Anyone know about the history of children's literature? I have a weird question.

mane - well, hard to say without a list of what you've read so far!
My list included Nesbitt, Frances Hodgson Burnett, all 4 Little Women, all the Anne of Green Gables series, the Katy Dids, Tom Sawyer, all the Swallows and Amazons, Narnia (of course), Hobbit, The Water Babies, Peter Pan (and new sequel), Treasure Island, David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, Gulliver's Travels, Tom's Midnight Garden ... and the pratchetts of course.

I dunno how 'classic' but some of the Rosemary Sutcliffe books are good, and Michelle Magorian (Goodnight Mr Tom, but also Back Home and Cuckoo in the Nest).

Proper classic classics not so sure, but someone else will be.

ok I thought I'd read a lot as a child (and adult) but I've not heard of mrs molesworth or the london child books. I've exhausted my range with dd1 and I'm not ready for her to read teenage stuff yet - she's living on a diet of morpurgo at the moment and gets through a book every two days. She's year 6 - has anyone got anything that's a must read from classics (that I haven't even heard of or have forgotten)? sorry for hijack.

I suppose few poor or ill-educated kids got the chance to read it when it was written.

Ok, I thought the puns were complex.

I mean, not, like, hugely complex, but for a child? Or, um, me? I am with jane in tha there's a fair few I really didn't get until they were explained.

I agree with errol, there's some brilliant writing around. YA fiction is especially up-and-coming IMO.

I'm reading this with interest LRD, hopefully some of it will stick in my mind for when my 1yo is old enough!

I don't think the London Child books would be any good for 8-9 yos, even mature advanced reading ones. Teenagers, perhaps.

There's some good children's poetry around nowadays which has interesting language. And there are authors who revel in language and ideas - as you might guess from my name I'll cite Terry Pratchett.

Oh God I just realised Diagon Alley

I dunno... Diagon Alley? Not over complex really, is it?

Someone tell me to piss off if I am being annoying (seriously), but I think in a culture where the religion is book-based, reading is always going to be seen as a 'good thing' that people should be able to do if possible.

Really early children's lit (c. 1300) is all about how important it is for children to read. And children later get taught that every letter they're learning when they begin the alphabet is meaningful and helps them to understand Creation (as in, God 'wrote' the world out of words so you need to learn to read them). I do think it's true that people used not to think it was so important for children to understand everything exactly, though. I think reading was seen as A Good Thing, but if you only have a small number of books, you're perhaps happier with the idea that you read a book to a child of 6 and they get some of it, then you read it again at 7 and they get more out of it, and by 10 they are bloody sick of it able to understand it all?

vesela - oh, good, get it for them then. I think they're lovely books. And if they get bored you can read them!

Thinking about vocabulary ... I don't know how simple some of ours is. JK Rowling is always credited with writing very simple (over-simple?) prose, but actually you need to understand quite a bit of language play to get all the puns, don't you?

OTOH as someone has mentioned, children nowadays know a lot of other stuff - small children may not know the names of the Biblical priests but some of them know a lot of different dinosaurs and would be able to decode a diplodocus from a tyrannosaurus or pterodactyl at a surprisingly young age.

It also seems to me that contemporary children's literature is much more likely to be written in the first person - as though that's now considered the best way to make a character engaging, perhaps? (or, shudder.... relatable) - or am I imagining that tendency?

Really interesting topic to discuss, OP :)

It's something I've noticed very much when reading to ds; modern books on the whole use a much simpler vocabulary and there tends to be more focus on action or dialogue, with far less description. Older books tend to be much more wordy with quite complex vocabulary and often loads of descriptive passages.
Over summer we were reading some old English fairytales in the original editions. They were fascinating! Some of the things that happened were also not what you'd expect to find in a children's story, and the language was remarkable. I'm sure ds didn't understand all of it, but that sort of didn't matter - he got the general plot, and any bits that really confused him we discussed.

On a sort of similar note, I'm always surprised when we watch old Charlie Brown/Snoopy cartoons: I know it was aimed at both adults and children, but sometimes I think there's no way a child would get that at all. And the music! It assumes that children will enjoy the jazz soundtrack....and you know, my ds does! Which I suppose shows, as someone mentioned upthread, that we probably underestimate our children these days.

And, as anyone who's read Antonia Forest's least succesful work, 'The Thuggery Affair' knows, in the early 1960s, even drug-addled ASBO types would use biblical references as slang, such as 'Belshazzar it!' to mean 'why not write it on the wall?'.

Apparently.

Not sure if this has been mentioned, but the one text that all Victorian children (and somewhat later) would have been familiar with, and in some cases apparently what they learned to read from, would have been the Bible. They wouldn't have been in the least fazed by Sara Carew calling her friendly rat Melchizidek .

I've read to my DD a lot over the years - lots of 'classics' which I happily read alone but she needs a bit more interpretation in places (esp religious references)- and there are times when I come across some term or reference that I didn't understand at the time and sometimes still don't (esp in American works) but now we can google it!

Peter Pan tie-ins of the early 1900s...

neverpedia.com/pan/Peter_Pan_books

really interesting discussion. I personally feel that a lot of children's books now are 'dumbed down'. Easier grammar, easier language etc. Why? lots of reasons, probably largely due to the fact that in day to day life we don't use many of the words that were common in the past.

Thanks - I think they're fine with not a lot happening, as long as it's interesting, but it might make sense to wait a year or so. I read Lark Rise (and A Country Child) some time between 10 and 12, I think, and enjoyed them a lot, although one of them - Lark Rise, I think - has parts that I remember finding quite scary.

That's a fascinating essay that you linked to - thank you (and for the link to the whole Representing Childhood project).

My dad used to refuse to read us Winnie the Pooh because of all the twee affected bad grammar ('I aren't) etc.

I think Back In The Day, there wasn't really any notion that reading was A Good Thing and that therefore all children ought to be able to do it and, more importantly, enjoy it - so writers would perhaps be unashamed of complex vocabulary, intricate sentences etc.

I remember being endlessly confused (side topic) by a misprint in my What Katy Did, which produced Debby as Daddy (Debby being the maid). It said 'Papa loves toast: I'll get Daddy to make him some'. I knew there were a lot of family members in that book, but couldn't understand how I'd got so far into it without spotting there were two fathers, one affectionately known as Papa and one as Daddy.

But as a child, you sort of accept what's there, and I think I was used to accepting that there would be bits of language and sentence structure that I wouldn't understand, and could skate over and fit in contextually. Like in Polly and the Wolf, the Wolf comments that he was looking forward to his dinner 'but it looks as though I wasn't going to get any: today at any rate'. Which seems (and always seemed) intuitively wrong, but you just sort of skim and 'get it' - in a way which I'm not sure much children's fiction expects or can get away with now.

Well, I read them as an adult. The language isn't that complicated, but there's a properly sad ending to the first one and I think a child might find them a bit boring - not a lot 'happens'.

OTOH I remember reading Lark Rise sometime in primary school and enjoying it, and it's pretty similar to that.

(although in Just William she was deliberately using long words for comic effect!)

LRD, are the London Child in the 1870s etc. books good for children? I was looking at them yesterday online, but couldn't tell whether they'd be suitable for my nieces, aged 8-9.

I'm reading Mrs. Molesworth (Christmas Tree Land) to DD (6) at the moment, and I'd say that although in terms of subject matter it's aimed at younger children, the vocabulary is more challenging than Edith Nesbit (which she hasn't read yet). That said, there are a lot of nice suppers and bells jingling merrily etc. I haven't read The Cuckoo Clock yet - I think that's meant to be an improvement.

I had also thought that Peter Pan was aimed at slightly older children. It's hard to say, though (going by Wikipedia). The boys to whom Barrie originally told the Peter Pan stories must have been quite young at the time he told them. The story first appeared in written form as chapters in a book for adults, though (The Little White Bird) so that may have affected the style in which Barrie continued to develop it. He then wrote the stage play, followed by Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, which was specifically meant as a children's book but the text is apparently almost the same as the earlier chapters for adults. I imagine that by the time he wrote Peter Pan and Wendy, he probably just meant it for anyone who would enjoy it... Publishers were probably more easygoing on the subject, too.

(There is a similar issue with the vocabulary in the Just William books - Richmal Crompton wrote the first one for adults, and then just stuck more or less with the same style, although William had become popular with children).

There's also stuff about people disguising themselves as deer, or werewolves bringing up children, that some people think show these must have been children's stories, because they would appeal to children and would be nonsensical to adults. Tricky to guess, though. But sometimes they're in books along with alphabets for children, or in books where children have scrawled the pages.

FWIW the language is dead simple, but I don't know that proves anything.

"Now, there are whole separate markets for 7-11, 11-13 and 13-16 iirc".

Hasn't that been the case for ages, though? Late Victorian children's fiction was carefully targeted at different age ranges - compare say Mrs Molesworth (youngish children), E. Nesbit (middle childhood) and Eric or Little by Little (definitely aimed at what we would now call teenagers).