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

[NowBringUsSomeFuzzpiggyPudding]

Not sure if this is the best place but I'm hoping somebody knowledgeable can answer this for me. :)

So, I've been reading chapter books to my 6yo and we've nearly finished the unabridged Peter Pan and Wendy. It's the first chapter book we've done that was unfamiliar to me (in that I hadn't read it myself as a child) and I was really surprised at just how tricky some of the language was and how lengthy the descriptions are compared to more recent books.

Should've expected it really but it got me thinking, did children at the time of PPAW etc have much better understanding of more elaborate language and they would have understood it as easily as modern children would understand a modern book? Is it just that the English language as a whole has changed?

Or is it because back then (I'm crap at history, can you tell?!) only wealthier children had access to education and books and so a higher standard of language was used?

Or is it that at the time, authors were less aware of their audience and the 'need' to simplify things for children to be able to understand them?

Does any of that even make sense hoping somebody gets what I mean!

Interesting thread, and exactly the book I have for DS (9) this Christmas, we read together so can discuss the harder more Victorian passages but generally find it better to push him, the books they read at school are quite awful!
We tried Oscar Wilde recently, Happy Prince was magical, as I remembered, the other stories a bit too much of a challenge but we will come back to it I'm sure

This is something I've been thinking about recently - I have been reading The Phoenix and the Carpet to my 4 and 7-year-old and been amazed at the level of the vocabulary and general complexity of the language. Even I don't know some of the words and I work in a language-related job.

I presume that some of the language is just unfamiliar because it is old fashioned, but I do think it's a shame that more modern books are so much more simplistic, almost without exception. And you find very few of the classics in the libraries (or not ours at any rate).

I studied children's literature as part of my degree and I even studied Peter Pan. So I wish I could answer your OP more convincingly.

But I think the main reason is that in the olden days there weren't such things as specific children's books. The Victorians invented the concept of childhood. Before that there were babies and then they became adults. (I enjoy telling my DC there were no children before the Victorian age.) And children were expected to read the same literature as adults. We studied an interesting chapter on the unwritten rules of children's stories and how they've changed over the years as society's idea of childhood has developed.

But specifically to your OP, Peter Pan was written as a play not a book so I imagine the language used was not intended to be read by children, but to be watched by them instead.

Aries' theories about there not being such a thing as childhood have been challenged quite a lot, I understand.

There is certainly such a thing as medieval children's literature. There's also an argument that some texts, where we don't know who they were written for, were probably meant for children because they are found with others definitely meant for children.

(Dunno if it's that interesting but for example, here, for criticism: www.representingchildhood.pitt.edu/pdf/aries.pdf.)

One can't study Victorian children's fiction in isolation from Victorian adult fiction... which is, correspondingly, much more wordy and linguistically complex than 21st-century adult fiction. Trashy Victorian novels (Lady Audley's Secret, East Lynne etc) have much longer sentences and descriptive passages, and sophisticated vocabulary, than, say, Fifty Shades of Grey or Katie Ffordesque chick lit.

The first novel I've read which was designed to appeal directly to children (as opposed to being fundamentally didactic) is Catherine Sinclair's Holiday House, published in 1839. Still a fantastic read today and much more accessible in terms of narrative and language than adult novels written at the same time.

I can't immediately think of any other children's novels before The Water Babies in the 1860s... does anyone else know any?

How elastically are you prepared to define 'novel'? I think this is part of the problem. In the strictest sense, novels for adults don't go that far back either. But you'd could accept, say, Pilgrim's Progress as an early children's novel? It's fairly grown up, though. And then if you are prepared to be really relaxed about what a 'novel' is, you've got narratives being read by children that are not that dissimilar in terms of plot/fictionality etc. to a novel - there's some in the Book of the Knight of the Tower which is late medieval. And a fair few medieval romances have children as protagonists which is what gets Philip Pullman's stuff classed as 'children's fiction' today.

My grandmother was a primary teacher (retired at 60 in '81) and refers to teaching children to read, the children in question starting at age 5 and still learning at 8-9 or in some cases older. I imagine that most 9yos would have a more complex understanding of language than most 6yos so while the decoding ability might be comparable the comprehension isn't iyswim? So modern "children's literature" is aimed at a considerably younger audience.

Teenagers didn't become a "thing" until the 50s either, so 5-15yos would be classed as and treated as children. Now, there are whole separate markets for 7-11, 11-13 and 13-16 iirc

"And a fair few medieval romances have children as protagonists" - I never knew that, how interesting.

The Pilgrim's Progress wasn't specifically aimed at children, was it - but in the late 17th century books weren't published/marketed in the way they were by the late 18th.

Yeah, I think I'm thinking about the March family reading PP.

There's a few romance characters (who all overlap really), who're boys brought up by a single mum. They're all sons of knights and are never taught to fight, but their genetic inheritance forces them to be interested in it all, and they end up going off to try to be squires at Arthur's court, get the piss taken out of them by Arthur/Kay/someone and end up proving themselves. Eg., Perceval, Lybeus Desconus. They're 'coming of age' stories really, sort of YA fiction I guess.

"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).

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.

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).

(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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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

neverpedia.com/pan/Peter_Pan_books

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!

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.

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.

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?

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?