Enid Blyton and Arthur Ransome may portray cosier times for children, but more recent reads are redressing the balance
by: Julia Eccleshare
"At a recent discussion of childhood during the past 50 years one speaker said he thought everyone remembered their childhood as being like something out of Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons. Do you think how childhood is portrayed in classic children's books has affected how we think childhood used to be? If so, has it given us too rosy a view of it?"
It is interesting how most people think that childhood is so different from one generation to another and how universally it is thought that children are always getting worse!
Memories of childhood are probably pretty partial. Individually, they are based often based on the best bits, such as special outings or treats. Holidays usually feature and these are reinforced by family photos which seem to confirm that the sun shine a remarkable amount during childhood. Collectively, they are influenced by known facts of the time such as how schools were organised, what shopping or transport was like and the headlines of "average" family dynamics.
Beyond the individual and collective facts, stories about childhood in books are handed down as blueprints of collective behaviour. Enid Blyton's huge-selling family adventures, including The Famous Five and The Secret Seven series, both of which ran into many titles, offered children the chance to identify with adventures in the countryside which were probably just as out of reach in reality as a term at Hogwarts is to today's children. Richmal Crompton's Just William and its sequels also showed children "playing out", inventing activities around their daily lives and well out of sight of their parents.
These tales came to epitomise childhood of the time. When asked about their childhood many think they spent a lot of time outdoors and without adult supervision. But did they really? It may be that they just identified too much with the children they read about.
The rosy, cosy vision of the 1950s and 1960s - often thought of as a golden age of children's fiction - was challenged from the 1970s onwards by an increasing emphasis on books showing different kinds of childhood. These included titles such Jean MacGibbon's Hal, one of the first multi-cultural children's books which featured an Afro-Caribbean girl living in a tower block, and Gene Kemp's award-winning The Turbulent Term of Tyke Tiler set in a village school and with a girl as its sparky heroine – a far cry from the boy-dominated, private school settings which lay behind Arthur Ransome's children, for example.
The huge success of Jacqueline Wilson's The Story of Tracy Beaker and her very many other bestselling titles frequently showed contemporary children living in challenging circumstances - bed-and breakfast accommodation, with step-families, in dysfunctional families with ineffective parents. These stories gave more children the chance to find a life like their own in a story. They have often been attacked for being too miserable in their portrayal of childhood but the reality is that they probably reflected a far broader range of experiences more truthfully.
When set against the rosy glow of Ransome and Blyton, will historians and sociologists using children's stories as source material see childhood at the turn of the 20th century as grim? Quite possibly, as children's books certainly reflect the society they come from. However, I would hope that they will be also be viewed as the fictional representations they have been created to be.
from: Guardian
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