by Peter Hunt
We have been looking at examples of images of the child
reader in the book, being read by the
child reader outside the book –
although ‘outside the book’ isn’t really an adequate description of what is
going on, because if the book is a success then the reader is, in some strange
way, absorbed into the book. But when
this happens, and the reader with the book identifies with the reader in the
book, how and why does it happen?
One theory was put forward in another classic critical text from
the golden age of the unique children’s literature journal Signal - Peter Hollindale’s Signs
of Childness in Children’s Books (Thimble Press, 1997). What characterises
a successful text for children, Hollindale suggested, was the presence of ‘childness’
– the quality of being a child – and it is a quality that is ‘shared ground …
between adult and child.’
He goes on:
I wish to argue … that childness
is the distinguishing property of a text in children’s literature … and it is
also the property that the child brings to the reading of a text. At its best,
the encounter is a dynamic one. The childness of the text can change the
childness of the child, and vice versa. On other occasions of reading the
encounter is only a mirroring – conservative and confirmatory.


Nevertheless, the validation of reading by the presence of reading children in fiction sends a strong empathetic message. And as Hollindale observes, this is uniquely an attribute of the book.
It is precisely the conjunction
of exterior with interior action…which gives the children’s book its special
place in helping a reader to build and diversify her sense of childhood
possibility…. The representation of childhood for children [on film and
television] is sparse and incomplete…Children who do not read books are exposed
to a fictional life made up almost exclusively of adults. What we see is – to
use an ugly word for a fairly ugly phenomenon – the defictionalising of
childhood.
The acknowledgement of shared ‘childness’ through shared,
empathetic reading is a powerful antidote to this accelerating trend.