HIDDEN CORNERS
THE IDEAL
READER
Roland Chambers speculates on how a child might respond to the Children’s Books section in the Library, whose attic-like setting under the roof on the sixth floor resembles a portal into a magic world The London Library’s books for children are on the sixth floor between Law and Religion, while books about children are on the first between Chess and Christmas and aren’t really my brief, except there’s a useful one down there by Hugh Cunningham called The Invention of Childhood (2006). Cunningham argues that we invent the idea of childhood to suit our adult needs, beginning with the arrival in England of the Catholic Church in the seventh century. Previously, children had been seen only as potential adults, because of the terrifying infant
mortality rate, but the Catholics insisted children possessed immortal souls and, without God’s grace, were doomed to burn in eternal hell. By the beginning of the eighth century, if a child died before it was baptised, its parents forfeited everything they had. It was considered a crime worse than murder. As to dating the invention of children’s literature, views differ. Some point to Aesop’s Fables, which has been in print in England since William Caxton’s edition in 1484; others to chapbooks, small, cheaply made pamphlets that sometimes contained alphabets and folk tales. As literacy in England took off, so Christian evangelists began telling stories designed to instill a sober piety in the very young, as in James Janeway’s A Token for Children: Being an Exact Account of the Conversion, Holy and Exemplary Lives and Joyful Deaths, of Several Young Children (1672). A few years later, in 1693, John Locke published Some Thoughts Concerning Education, which suggested that the minds of children were not
Left Title page of Aesop’s Fables, 1933 edition, illustrated by Arthur Rackham. Opposite, clockwise from top left Illustration by Charles Robinson, from Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden (1911), 1925 edition; illustration by Edmund Dulac, from Stories from the Arabian Nights (1911), 1919 edition, permission granted by Hachette Children’s Books; illustration by Arthur Rackham, from Aesop’s Fables, 1933 edition. 28 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE
innately evil, but blank, like smooth wax. Locke’s theories influenced Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who in turn influenced the Romantic poets – William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge – who inverted the notion of original sin by seeing childhood as a natural state of grace. The question as to whether children are little devils or saintly underdogs has never gone away, or the possibility, so essential to the post-Romantic imagination, that they might be able to choose for themselves. Browsing any collection of children’s books is bound to be a personal business, because people who love reading tend to start young. In my case, it began when my mother took me with her on a visit to her chiropractor, and left me in the waiting room with a copy of C.S. Lewis’s The Magician’s Nephew (1955). When she came out again I had become a reader and I’ve been a reader ever since, so getting down on my hands and knees (creakily) it’s reassuring to find all seven of the Narnia stories on the bottom shelf, although it’s strange to see them in London Library bindings. It’s as if they’re dressed in awkward Sunday suits, but when I open them up of course they’re just as they should be, with Pauline Baynes’s lovely illustrations in all the right places. There’s a great deal here that was first read to me in my grandmother’s sitting room last thing before bed: Helen
