Ethics and Children's Literature

Claudia Mills

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781472440723
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317141396
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Exploring the ethical questions posed by, in, and about children's literature, this collection examines the way texts intended for children raise questions of value, depict the moral development of their characters, and call into attention shared moral presuppositions. The essays in Part I look at various past attempts at conveying moral messages to children and interrogate their underlying assumptions. What visions of childhood were conveyed by explicit attempts to cultivate specific virtues in children? What unstated cultural assumptions were expressed by growing resistance to didacticism? How should we prepare children to respond to racism in their books and in their society? Part II takes up the ethical orientations of various classic and contemporary texts, including 'prosaic ethics' in the Hundred Acre Wood, moral discernment in Narnia, ethical recognition in the distant worlds traversed by L'Engle, and virtuous transgression in recent Anglo-American children's literature and in the emerging children's literature of 1960s Taiwan. Part III's essays engage in ethical criticism of arguably problematic messages about our relationship to nonhuman animals, about war, and about prejudice. The final section considers how we respond to children's literature with ethically focused essays exploring a range of ways in which child readers and adult authorities react to children's literature. Even as children's literature has evolved in opposition to its origins in didactic Sunday school tracts and moralizing fables, authors, parents, librarians, and scholars remain sensitive to the values conveyed to children through the texts they choose to share with them.

PART I
The Dilemma of Didacticism: Attempts to Shape Children as Moral Beings

Chapter 1
Transmitting Ethics through Books of Golden Deeds for Children

Claudia Nelson

Historians of children’s literature in English rightly point to the mid-nineteenth century as the moment when didacticism began to go underground in children’s literature, gradually shouldered aside in the public esteem by ostentatiously anti-didactic texts from the comic verses of Edward Lear to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865). Yet the same moment also saw the birth of a small but recognizable, and unabashedly didactic, genre within children’s literature: the book of golden deeds. Most examples of such works date from between 1864, when Charlotte Yonge published her influential A Book of Golden Deeds, and the 1920s, clustering especially in the first two decades of the twentieth century; a number of these texts remain in current circulation among home-schoolers, and golden deeds books dating from later moments in the twentieth century may be found in both Christian and Muslim English-language religious publishing. Although within the Anglophone tradition of writing for children overt didacticism is now often seen as an artistic flaw,¹ children’s literature gatekeepers, from publishers to parents, teachers to prize committees, still scrutinize the ethics of literary works that target a youthful audience, and few consumers would argue that children’s literature as a whole no longer attempts to intervene in its readers’ moral development. The golden deeds book merits study as an unusually specialized and frank example of a much larger phenomenon.

This chapter is intended as an introduction to this now largely forgotten genre. My purpose here is briefly to describe representative examples, note formal characteristics, and explore the ethical topography of the form by identifying types of commonly profiled achievements and examining what the exalting of these achievements might have to tell us about the visions, both of childhood and of ethics, embraced by the compilers. To be sure, some authors fold into the category of “golden deeds” desirable but not necessarily virtuous qualities, from temperance to outstanding musical talent; for instance, one golden deeds verse notes,

The bath will be our chief delight;

We’ll tidy be from morn till night;

… Our teeth shall have the best of care,

As also shall our nails and hair. (Cassidy 70)

While laudable, these resolutions might not seem to signal outstanding character. Nevertheless, despite such momentary deviations, one thing that unites books of golden deeds across cultures is their overall emphasis on self-sacrifice—the “doing of something for somebody else,” to borrow a phrase from Indiana educator and golden deeds book editor James Baldwin (3).

Such sacrifice is particularly of a physical kind. As Yonge puts it, “there is nothing so noble as forgetfulness of self. Therefore it is that we are struck by hearing of the exposure of life and limb to the utmost peril, in oblivion, or recklessness of personal safety, in comparison with a higher object” (2). Often manifested not merely as risking one’s self but as experiencing mutilation or death, this emphasis may be seen as reflecting an adult effort to instill in the child an altruism-based ethical hierarchy in which physical pleasure and comfort have a considerably lower status than public approbation for one’s commitment to ideals such as patriotism and piety. In an era in which severe physical chastisement of childish misbehavior was increasingly frowned upon, books of golden deeds instead encouraged child readers to imagine the voluntary acceptance of pain for others’ sake as a hallmark of the admirable person.

At this juncture, an overview of the texts in my sample will be useful. Unlike the related forms of religious tracts and episodic fictions about groups of children striving to be good (such as Maria Charlesworth’s evangelical Ministering Children of 1854, in which all efforts at virtuous deeds succeed brilliantly, and E. Nesbit’s 1901 comic novel The Wouldbegoods, in which they usually result in humiliation for the perpetrators), the tales making up these collections tend to be short. Typically, they deal with a single occurrence per tale; they focus on figures with whom the reader is expected to identify because of a commonality of national origin, age, or religion, or because the compiler asserts that “everyone should know” these figures; and they make claims of veracity—that is, they are presented as recounting the deeds not of imaginary exemplars but rather of real people, many but not all of them children. “While some of these narratives may have the appearance of romance,” noted Baldwin in 1907, “yet they are all believed to be true” (4). As the genre of the golden deeds book clearly exists alongside adjacent genres—to those listed above, we might add saints’ lives for children and biographies of figures noted for their service to humanity²—I am for the purposes of this chapter defining it narrowly as embracing only those works that include the term “golden deeds” in their titles or subtitles, although if space permitted, this definition could certainly be revised to be more inclusive. This examination, then, draws on the following representative list, arranged here in order of publication:

1. Yonge’s A Book of Golden Deeds of All Times and All Lands (1864), which went through many printings and was frequently used as a prize book in school or Sunday school settings, as well as being cited in golden deeds books published decades later (see, for example, Baldwin 4).

2. The World’s Heroes: A Storehouse of Heroic Actions, Golden Deeds, and Stirring Chronicles (c. 1900), edited by public intellectual Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch at about the time that he produced the first Oxford Book of English Verse. The World’s Heroes met with sufficient acclaim that Quiller-Couch followed it in 1911 with The Roll Call of Honour: A New Book of Golden Deeds.

3. Baldwin’s An American Book of Golden Deeds (1907), whose author was an indefatigable producer of textbooks. According to the Baldwin Online Children’s Project, “at one time it was estimated that of all the school books in use in the United States, over half had been written or edited by him” (n. pag.).

4. “A Child’s Book of Golden Deeds,” a section of the American edition of the children’s encyclopedia The Book of Knowledge, a work designed to provide the reader with “character, and knowledge, and influence” (1: vi). Excerpts from this section, published from 1910 through the early 1960s, were picked up for reprinting in other venues well into the twentieth century. In 1947, for instance, the Toledo Blade published golden deeds tales such as “The Story of William Tell,” also making available (for 25 cents including sales tax and postage) a hundred-page scrapbook in which daily clippings of Book of Knowledge snippets could be stored, and as late as 1967 Franklin Watts published Golden Deeds and Stories to Know, “by the Editors of the Book of Knowledge.”

5. Amy B. Barnard’s The Golden Book of Youth: Noble Deeds of Boys and Girls, published in 1910, the same year that she wrote The Home Training of Children, and focused specifically on heroes aged twenty-one or under, including children as young as three and four. Barnard also contributed articles on education (among other topics) to various periodicals.

6. The anonymous Golden Deeds: Stories from History, Retold for Little Folk, undated but in print no later than 1913.

7. The Golden Deed Book: A School Reader (1913), by Yale professor Elias Hershey Sneath, Dean of the Episcopal Theological School George Hodges, and Associate Superintendent of New York City Public Schools Edward Lawrence Stevens. This volume, aimed at eighth graders, is the culmination of a curricular series designed for different reading levels; the other five titles in the series include The Golden Ladder Book and The Golden Path Book. All the selections in Sneath’s School Reader encourage good behavior, although some do so by discouraging bad behavior—from smoking to drinking to the arrogance chronicled in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias”—and thus might, like the panegyrics to cleanliness quoted earlier, seem to some readers to fall outside the penumbra of the “golden deed.”

8. Annah Robinson Watson’s Golden Deeds on the Field of Honor: Stories of Young American Heroes (1914), which focuses on the Civil War, primarily but not exclusively from a Southern perspective. The volume concludes with “advertisements of a few of the Macmillan books on kindred subjects” (n. pag.), which do not consist of leisure reading for the young but rather of textbooks in English and “moral training.”

9. G. A. Leask’s Golden Deeds of Heroism: A Popular Book of Bravery and Devotion in the Great War (1918), which, its preface notes, doubles as “a running narrative of the leading events of the war, into each phase of which is woven the story of the great deeds falling to that period…. The arrangement of the book, it is hoped, will provide a permanent and popular history of the Great War, as well as a gallery of outstanding heroes” (n. pag.).

10. Golden Deeds in Character Education (1921), by Masillon Alexander Cassidy, Superintendent of Public Schools for Lexington, Kentucky, whom Richard E. Day and Lindsey N. DeVries describe as “part of a new breed of progressive educators who joined with the business community to declare that a modest amount of schooling would prepare all for a life of equality, not by restructuring society, but by making each individual better” (121). Cassidy launched a curricular innovation in which Lexington students were to remain “continually on the lookout for deeds which illustrate neatness, politeness, gentleness, kindness, love, truthfulness, duty, fidelity, obedience, nobility, gratitude, forgiveness, honesty, confession, self-control, honor, courage, modesty, self-respect, prudence, good name, manners, health, success, labor, temperance, thrift, reverence, patriotism, and other desirable qualities” (Cassidy 20–21); students were to report back to their classmates, and after due discussion, certified Golden Deeds would be entered in the class Golden Deeds Book, which, in turn, would compete with its counterparts from other classes and schools.

11. Tales of Golden Deeds: Teacher’s Manual, by Mildred O. Moody (1923), which explains how to use tales of golden deeds, many taken from the Bible, with an audience of nine-year-olds. Moody recommends appealing to qualities she sees as instinctual in the child, namely the desire for approval and the wish to make others happy, in order to develop the more complex qualities of sympathy, duty, and doing “the thing that’s hard … even if it makes us unhappy … just because it is right” (6).

12. Maulvi Muhammad Yakub Khan’s The Golden Deeds of Islam (n.d.), of which the second edition circulated in the 1930s; the 1946 third edition of this title was reprinted in Trinidad in 1964 and in that form is available online. In addition to teaching such lessons as charity, courage in battle, and the importance of keeping one’s word even if it costs one’s life, Khan schools his readers in cultural attitudes such as the following: “As a class [Jewish] money-lenders are devoid of all humane feelings. They are notorious for their pound of flesh” (14).

13. Rashid Ahmad Chaudhri’s Golden Deeds of Muslims (1975), which, alongside the golden deeds associated with the Prophet Mohammed and accounts of the devotion and honorable behavior of his followers, also provides a brief outline of Islam and allied study questions such as “Name the five pillars of Islam and explain each of them.”

This list suggests that the natural didacticism of the book of golden deeds has led historically to a considerable overlap with secular or religious educational enterprises, even though early examples such as Yonge’s were not necessarily created for school use.³ Sometimes this overlap occurs via a factual emphasis (the direction to “Name the five pillars of Islam,” for instance, or the construction of a history of the battles of the Great War), but more commonly the shared ground has to do with character education. The latter term emerged in American schools in the early twentieth century and, as James S. Leming notes, has at various times embraced a formal “Children’s Morality Code,” the “moral and values education” of the 1960s, and, more recently, drug and sex education (63, 64). Both Leming and Madonna M. Murphy refer to the American Institute of Character Education in San Antonio, Texas, originally established in 1942 as a children’s fund before growing into a foundation that for more than a quarter-century disseminated nationwide, for teacher-led student discussion, “a set of stories that illustrate values such as honesty, kindness, and generosity” (Leming 67). Their accounts are strikingly reminiscent of accounts of similar but substantially earlier undertakings, up to and including the emphasis on scientific or quasi-scientific evaluation of results. Murphy notes that in the late twentieth century “The San Antonio Independent School District administered pre-tests of the Piers-Harris Children’s Self-Concept Scale to three schools using the Character Education Curriculum, and three control schools not using the curriculum,” finding that “significant changes favoring the experimental schools were noted in many areas of self-concept” (205). Similarly, in 1913 the Golden Deed Book: A School Reader could position itself as pedagogically and scientifically cutting edge, as its methods are “based on a questionnaire”—the authors italicize this word for greater impressement—“circulated among the teachers of ten cities” and “supported, also, by investigations relating to the moral nature in the field of child psychology, and the psychology of the first years of adolescence” (Sneath et al. v), which better enabled it to “satisfy the almost universal demand for systematic graded instruction in morals in the schools” (Sneath et al. vi).

In the context of the scientific aspirations of American educational theory, golden deeds books’ frequent emphasis on physical suffering, including injury, mutilation, and death, seems particularly worthy of note as a mingling of what is often a Christian subtext with a vision of the sacrificial duty that even the secular individual may owe to the community. The collection of golden deeds included in volume 3 of the Book of Knowledge, for instance, consists of one anecdote about a Russian aristocrat’s servant who throws himself to a pack of ravening wolves so that his master’s family may escape; another about a group of Italian children who agree to be taken hostage by their town’s enemies in order to save the community and who are, in turn, saved by the intervention of a troop of angels bearing fiery spears; and a third about an early martyr named Beatrice who rescues her brothers’ bodies for Christian burial and is subsequently strangled by judicial fiat for “refusing to worship idols” (3: 964). The movement from Russia to Italy, adult to child to adolescent, male to mixed-gender to female, advises the reader that the values profiled here are universal, while simultaneously, the positioning of the heroes as social outsiders (a servant in a status-conscious culture, children in a world that privileges adults, a woman in patriarchal pre-Christian Rome) suggests that voluntary surrender to the more powerful may confer moral authority upon society’s outliers.

As a group, then, golden deeds books implicitly endorse the sentiments of Aristotle, who writes in “The Aim of Man” that “The securing of one individual’s good is cause for rejoicing, but to secure the good of a nation or of a city-state is nobler and more divine”; Jeremy Bentham, who asserts that “It is the greatest good to the greatest number of people which is the measure of right and wrong”; and, on a more popular level, Mr. Spock in the 1982 movie Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, who, very much in the golden deeds tradition, exposes himself to a lethal dose of radiation in order to save his comrades on the starship Enterprise, explaining, “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.” This collectivist ideal has in some circles today become imbued with longing less for a society dedicated to collectivism than for one dedicated to idealism itself. In other words, a quality that seems particularly admirable to the compilers of golden deeds books is that the heroes profiled have acted of their own free will against their self-interest. They have chosen sacrifice rather than having it forced upon them by some Benthamite overlord, have defined and embraced their own understanding of duty rather than becoming the passive victims of someone else’s vision. And the measure of free will is excess; the karat measure of the gold, as it were, is determined by the extent that the doers of deeds go above and beyond the position that the average reader might imagine taking.

Interestingly enough, in golden deeds books self-sacrifice is also almost always measured in physical terms. Readers learn about rescues or attempted rescues from bodily peril rather than about, say, a devoted family member overworking in order to send a child to school. Here, we encounter a paradox: in its original heyday as the product of a progressive, child-oriented approach to schooling, the character education of the early twentieth century did not normally consider corporal punishment desirable, yet the chastisement of the body is a central preoccupation of the golden deeds book. Consider the story of Catherine Douglas, loyal subject of King James I of Scotland, whose tale recurs in several books of golden deeds. The shortest version appears in the...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I The Dilemma of Didacticism: Attempts to Shape Children as Moral Beings
• Part II Ethical Themes in Classic and Contemporary Texts
• Part III Ethical Criticism of Children’s Literature
• Part IV Ethical Responses to Children’s Literature: Identification, Recognition, Adaptation, Conversation
• Index