide to Children’s Books in English certainly isn’t the kind of restrained and precise tome that you might expect from its authoritative-sounding title. It’s not a Bumper Fun Book either, but, at 800 pages, it’s satisfyingly weighty and a lot more fun than literary guides used to be. Gone is the pretence of a single voice, pronouncing an unassailable judgement on the quick and the dead, rather there are about 300 voices from four continents, quite often taking different approaches to the subject. Victor Watson has had the support of three advisory editors in gathering the contributors and their entries, mainly from Britain, North America and Australasia, but also from India and Africa, to provide coverage of children’s books and their authors from across the English-speaking, and -writing, world. The format is familiar. There are entries for individual authors and individual titles, and there are broader discursive essays on a variety of subjects, like historical fiction or school stories, which give a context to the single entries. The most obvious innovation is the extensive use of entries for series, which are generously defined to include any set of linked titles, whether Alan Garner’s Stone Book Quartet or the Stratemeyer Syndicate’s Nancy Drew. These give opportunities to consider the works in relation to one another, in more depth than with a single title, and sometimes, particularly with popular titles, to discuss the possible basis of their appeal to children. What is most striking is the degree of freedom given to the contributors in writing their entries. Yes, there is pattern and consistency. A more important writer gets a longer entry (and is assigned to a heavyweight contributor), and the topic essays tend to come in three geographical sections (usually in this order) Britain, North America and Australasia. But there is little suggestion that the editors have fixed a template for the contributors on their approach to an entry or what to include in it. Some entries are predominantly analytical, others are descriptive. Some take a historical approach, some a literary one. Some relate literary developments to social changes, others are more aware of literary influences. Some offer lists of works as examples and some include critical references, and some don’t do either. This variety of approaches is reflected in the style of the entries. These range from the bland detail of literary biography to specialized academese. We are told Verna Aardema had to ‘juggle her roles as a writer, mother and teacher’, while the account of the battle of light and dark in Susan Cooper’s Dark is Rising sequence speaks of ‘tropes . . . dichotomised terms of reference . . . binary structure . . . perspectivised’ and so on. There are obvious advantages, in terms of accuracy and expertise, in using a range of contributors like this rather than trying to do everything yourselves, as Mari Prichard and Humphrey Carpenter did in The Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature, nearly twenty years ago. But it does create demands on the editors to integrate the material and avoid contradictions between their contributors, which I am not convinced that the Cambridge Guide is entirely successful in achieving. I will discuss this as I go along but, at the outset, it is important to recognize that the benefits of Watson’s approach outweigh the drawbacks. The freedom accorded the contributors allows expression of the variety and dynamism of the subject itself, which has undergone tremendous changes in the last thirty years, moving from the professional concern of teachers and librarians, the book review pages, and a number of pioneering critics, lecturers and periodicals, to becoming established as an academic discipline in its own right. This change is recognized within the Guide, with subject entries for critical approaches to children’s literature and reviewing and reviewers, and individual entries for landmarks like this very journal. Many of the pioneers are contributors themselves. ---------------------------------------------------------- Books about Children’s Books 2001 SHEILA RAY This is a non-selective, and inevitably incomplete, list of the books about children’s books published in Great Britain in 2001. Apart from the date, this sentence is the same as the one with which I introduced the first annual survey written for The Signal Selection of Children’s Books 1987. Although some things have changed in the intervening years—for example, the inclusion of books published outside the UK but available here, the relaxation of the date of publication where important books have been overlooked—it has not become any easier to track down all the relevant publications, which come from a wide range of publishers and are aimed at a wide-ranging audience. In some years it has been difficult to know where to begin, but for this fifteenth and final survey, the starting point is obvious. The Cambridge Guide to Children’s Books in English (edited Watson; see also pages 102-110) has undoubtedly been the most widely reviewed book in the field during 2001 and, to echo the words of a small boy written many years ago of The Hobbit, ‘it is staying on my shelf—for ever’.1 Although opinions of reviewers have tended to vary according to their specialisms, it has been warmly welcomed as an important reference book, joining such other indispensable works as The Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature2 (published in 1983, reprinted in paperback in 1999 but not updated) and Twentieth-Century Children’s Writers3, still a useful source of information but, as the title suggests, limited in its coverage. The true value of The Cambridge Guide will emerge as people use it and discover its strengths and weaknesses, but it deserves special praise for its coverage of African and Indian authors as well as those of the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Authors and illustrators whose work is available in translation are also included. Minor authors are covered under topic headings such as ‘ballet stories’ and ‘publishing and publishers’. Many of the major author entries are written by experts, David Rudd on Enid Blyton and Margaret Meek on Aidan Chambers, for example, but the standard is not consistent. In writing about the Guide for Souvenir,4 the journal of the Violet Needham Society, I discovered that the entry for Needham is one of the less satisfactory. She is best known for her sequence of novels set in Ruritanian countries, featuring Dick Faucenbois, and her ‘country house’ novels are also much admired, so to describe her nineteen novels as ‘mostly historical romances’ and to mention only The Changeling of Monte Lucio are somewhat misleading. Nevertheless, the Guide is extremely well organized for extracting specific information, and also makes for enjoyable and rewarding browsing. ---------------------------------------------------------- Ethel Talbot the Writer DAVID GRUGEON In 2001 Signal 94, 95 and 96 carried substantial extracts from Ethel Talbot’s previously unpublished memoir, Brethren’s Child. My article about my great-aunt, based on family research, ‘Who was Ethel Talbot?’, appeared in Signal 97, January 2002. Jan Mark wrote a letter in response: What an amazing woman she was. Brethren’s Child is an extraordinary story and rather gives the lie to the Jesuit belief that you can mould a child for life in its first seven years. Who would have thought that such a joyless environment could produce works that never fail to celebrate affection, kindness and generosity both practical and in spirit. By way of period research, I’ve been re-reading her school stories very recently. They are always good-hearted. She seems to have been recreating the loving elder sisters that she herself so longed for, and the father/daughter bond she enjoyed so fleetingly during her mother’s illness. (Letter to David Grugeon, 20 February 2002) Ethel Talbot starts to be published towards the end of the First World War while she is sharing a cottage and a flat with Edith de Foubert, in Pitlochry and in Edinburgh. Both women appear to have tried their hands at writing for a variety of publications in various genres. The first page of the manuscript of Brethren’s Child describes Ethel Talbot as a ‘Contributor of verse to Cornhill Magazine, Windsor, Punch, Chambers’ Journal, Poetry Chapbook, Sunday Times, Westminster Gazette, Colour Etc. and of prose to Chambers’ Journal, Time & Tide, Colour and Everyman.’ One of her first full-length books is The Story Natural History (1919), with forty-two chapters, from ‘African Elephant’ to ‘The Walrus’, twenty-four whole-page colour plates and other black and white illustrations. The printed dedication reads: ‘To Trevor and Margaret and Baby Anstace too’ (my father and two aunts). It is a large, generous book of 256 pages, thick and rough at the edges, not cleanly trimmed like the first major book by Edith de Foubert, Every Girl’s Book of Hobbies (my copy is dated in Ethel’s hand 18.10.’24). Ethel’s other early book is Billy the Scout and His Day of Adventures, the first of a range of story books featuring Wolf Cubs, Scouts, Brownies, Guides, Rangers and Sea Rangers. Around this same period, Ethel is also publishing short stories in numerous annuals, for example, The Empire Annual for Girls where she has the lead story, ‘The White Lady of Glenshee: a Story of a Highland Village’, and three others, ‘Amy and the “Terrible”: A Story of a Friendship’, ‘Taking Care of Carolyne: A Story of a Schoolgirl Princess’ and ‘Book Walks and Book Wanderers: Some Figures from the Pages of Favourite Stories’. This last begins with Cranford, an early favourite of hers in the library at Miss Wone’s School as recorded in Brethren’s Child. Both Ethel and Edith appear in a single volume of Cassell’s British Girls’ Annual, along with May Wynne and Elsie J. Oxenham. The 1920 British Girls’ Annual features three stories by Ethel and others by Angela Brazil, Dorothea Moore, Bessie Marchant, and Violet Methley. Ethel continued to be published in annuals for over twenty years. By far the most substantial part of her work was in the genre of the girls’ school story. Sue Sims estimates that there were nine hundred such books published between 1921 and 1940. In that period Ethel Talbot published at least sixty of these, the second most prolific author after Elsie J. Oxenham. ‘The classic girls’ school story reached its peak both in quality and quantity in the mid 1920s . . . in 1924, 43% of all new girls’ books published were school stories (calculated from the accession lists of the Bodleian Library)’ (Sue Sims, Introduction to The Encyclopaedia of Girls’ School Stories, Ashgate, 2000). It is for her girls’ school stories that Ethel Talbot is best known, and which I mainly consider here. ---------------------------------------------------------- Endpapers Ethel Talbot — The Edinburgh Connection Dorothy I. Devlin writes: Presently preparing a study of the work of Ethel Talbot and Evelyn Smith, I have found David Grugeon’s serialization of Brethren’s Child in Signal both moving and illuminating. Talbot and Smith are diametrically opposite sorts of writer, but they have one thing in common, and that is the merciful absence of a religiosity which mars, for me, the work of Brent-Dyer, Oxenham and Bruce among others. Now we can judge, in the case of Talbot, why we are spared. Until David Grugeon shared his family records with us, I had relied for my knowledge of Talbot on Sue Sims’ and Hilary Clare’s invaluable Encyclopaedia of Girls’ School Stories. There are still gaps to fill about Ethel’s time in Edinburgh with Edith de Foubert, a teacher at St George’s School, in the years 1907 to 1916. I am indebted to Griselda Fyfe, who is a mine of information on St George’s and the Ravelston area of Edinburgh where that part of Talbot’s life, it seems, took place. Griselda took me to look at the outside of 5 Roseburn Cliff, which Talbot shared with de Foubert, in a handsome row of houses built for Patrick Geddes in 1911. The 1916 Street Directory lists de Foubert and Talbot as tenants, and according to Griselda’s research the Valuation Rolls give the rent as £38 per annum. Sims and Clare say that Ethel’s longest-lasting address in Edinburgh was 37 Palmerston Place. I did a day’s dredge myself in the Edinburgh Room at the City Library, through the Street Directories, the Valuation Rolls and the Voters’ Rolls. Referred to from 1926 onwards as Palmerston House, a legend still engraved on the glass above its chaste and dignified door, it appears to have been arooming house from 1920 onwards (though Palmerston Place, built from 1880 to 1883, had always been and still is a prestigious address, the last place you would expect to find such an establishment), with fifteen voters plus Ethel listed in 1926, though the average was usually about nine. They were accommodated on the three floors of this spacious house plus the attics. (The basement was occupied by one Mary Hinnigan, the caretaker, and was not a rated part of the house.) The rooms were separately rated, and graded according to their architectural status in the house. Ethel and Edith had the more modest rooms. In 1921-2 Ethel lists herself as ‘authoress’; Edith is listed but indicates nothing of her profession, though in the 1922-3 Valuation Roll she describes herself as ‘a lecturer’. In 1923-4 Ethel is listed but Edith is not. In 1924-5 Ethel is still there, an authoress. The occupations of other tenants are variously given as nurse, shopwoman, clerk, cashier, missionary and masseuse, a respectable bunch of women going about their lawful business, but definitely girls of slender means, rather an unusual class of person to be living in Palmerston Place. In 1926 Ethel is in the Voters’ Roll at this address, but from 1927 on there is no word of her. ---------------------------------------------------------- Jane Cooper ‘“Just really what they do”, or, Re-reading Mrs Molesworth’ by Jane Cooper appeared in the January 1988 Signal. She writes: ‘I have been working on a life of Mrs Molesworth for more years than I care to remember and am set to publish it on 2 September 2003. Mrs Molesworth was one of the most popular and well-thought-of writers for children in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Her real-life novels in particular broke new gound in the 1870s, yet no biography of her has ever appeared. Brian Alderson calls the biography “as near-definitive a study of Mrs Molesworth’s life and writing as current resources allow”.’ Further details about Mrs Molesworth: A Biography from Jane Cooper, Wealden Cottage, Pratts Folly Lane, Crowborough, East Sussex TN6 1HR. ---------------------------------------------------------- National Centre for Research in Children’s Literature / International Board on Books for Young People conference The annual NCRCL/IBBY conference will be held at Froebel College, University of Surrey Roehampton on 16 November 2002. The theme is Children’s Literature and Childhood in Performance. Among the highlights will be talks by Peter Hollindale, Michael Newton, Gillian Cross and Aidan Chambers, recent recipient of IBBY’s Hans Christian Andersen Author Award. Speakers from Australia, Hungary, the USA and Scotland will discuss a range of issues relating to children as performers and adults performing childhood. A celebration of Signal’s contribution to the study of children’s literature will be part of the proceedings. Full programme details and booking forms from Maureen Murdock, NCRCL, University of Surrey Roe-hampton, Roehampton Lane, London SW15 5PH. Tel. +44 208 392 3008. Email: ncrcl@roehampton.ac.uk ---------------------------------------------------------- Anne Wilson The following extract comes from the preface to Anne Wilson’s Plots and Powers: Magical Structures in Medieval Narrative (University Press of Florida, 2001, 0 8130 2121 9), the final study completing her earlier work in Traditional Romance and Tale (D.S. Brewer, 1976), Magical Thought in Creative Writing (Thimble Press, 1983) and The Magical Quest (Manchester University Press, 1988). [N]onrational thought has been a wonderful creator of stories, stories having much to tell that we have not heard about elsewhere. This book is about a number of remarkable narrative texts produced by a hitherto unrecognized system of irrational thinking. We tend to assume that the thought responsible for any narrative is of a kind familiar to us, and, where critics . . . wish to address the nonrational, the temptation is to conjecture on the basis of our present knowledge rather than study the living thought in the text. . . . The characters and adventures in these narratives are employed for unacknowledged ritual purposes, which have no resemblance to the roles they play in other fictions. Inconsistencies, contradictions, and incongruities arise when we attempt interpretations that assume a rational form of thought; they also arise when authors give us texts in which a ritual narrative of this kind has an overlay of characterization and moral themes. . . . As the form of thought that has emerged employs magic, operating at a deep level in the texts, the account of my methods includes an explanation—in intellectually rigorous terms—of just what this means at every point. Magic is demystified and given the new, practical definitions that literary people need in order to be able to address this type of thinking when it is responsible for a narrative. When people think in magical terms they invest power in objects and processes, and magical texts contain highly organized structures in which audiences can invest power for particular purposes within the narrative experience. . . . Visual thinking, as opposed to verbal reasoning, has played an important part in discovery, because it provides a more flexible, fluid dimension to the process of reflection. An unknown type of thought has to be studied by means of building up a picture of its progress through the text, and this requires both close attention at the verbal level and a readiness to discern patterns and regularities, even where they are of an extraordinary kind, apparently making little sense. ----------------------------------------------------------