Issue 23

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 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 Bannerman’s The Story of Little Black Sambo (1941), Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Verses (1939), Heinrich Hoffmann’s Struwwelpeter: or, Merry Stories and Funny Pictures (1903), with its catalogue of disproportionate punishments, all of which my grandmother delivered with relish. A little while ago (she’s 96) she phoned and asked why she couldn’t find a decent illustrated copy of Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies (1863)– the story of a thieving chimney sweep who begins his moral education after drowning – in her local Waterstones. So I found her one online. It’s a book I’ve re-appraised as an adult, just as I’ve reappraised Little Black Sambo, but that doesn’t mean I don’t still love it or have escaped its influence, and I’m glad to see that the Library has it in its first edition.

Walking up and down the aisles I’m constantly encountering old friends – Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1908); Ursula Le Guin’s ‘Earthsea’ books (1968–2001) – and also unfamiliar titles I find unexpectedly riveting, such as Kenneth Lindsay’s 1946 anthology of model lives, Adventure and Discovery, which includes an account of the Dam Busters’ raid by Wing Commander Guy Gibson. There are nonsense poems by Edward Lear, fairy tales by Hans Christian Andersen, boarding-school stories, holiday adventure stories, detective stories. By the late nineteenth century, children’s authors were placing much more emphasis on the imagination and initiative of their heroes, as Lewis Carroll does in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865).

A few years later, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy (1885) became the first children’s international best-seller, and as the industry grew, so the children’s genre expanded, if, that is, you can talk of a genre that includes alphabets, novels, fairy tales, nursery rhymes, history, autobiography, religious tracts and poetry. It explains the wonderful sense of clutter on the sixth floor, and also the popularity of the collection. But along with the childish thrill of rummaging through the stacks comes an occasional quiver of disappointment. There are three whole shelves here given over to an author I’ve never heard of – G.A. Henty – while Diana Wynne Jones, whom I adore, has been reduced to a single volume, Fire and Hemlock (1984). There are no books by Chris Riddell or Meg Rosoff, while Jacqueline Wilson, who was the Children’s Laureate between 2005 and 2007, is represented by only four novels.

Consulting the relevant staff, I discover that there’s a reason for the curious shape of The London Library’s children’s collection – bulges here, bald patches there – which is that it’s not really meant for children. Originally it was intended to accommodate the work of authors who usually wrote for adults, as a way of respecting their oeuvre. Donations are also accepted. There’s a bundle of children’s books gifted by Elaine Moss, which she put together as a selector for the Book Trust’s Books of the Year exhibitions between 1970 and 1980, and also in the course of her career as a librarian. This explains the large number of novels from writers such as Jane Gardam, Philippa Pearce and Alan Garner, as well as picture books published between 1960 and 1990 by Maurice Sendak, Shirley Hughes, Charles Keeping and others.

A separate bundle from the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education in Waterloo comprises illustrated fiction from the 1950s to the 1990s generally considered classics. But the bottom line is that most children’s books in the Library are the result of charity, not a dedicated budget. The Library recognises the increasing importance of children’s literature, but acquisitions are made ‘cautiously’ and ‘not really with children in mind’ .

It is for this reason that the children’s collection is not bigger, or more systematically thought through. It’s why it would disappoint a thorough investigation into the genre, although scholars will be well served by the bibliography section on the fifth floor and the history of childhood on the first. It’s because this is not a children’s library, which is a pity, because who enjoys an attic-full of magical bric-àbrac more than a child?

It makes me wonder what would happen if a child actually got in, and the more I think about it, the more clearly I see him. Don’t ask me where he comes from. Perhaps he crept in from Mason’s Yard. In any case he doesn’t ask anybody for help because he knows he’s committed a dreadful crime just by being here, and before long he’s scuttling between the stacks, climbing up endless higgledypiggledy flights of stairs (like the ones in George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin of 1872), hopelessly lost until he’s under the roof where he crawls into a passageway between the books to collect himself. It’s a cosy enough hiding place and, as luck would have it, he finds the reading matter to his taste, beginning in the ‘A’s with The Arabian Nights (the 1919 edition illustrated by Edmund Dulac). He likes Kipling and E. Nesbit, too, and by lunch is so busy devouring Richmal Crompton’s Just William (1922) that he only notices he’s hungry when a friendly librarian shows up and offers to share his sandwich.

That afternoon, while somebody tries to contact his mum, he is shown what’s in the safe, which has a secret combination. But the greatest excitement is that he is allowed to handle the books: a miniature alphabet beautifully illustrated by Kate Greenaway (1885); a copy of Hans Christian Andersen’s Danish Fairy Legends and Tales (1846); Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures Under Ground (1886), the original version of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; and a set of curios including The Puzzler, Being a Collection of Two Hundred and Thirty Eight Original Charades, Enigmas, Rebuses, Anagrams, Conundrums, Transpositions, etc. With Solutions (1845).

At tea-time there is still no sign of his mother, but the boy doesn’t much care because he is halfway through the Oxford Junior Encyclopaedia (1949–56). He only cries at closing time because he doesn’t want to leave, so they let him sleep over, and in this way he becomes a fixture, a sort of library mascot. Meals are delivered to him in the Members’ Room and occasionally he takes a breath of fresh air in St James’s Square. By the end of the week he has a better working knowledge of the children’s collection than anybody else in the building. He’s so hooked that when he is told his mother has been run over by a bus, or flattened by an escaped hippopotamus, he is only a little bit sorry. In any case, he’s used to it: a couple of years ago his father, a wealthy gentleman explorer, was eaten by a polar bear.

Having dispensed with Henty – all of him – the orphan settles down to an exhaustive study, working steadily through the Victorian golden age of children’s literature, then the Edwardians, then the flotilla of soothing post-First World War books which, in addition to Just William, include A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh (1926) and The House at Pooh Corner (1928) and Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons (1930). He doesn’t ask why T.H. White’s The Sword in the Stone (1938) is down in adult fiction along with J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (1954), or why Aesop’s Fables can only be found in L. Greek & Latin Lit. Trans., because he has never heard of these people and doesn’t miss them. He’s too busy enjoying what’s at hand.

This boy (soon the only permanent resident of the building, with his own headed stationery) is the collection’s ideal reader and, over the years, certain things fall into place. It occurs to him that many children’s stories figure a portal through which magic worlds are reached – a rabbit hole, a wardrobe, a door into a secret garden – and that these portals behave exactly like good books. He notices that in The Magician’s Nephew there is an in-between place containing many magic pools, a drowsy limbo which in its atmosphere closely resembles a library, and for him will always be The London Library. He understands that his literary life began in an attic on the sixth floor of No.14, St James’s Square and that from now on whatever he reads will be coloured by that original excitement.

And that is why, when he dies (childless himself), he leaves his fortune to his alma mater, fountain of all his learning and happiness, with an injunction either to lower the minimum age of membership to five, or to set up a special reading room, suitably soundproofed, possibly with padded walls. And having done so to search out and acquire the finest children’s books every year and to place them alongside the ones he loves best because he read them first: the ineradicable shape of his own childhood.