Peter Hunt
Meanwhile, research continues worldwide!
Out in the rolling (and currently extremely well-watered)
hills of Virginia, I asked some of the graduate students taking the MA and MFA
in Children’s Literature at Hollins University, Roanoke, how they saw the
relationship between readers reading in books,
and readers reading about readers
reading in books. We are engaged in an experimental – and, it has to be said –
mind-expanding (or boggling) course, in which each student produces (part of)
an annotated edition of a classic children’s book. With an astonishing range of
books being looked at in detail, I thought we might find some striking evidence
about attitudes to reading – and we did – although the conclusion that it’s
dangerous to generalise was not exactly helpful for my thesis.
In general terms I expected that the portrayal of readers in books might gradually decline over the
20th century, as reading
habits changed. But it ain’t necessarily so.
I would have expected that Pollyanna (Eleanor H. Porter, 1913), the apotheosis of the girls’
book of the late 19th century would have displayed a healthy
preoccupation with books (after all, Little
Women does) – but what little reference there is, is not entirely positive.
On the other hand, in Thimble Summer
(Elizabeth Enright, 1938), set in rural Wisconsin, books are a natural part of
the landscape – two characters are locked in the local library; while Esther
Forbes’s historical novel Johnny Tremain (1943) is totally suffused with the idea of
the book and the virtue of the book.
Then again, it is hardly surprising that books and reading
figure largely in Edmondo De Amico’s educational-political novel Cuoire (1886), one of the two great Italian children’s classics of the 19th
century, or that respect is shown for the wisdom of books in Lloyd Alexander’s The Book of Three (1964). Equally, it was
predictable that reading figures only marginally in Wilson Rawls’s Where the Red Fern Grows (1961) and Judy
Blume’s Are You There God? It’s Me,
Margaret (1970) and then as a means to an end (acquiring a coonhound or
learning certain things from Playboy).
But three examples – which seemed, ironically, to prove my
thesis – surprised me. I would have expected Joan Aiken’s The Wolves of Willoughby Chase (1962), written by an author from a
very bookish background, to include readers and books; E. L. Konigsburg’s From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs
Basil E. Frankweiler (1967) is an outstanding example of the of the ‘smart
kids’ novels of the 1960s and 1970s and yet when the child characters do
encounter books – for research purposes - they soon get bored; and, despite
Roald Dahl’s claim that he would do anything to put books (presumably not just
his own) into the hands of children, as he demonstrates in Matilda (1988), there is no reference to books and reading in The Witches (1983).
It would seem that any over-reaching thesis is going to be
seriously undermined by specific examples, and the Hollins students were on the
whole quietly surprised by my overall idea that books were less important in
books than they had been. Among a formidable array of evidence which they
brought forward, they patiently pointed out that there was a very obvious example
that contradicted my argument, which I might possibly have come across. Without
the reading of books, and respect for books, which are repositories of wisdom
and redemption and salvation, the ‘Harry Potter’ series could scarcely exist.
(And, of course, where would Terry Pratchett’s Unseen University be without its
multi-dimensional library?)
But are books-in-books now primarily aids to knowledge for
the characters (and have they always been so), or are they the prime-movers of
the plots? Is there, as some of the students suggested, a backlash against the
multi-media electronic world, and a resurgence of the book as an object of
genuine interest?
Watch this space.
With thanks to my
amazing, intelligent, hard-working, and tolerant class: Cecilia, Courtney,
Emily, Fatima, Gwen, Jennifer, Kacey, Kelly, Linda, Shannon, and Tara.