First Page Excerpts for SIGNAL APPROACHES TO CHILDREN'S BOOKS Issue 99, September 2002 [please, note that italics and other formats are not reproduced in this excerpt] ---------------------------------------------------------- Elsie Piddock, Then and Now Anne Harvey 156 The Discipline of Children’s Literature: To Benchmark or not to Benchmark Peter Hunt 176 Keeping Children’s Classics Alive and the Case of Beatrix Potter Nicholas Tucker 183 Teaching Children’s Literature as a comparative literary subject in a British University Penny Brown 189 The Collecting Mystery Brian Alderson 200 Endpapers: Signalling William Mayne 221 Annual Index 2002: Issues 97, 98, 99 224 Contributors 227 ---------------------------------------------------------- Elsie Piddock, Then and Now ANNE HARVEY Eleanor Farjeon wrote and edited over eighty books for children and adults, hundreds of poems—many of which remain popular in anthologies today—as well as collaborating with her youngest brother, Herbert, on theatre musicals. Her collection of stories, The Little Bookroom (1955), received the Carnegie Medal; her body of work was honoured in 1956 by the international Hans Christian Andersen Medal and in 1959 by the U.S. Catholic Library Association’s Regina Medal, awarded once in five years. The Children’s Book Circle give their annual award for outstanding services to children’s literature in her name. As a child I learned her poems by heart and remember acting in the classroom her witty Nursery Rhymes of London Town, originally published in Punch in the First World War. I could not know then that one day I would be involved in the republication of those rhymes and other of her titles or that I would portray her in literary presentations. In 1984 a Leverhulme grant enabled me to work with her niece, Annabel Farjeon, on the biography, Morning Has Broken, its title taken from her much-loved hymn, written for Percy Dearmer’s Songs of Praise. Her nephew and executor, Gervase Farjeon, was my partner for twenty years until his death in 2001, and it was while sorting through Farjeon papers, in my new role as trustee of her estate, that the idea of exploring ‘Elsie Piddock Skips in Her Sleep’ came to me. In her 1961 Bodley Head monograph, Eleanor Farjeon, Eileen Colwell wrote this of Martin Pippin in the Daisy-Field: But the best story in the book, and Eleanor Farjeon’s own favourite, for it really says ‘what she wanted it to say’, is ‘Elsie Piddock Skips in her Sleep’. It is the tale of little Elsie Piddock, who while she was asleep learnt to skip as the fairies do, and who had a fairy skipping rope with handles of Sugar Candy and Almond Rock. She could skip as never so: The Slow Skip, The Toe Skip, The Skip Double-Double, ---------------------------------------------------------- The Discipline of Children’s Literature: To Benchmark or not to Benchmark Peter Hunt The very idea of making children’s literature into a scholarly discipline, of forcing all that’s most imaginative and free . . . into a grid of solemn pedantry, pompous platitude, and dubious textual analysis—psychological, sociological, moral, linguistic, structural—such a process invites divine retribution. —Alison Lurie Consider . . . the pedagogical and institutional implications of the prevailing metaphor in postsecondary education: ‘fields’ of knowledge. While ‘fields’ in principle is no doubt intended to suggest intellectual expanses, cognitive terrain to be charted and cultivated, in practice it more often works negatively to suggest boundaries, enclosures, intellectual barriers—boxed knowledge. This metaphor supports, finally, an isolated, insulated view of scholarship, pedagogy and learning. —Donald McQuade Those who argue that the humanities have become disablingly incoherent seem to me right, but many of them fail to see that coherence can no longer be grounded on some restored consensus . . . —Gerald Graff BOSWELL: Then, Sir, what is poetry? JOHNSON: Why, Sir, it is much easier to say what it is not. We all know what light is; but it is not easy to tell what it is. —Life of Dr Samuel Johnson, 11 April 1776 A few years ago I received—as those of us happy enough to be associated with Signal occasionally do—one of Nancy Chambers’s gnomic postcards: Please tell me: academically speaking, does an area of study have definable characteristics? That is, should you be able to say what an academic subject comprises? I’m not talking about individual courses, but the ‘discipline’. What is the ‘discipline’ of children’s literature? Presumably, if, like Nancy, you’ve published nearly one hundred editions of a journal about ‘approaches to children’s ---------------------------------------------------------- Keeping Children’s Classics Alive and the Case of Beatrix Potter Nicholas Tucker Classic books for children in the past simply represented titles chosen by enough adults from their own literary memories to make up an informal critical consensus. Keeping these books alive was therefore a comparatively simple matter, with parents and grandparents choosing from what were once their own favourites as self- evidently suitable birthday or Christmas presents for the next generation. But times change; Lewis Carroll’s Alice stories were popular once with all ages, yet their most distinguished modern editor, Martin Gardner, claims never to have met a modern child who actually enjoyed them. So while Alice remains the classic it undoubtedly is, there is less confidence now in its suitability for the very young. Other once persistently recommended children’s classics dating from way back only got to that position because, with so little that was genuinely entertaining written for them, keen child readers at the time would fall on anything in the adult market that looked the remotest bit interesting. Even so, such stories from the past, often with resounding titles but little else pleasing to children in a more modern age, could until comparatively recently still be found on sale at rock-bottom prices in Woolworths and other inexpensive stores. Usually produced outside Britain, they habitually used evil-smelling paper and the darkest, closest print. Volumes ranged from Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Black Arrow to James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans, sometimes confused by unwary young readers with the haircut of the same name, and Richard Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast. What damage these and various other stories of similar age and impenetrability may have done when presented as well-meaning gifts to contemporary children not as yet won over to the cause of books and reading can only be guessed at. These fictional warhorses had also benefited in the immediate post-Second World War years from the fact that so many contemporary children’s books had perished during air raids on London. New life was also occasionally breathed into them from ---------------------------------------------------------- Teaching children’s literature as a comparative literary subject in a British University PENNY BROWN The history of comparative literature has been characterized by debate about its nature and scope, its parameters, methodologies and dangers. Even its validity as an academic discipline has repeatedly come under scrutiny. In the study of literature across national boundaries, expertise in different cultural contexts and, perhaps most importantly, linguistic competence become key issues. It is not my intention here to investigate this debate, nor to offer a further defence of comparative literature.1 The increase in recent years of new comparative and interdisciplinary courses in British universities at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels, and the number of academics who are working on comparative and interdisciplinary projects, testify to the recognition that any single field of study can only benefit from reference to other literatures, other cultures and other disciplines. Yet nervousness about and resistance to reading—and in particular teaching—texts in translation still persists in many places so that courses and projects are often constructed with a limited scope, based on the linguistic expertise of the participants. The study of children’s literature, of course, encounters comparable problems of definition and evaluation and has had to cope with similar reservations, even outright criticism, of its validity as a subject for scholarly attention. Teaching children’s literature as a comparative literary subject thus may experience twofold pressures to justify itself Yet children’s literature is an extraordinarily stimulating and productive topic for comparative and interdisciplinary study. Susan Bassnett’s working definition (‘Comparative Literature involves the study of texts across cultures, is interdisciplinary and is concerned with patterns of connection in literature across time and space’) raises a number of questions relating to transmission, reception, influence and affinities, adaptation and translation.2 As Peter Hunt reminds us, the ability to make links across cultural boundaries is vital to a study of children’s ---------------------------------------------------------- The Collecting Mystery BRIAN ALDERSON He was a bibliomaniac . . . When my father called on him to arrange about the house, he found him sitting almost in rags, apparently dining upon some cheese-parings, and surrounded by a library, the value of which would have fed and clothed him with comfort for an almost indefinite period. Juliana Horatia Ewing, ‘Reka Dom’ in Mrs Overtheway’s Remembrances 1869 John Carter, one of book-collecting’s great philosophers, attempted to define the nature of the beast at the start of his Sandars lectures on ‘Taste and Technique in Book Collecting’1 and, having ruled out certain shibboleths such as heredity or natural instinct, came close to endorsing the notion that the thing is ‘a mystery, not only too complicated but also too delicate, almost too sacred, to make the exposition to the uninitiated anything but painful’. Whatever you may think of the phraseology, the notion seems—by its very vagueness—a justifiable one, and I would certainly accept it as an explanation of my own bibliomaniac propensities. I have no idea where these came from but, like Judy Taylor (‘The Collecting Urge’, Signal 96), I can perceive their emergence in fairly early youth and suspect that Carter’s ‘mystery’ is for many book collectors a function of their own private histories. Unlike Judy I’m not conscious of wanting, as a child, to collect children’s books. (Some of my most pleasurable experiences in those days came from borrowing books from the tremendous holdings of the Enfield Central Library, whose stock, including the children’s books, was uniformly bound in library-suppliers’ leather, the gloomy appearance of which had no deterrent effect whatsoever.) Certainly I was desperate to own some books for myself: John Finnemore’s ‘Teddy Lester’ school stories; the annual Wisden’s almanacs2; W.J. Basset-Lowke’s Model Railway Handbook (oh, the joy when W.H. Smith’s in Palmer’s Green got hold of a copy in the teeth of wartime crises). The wish to possess these may have marked me as an incipient collector, but it was only in my middle teens that the craziness noticeably began to set in. To some extent I blame the school library at my Quaker ----------------------------------------------------------