Why Children’s Books?

January 29, 2025 at 10:48PM

“Children’s book” is a fraught term, at once diminishing a title’s concerns and narrowing its audience. “Children’s books merit grown-up conversation,” Mac Barnett, author of dozens of picture books, wrote in 2011. “Grown-up conversation doesn’t mean asking kids to leave the room.” Katherine Rundell traces the evolution of English-language children’s books from blunt moral instruments to vehicles for more expansive thinking, working in a delightful appreciation of Tove Jansson’s Moomin series and a tidy history of Tolstoy’s works for younger readers. “The blurb on the back of my edition says the stories will ‘captivate and delight children of all ages,'” writes Rundell, “always assuming that those children have a more than usually potent appetite for dead puppies.”

The very first children’s books in English were instruction manuals for good behaviour. One of the earliest, The Babees Book, from around 1475, is a list of instructions: ‘Your nose, your teeth, your nails, from picking keep.’ It’s striking how many of the early children’s conduct manuals focused on nose-picking. The 15th-century Little Children’s Little Book orders that you should not ‘wipe your nose or nostrils, else men will say you are come of churls’, while Urbanitatis instructs Tudor children to keep their hands ‘from dirtying the cloth/There-on thou shalt not thy nose wipe.’ Urbanitatis was used in the education of the Duke of Norfolk, grandfather of Henry VIII’s most unfortunate wives, Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard, to whom he may have passed on impeccable nasal hygiene. The text does not, alas, teach how to avoid being beheaded by a king.

Over the decades, however, children’s literature slowly uncoupled itself from strident moralising and nostril anxiety. Women’s suffrage and trade unions gained strength, childhood literacy rates soared, and children’s books became more than ways to regulate and admonish the child heart. They began to take the actual desires of actual children into account. As grown-ups came to recognise the childhood imagination as something unique to itself, something wild and immense, so the books, in turn, became wild and immense offerings. From being engines of control, they began offering visions of how various good and evil might be. They work to disprove the Anna Karenina principle that happy families are all alike: they offer a multiplicity of models for what delight might look like.

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from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/01/29/why-childrens-books/
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Why Children’s Books?