What are children’s books for?

Children’s books are quite new. They start appearing round about 250 years ago. Before that chapbooks and broadside ballads formed ephemeral nourishment for the reading public, and while many of them certainly appealed to children and were read by them, few were specifically aimed at children. And all the while oral storytelling continued, of course.

Advances in printing technology and ease of distribution through the railway system meant that in the Victorian age many more people could afford to acquire books and the potential for writing books especially for children was realised. Initially tract writers had a field day. Wagon loads of well-meant, morally uplifting, and frequently tedious tracts were dumped into the laps of infants. With a few honourable exceptions it wasn’t until the late 19th century that writers like the great E. Nesbit broke down the walls of tedium and let some light into the world of children’s books.

Now, what are children’s books for? As a child I was puzzled that adults seemed to not to remember what it was like to be a child. I would think, “But you were a child, and not so long ago. Why do you not remember?” Part of what made my favourite books precious to me was that their authors did remember. They seemed to offer a path into adulthood that did not require me to forget. 

The fairytale told by a grandmother 500 years ago and the computer-generated picture book, however different the vision they present, are creating the future. They offer the child a way forward, a way of understanding the world, and suggestions for how the world can be. What is communicated can be very blunt, but it can also offer great subtlety and beauty.

Plato in his Republic, attempting to imagine an ideal society,  recognised the importance of this process of transmission. He wrote: “Our first business is to supervise the production of stories, and choose only those we think suitable, and reject the rest. We shall persuade mothers and nurses to tell our chosen stories to their children, and by the means of them to mould their minds and characters rather than their bodies. The greater part of the stories current today we shall have to reject.” This business of persuasion and moulding is doomed to failure: gallons of ink persuading children of the evils of alcohol did not eliminate it from our world and we each have our own shape, so moulding  merely makes misshapes. But his view of the primacy of the stories we tell children is interesting and significant. The operating myths of a society are created here. In the transmission from one generation to the next choices, consciously or not, are made: do we continue this mode of being in the world, or do we create something new? 

Over the coming decades many very bright beings are choosing to incarnate in our world. We can help them. We can create pathways of transmission that help children to recognise who they are, to retain awareness of the purposes that brought them into this world, and to open possibilities that give them scope to express those purposes fully. Stories that recognise the light within each being, that recognise that the past does not need to dictate the future, that recognise the beauty of the world we all share, these all help.

For the maker of children’s books, perhaps it was most simply expressed by the creator of Narnia, C.S.Lewis: “I wrote the books I should have liked to read”.