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!

That's what I think, LRD. Hence why it came to me in church really (I am not a Christian) but within that context of thinking about wider morality it was bound to appear in children's literature, wasn't it.

YY. I think it is one of the things that (to me) makes some classic children's literature seem very 'grown up', in that it does seem to expect children will be aware of quite big ethical questions. But then, there's also a total lack of awareness about stuff like bullying/animal cruelty ... it's such a mixture.

I don't think modern fiction would necessarily use the language of 'morals' or honour or doing one's duty, but some of the books, probably moreso for older children have good 'ethical' content - sometimes quite complex. Apart from Harry Potter, the ones that spring to my mind are the Tiffany Aching 'childrens' discworld and (IIRC, its ages since I read them) the Dark Materials trilogy.

Hi,really interesting thread. I have mixed feelings about whether children's books use easier language or if it's a good thing or not.
I know the discussion has been about novels but the genre which has the most immediate plot access and virtually no description are fairy tales. I know they would have been passed down through oral tradition before they were collected and printed, but they were for children to scare the little blighters into behaving. So is it right to say that children's books lack long descriptions and extended vocab? Perhaps it's a more precise use of language? I dunno.

I am going to argue that picture books for children of all ages are very sophisticated. They keep language simple but rely on a visual literacy which takes the reading far beyond the sentence. I can only think of straightforward examples- such as the central devise of The Gruffalo where one thing is being said but the reader can see what is actually happening.The important thing is that they do not match, that the author/ illustrator is toying with the reader's understanding. Sorry,I'm too knackered to put together a decent description. Does that make sense? Picture books are a much more visual genre,they are for much older readers and they use visual literacy in a way that books in to 70's or 50's didn't.

perhaps it's that 'right' was more defined when those books were written. Now I think all literature has a more loosely defined moral code and things just aren't so black and white whereas beliefs were more homogenous (Sp?). I haven't read any of the newer fiction with the kids except the godawful rainbow fairies so i don't know how much they touch on it but dd read some of it to me like warhorse etc, I only heard snippets as she'd read most of it on her own.

re sharing passions from our own childhood - errol reminded me when mentioning bbc adaptations. I bought the bbc narnia series for them as Id loved it as a child. It is hilarious. The costumes are archaic. made them watch it all though.

Interestingly I'm reading Little House in the Big Woods(American) to the dc (written at a similar time) and that is very basic.In fact DS 10 pointed out that it wasn't written very well as they're doing a lot re making sentences more interesting and complex at school.

I was a bit as I love that book.I pointed out that she was probably aiming it an audience of children.

mmm x post. gruffalo is great but what about (ok only slightly) older stuff like raymond briggs, asterix, and tintin. Elephant and the bad baby and alan ahlberg. All aimed at different age groups but weren't they 70s and 80s?

The eurghh modern rainbow fairies books are all about doing the right thing, restoring the whatever to its rightful owner etc, aren't they? You wouldn't call it 'doing your duty' any more, but that's an old-fashioned phrase now.

Horrid Henry, Captain Underpants etc deliberately celebrate naughtiness, but I think they still have a moral undertone of some description, ie there is a clear right / wrong, good / bad dividing line?

The brilliant thing about the Little House books is that they grow up with the reader. I was given Little House in the Big Woods when I was six, about the same age as Laura in the book - I found the setting quite confusing but the level was spot on for me at that age, and I loved reading the rest of the series over the next few years.

What an interesting thread!

I think that in the 60's there was a bit of an explosion in children's books, when picture books became more mass produced, and more children had access to them. At this point some writers started making books with more of a child's voice, as the books were now owned by the children. Whereas you can imagine books being lent to children and needing to be returned to the family bookcase previously.

Clever polly, for example was written for the author's children, and she used the language they used to put their voices into print.

You can see that the intention of this was really quite radical in the 60's, and will have made books more accessible and interesting to children. However this was done under careful editorship by the likes of Kaye Webb who published so many richly written books in the 70's and 80's.

I don't know where to begin with the state of current children's literature. It is so depressing. And the sad thing is that so many wonderful books have been published in the last 40 years, and so few of them remain in public libraries...

Yes,I'd forgotten about Asterix and the Elephant and the bad baby. I LOVED those books as a child. They sometimes used visual disconnects and sometimes used comic sketches or verbal jokes.

I still think that modern children's books are doing something more sophisticated,although they are building on the comic book genre. We have a brilliant book called 'there are no cats in this book' aimed at young children. The cats speak directly to the reader and ask the reader to turn pages,throw balls of wool,tuck that cats into bed. Lovely stuff. How about the book where the bear is looking for his hat- a visual trick is played where a rabbit has stolen a hat early on and the careful reader spots this,meanwhile the bear continues searching for his hat. The language is simple but the reading is complex.

Much sympathy to anyone wading their way through the rainbow flipping fairies though.

Oh I haven't acknowledged that there are some awful books out there for small children. Please don't think I'm arguing that all books for the under 5's are great,some of them are a right load of old tut.

the only way to do it is to give rachel and kirsty ridiculous accents. gangster style cheered me up a bit.

The one really good thing about my DD being a reluctant reader is that we totally escaped the Rainbow fairies and their ilk!

Reading the Little House books again as an adult, I realised I'd missed what now seems a lot of narrative snidiness at Mary! 'Laura was a bad girl who did not do as she was told: Pa had told her not to leave her seat, but she could not watch as Jack was savaged by a bear, so she leapt up and saved him. Mary was a good girl, and she stayed in her seat sewing button-holes for Ma, and did not rescue any dogs from any bears like bad Laura, because she was such a good, good, girl.' Or words to that effect.

There are picture books from the 1960s and 1970s with the visual disconnect, think of 'Rosie's Walk', or 'Bear Hunt' by Anthony Browne. I'd say the best picture books always have that, that's what makes them great. Or think of how the pictures take over the text in 'Where the Wild Things Are'. Absolutely brilliant.

I'm surprised at the claim there were no children's books before the Victorians - and glad it has been disputed. Had no idea children's stories - written - could be traced to 1300, though. The British Library Georgians exhibition has a display of books for children from the 18th century.

It's like the claim that parents weren't attached to their children because infant mortality was higher. If the idiot proposing that theory had bothered to check, he would have found plenty of letters and diaries by parents who were heartbroken at the loss of their children, just as you would be today.

Oh, I think there were children's books long before 1300. I just wouldn't know the names of them. I am sure the Romans and Greeks had stories for children, though.

I will have a look.

It's the same person who argued people weren't fond of their children - Aries. I agree ... it's offensive, isn't it? You only have to think for a minute to realize it's not likely to be true.

Wasn't Aesop's Fables written for children? That's literature for children going as far back as we can trace. And my kids still love those stories today.

Yes - that was surely for children!

I think Homer was probably read/heard by children. We certainly know it was later on - and descriptions of children are all through it, suggesting they were part of the audience. In most ancient civilizations, people preferred to hear stories read aloud, so by default children would hear them.

There's some interesting info on Aesop's Fables in wiki. In short they weren't specifically written for children, and in the first instance not written, and not all by 'Aesop' anyway.

But 'The first printed version of Aesop's Fables in English was published on March 26, 1484, by William Caxton' which is rather beautifully specific!

As with other stories, there were children's versions from early on e.g. Lambs' Tales from Shakespeare was published 1807. 'The book reduced the archaic English and complicated storyline of Shakespeare to a simple level that children could read and comprehend'.

There's quite an interesting wiki Childrens Literature .

We have a memoir written by my great-great-great grandmother who lost 3 children in infancy in the 1830s-1840s. She writes with real sadness about their loss, details of their little personalities - wee Jamie with his favourite velvet bonnet - & says 'it took me a long time to say 'God's will be done''. It's grief & resignation. Slightly off topic but the mention of infant deaths reminded me.

That's so sad, jane.

It makes me really cross, the 'oh people didn't love their children' thing. It's one of those ideas that never seems to go away, for some reason - I think people want to believe it.

Caxton is specific about dates in his prologues: 'And herewith I finished this book, translated and printed by me, William Caxton, at Westminster in the Abbey, and finished the 26th day of March, the year of our Lord 1484, and the first year of the reign of King Richard the Third.'

There are three manuscripts of the earlier English translation that the wiki link mentions, and the guy who made one of those reckons it was made around 1405-10. I've just googled and there's someone arguing that the way Lydgate translated shows he was explaining the fables in the same way people explained other texts in classroom settings, which might suggest he had children in mind.

In one of the manuscripts, it's together along with a text called 'The Boy Standing at the Table', which is a really boring explanation to children about good table-manners and being polite - that suggests the manuscript was partly for children to use.

I'm only mentioning that because the wiki link makes it sound slightly as if Caxton's printing is an important 'first' and I think children would have been read those stories in English way earlier than 1484.

I've just come across a medieval story called 'Jack and his Stepmother' which is also in manuscripts with lots of instructional 'how to be polite' literature for children, in which Jack is rewarded for his kindly nature by a magician, who grants him the power to make his stepmother fart every time she scowls at him.

Sorry, I am wittering on, I've just not looked into this much before and I am getting the impression children just don't change much!

It makes me really cross, the 'oh people didn't love their children' thing.
It's bizzarre - parental attachment certainly predated sanitation and penicillin. This discussion reminded me of the mid-1800s poem Which Shall It Be? - I'm a sucker for a sentimental sniffle!

LRD, love the farting stepmother. Can you imagine if that superpower was genuinely on offer to small boys!