Popular Children’s Literature in Britain

Julia Briggs, Dennis Butts

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138276710
• eBook ISBN: 9781351910033
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The astonishing success of J.K. Rowling and other contemporary children's authors has demonstrated how passionately children can commit to the books they love. But this kind of devotion is not new. This timely volume takes up the challenge of assessing the complex interplay of forces that have created the popularity of children's books both today and in the past. The essays collected here ask about the meanings and values that have been ascribed to the term 'popular'. They consider whether popularity can be imposed, or if it must always emerge from children's preferences. And they investigate how the Harry Potter phenomenon fits into a repeated cycle of success and decline within the publishing industry. Whether examining eighteenth-century chapbooks, fairy tales, science schoolbooks, Victorian adventures, waif novels or school stories, these essays show how historical and publishing contexts are vital in determining which books will succeed and which will fail, which bestsellers will endure and which will fade quickly into obscurity. As they considering the fiction of Angela Brazil, Enid Blyton, Roald Dahl and J.K. Rowling, the contributors carefully analyse how authorial talent and cultural contexts combine, in often unpredictable ways, to generate - and sometimes even sustain - literary success.

Chapter 1
General Introduction

M. O. Grenby

The recent astonishing success of certain children's books makes a study of popularity and children's literature a very timely undertaking. J.K. Rowling's 'Harry Potter' books are, of course, the most prominent example. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2003) was the fastest selling book in UK history (5 million copies in one day); Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2005) had a larger print-run than any previous title in the USA (10 million copies). The spontaneity and universality of this acclaim and appeal, but equally its contrivance and pervasiveness, provides the impetus for a fresh investigation into the complex interplay of forces that come to bear on literary popularity. Such phenomenal success calls for a reassessment of our understanding and interpretation of the workings of popularity within children's culture. It has certainly reminded us, if we needed reminding, of just how passionately children care about their books, and just how potent a force the popularity of children's books can be.

Above all, such success demands a careful consideration of the historical perspective. The apparent step-change in the possibilities of popularity of children's books requires us to ask whether the Harry Potter phenomenon is unique and unprecedented, or simply part of a repeated cycle of success and decline within the publishing industry. Perhaps it might even be the inevitable consequence of children's reading habits – a tendency to surfeit on particular kinds of texts, to consume, almost fanatically, works by one particular author, or of one distinct genre. Critical discussion of the Harry Potter series has often asked whether it was the imaginative quality of Rowling's work, or simply their shrewd marketing that has made these books so successful. The chapters in this volume begin to answer these questions, not simply on behalf of the Harry Potter books, but on behalf of successful children's literature over the last two or three centuries. Taken individually, these chapters provide a series of case studies exploring the popularity of particular books, or particular types of books. Taken together, they explore how and why popularity in children's literature can be – and has been – created, sustained and lost, and whether the same processes which have made a cultural icon of Harry Potter have also been at work for as long as children's books have been published, read and loved.

The first step must be to define what constitutes popular children's literature, for the term 'popular' is peculiarly slippery. Dictionaries provide a web of related but potentially contradictory definitions. To complicate things further, the term is liable to be appropriated in the service of competing ideological interests. For some, the popular (popular music, popular literature, popular practices and beliefs) can threaten the highest achievements of a society – its art, its manners, its values and laws – and therefore should be curbed or reformed. For others, the popular is itself an expression of cultural identity – the spirit of the people – and as such must be protected and fostered.¹ For our purposes, there are two main ways of understanding popular literature. The first defines it as that which is suited to ordinary tastes, and to ordinary means: the quotidian and the 'low', the inexpensive and the ephemeral, or, as Victor Neuburg put it in his path-breaking study of popular literature, 'what the unsophisticated reader has chosen for pleasure'.² A quick glance through the contents page of this volume shows that some of the chapters seem to conform to this definition: the chapter on chapbooks, for instance. Alongside it, other chapters in the 'Old Tales Retold' section of this book chart the enduring popularity of traditional folk and fairy tales.

But several other chapters in this volume are predicated on an altogether different definition of the popular. Those in the Part II, for instance, that examine once celebrated but now neglected authors, or those in Part IV, that investigate the reasons for the appeal of particular bestsellers, define popular literature as that which has been well-liked or commercially successful, or both. Nor do we find in Arthur Mee's Children's Encyclopedia (discussed by Gillian Avery) that crude, unrefined and subversive quality so often associated with the literature of the street. Yet although these two basic definitions of popular literature seem in some ways to compete, in actual fact they have seldom been mutually exclusive. The 'vulgar' is often commercially successful; the quotidian could certainly be well-loved and enduring.

Slippery at the best of times, both these definitions of the popular become more problematic when we consider popular literature written specifically for children. For one thing, it is notoriously difficult to be sure who were the intended readers of the street literature, traditional tales, chapbooks and broadsides that constitute "popular literature' according to our initial definition. In his survey, Victor Neuburg did not risk an attempt to separate material addressed to children from that which was intended for adults.³ Is it possible, then, to talk of a distinct 'popular children's literature' in this sense? Yet, methodologically speaking, our second definition is no easier. For adult literature, popularity (in the sense of those books that were well-liked) can be estimated convincingly on the basis of sales. Since Sir Walter Scott's Waverley went through four editions within a year of publication, and Betty Crocker's Cookbook sold 20 million copies between 1969 and 1982, it may reasonably be argued that they were popular.⁴ But with children's books, sales figures (generated by the decisions of the adults who buy the books) do not necessarily correspond to the actual appeal of the text to its end-users (the children who read it), and who may have had little say as to which books were bought or borrowed for them.

On the other hand, if we discount sales figures, how are we to ascertain children's reading preferences at all? Records of children's opinions are scarce, especially before the twentieth century, and where they do exist they are scarcely reliable. Diaries, journals and letters purporting to reveal children's reading habits are prone to embellishment and a tendency to conform to what their authors think is expected of them or to how they would like to appear. Childhood memoirs, written many years later, are even less trustworthy. Like diaries, they often follow established rhetorical conventions, and include predictable and audience-pleasing lists of reading. They are further distorted by lapses of memory and the almost irresistible urge to edit autobiography. By and large, they tend to be produced by a self-selecting section of the population – writers, politicians, clergymen and so on: high-achievers in their adult lives, and thus hardly representative of the general run of children of that generation. The surveys of children's reading preferences, conducted from the late nineteenth century to the present, demonstrate comparable problems. For example, Edward Salmon included a survey of a thousand 'young ladies' in an article on 'What Girls Read' which he published in 1886, but having pondered the results, he could not 'help thinking that the list far from adequately represents what girls read'. Salmon surmised that the interviewees probably 'considered it proper to vote for such names as Scott and Dickens' (who easily top the list). Or perhaps, he suggested, they could not remember the names of those writers whose work they enjoyed more, so that they were forced to fall back on well-known authors whose names came instantly to mind.⁵ Surveys of juvenile reading habits conducted and published in the USA in the 1920s, by A.J. Jenkinson in Britain in 1940, by Frank Whitehead and his team in 1972 and Martin Coles and Christine Hall in 1994–95, not to mention the newspaper, broadcasting and bookshop-sponsored lists of favourite books which appear so often today, are all prone to exactly the same objections that Salmon identified more than a century ago.⁶

On the other hand, we should not dismiss these surveys just because they throw up results that look, at first sight somewhat unlikely. Salmon, for example, thought it 'absurd' to imagine that Thomas Carlyle was more popular with girls than, say, Black Beauty, as his raw data seemed to show. But as he himself pointed out, the availability of a book is just as important a factor in its popularity as its literary merits or its appeal for children. Dickens, Scott and Carlyle were 'probably in the school or home library, and hence easily get-at-able', he wrote.⁷ This observation further complicates any attempt to define popularity in terms of what children apparently enjoy. They are not, after all, typical consumers, and their preferences are not based on unlimited access to literature, but have to be constructed from what is obtainable, where and when they live, what they are given by others, or what they can afford. To a large extent, access to children's books has been determined by publishers, who decide what to keep in print and what prices to charge, and by parents, teachers and librarians, who regularly attempt to supervise distribution. Any attempt to define popularity in terms of children's preferences thus necessarily runs up against these external controls. Was Dickens really 55 times better liked by children than Lewis Carroll, as the Salmon survey indicated? Or was it because the only edition of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland then available cost the princely sum of six shillings? Macmillan did not issue their 'People's Edition' (without the gilt edges and fancy binding, and costing less than half the price of the standard edition) until 1887 – a year after Salmon's article was published. Similarly, does the fact that J.K. Rowling has not been among the top ten of the most-borrowed children's authors from British libraries suggest that she was less popular than Nick Butterworth, Dick King-Smith, Jacqueline Wilson, R.L. Stine, Enid Blyton and other writers whose books were lent out more often? Or was it simply that children possessed their own copies of the 'Harry Potter' books, so that they did not have to borrow them? Or even that library policies restricted the availability of Rowling's work?⁸

Since children's actual opinions are so difficult to ascertain, and their preferences so circumscribed by external factors, perhaps the most useful way to define popularity may, after all, be in terms of sales. Many of the chapters in this book provide information on the subject, either in the form of estimates of the number of copies sold in Britain and throughout the world, the size of print runs, the numbers of editions, or the sheer length of publication history. Further problems are, of course, inherent in the gathering and interpretation of this kind of information. Figures are not always available, and title pages claiming that 200,000 copies have been sold, or that one holds in one's hands the 'twenty-second edition', must be treated with a degree of scepticism. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for instance, new 'editions' were often really only new issues of old stock, with fresh title pages. But apart from such false claims, sales figures are also problematic as a dependable index of popularity because they bear so little relation to the degree of pleasure a child actually derives from a book. A favourite book may only be bought once, yet re-read daily, or nightly – until it is loved to death.⁹ How can mere sales figures register this kind of popularity? Likewise, a book may sell in vast numbers, but its readers may loathe it – a Latin textbook or a list of historical facts to be learned by heart, say, or an overly moral, or pious, or edifying story. Once again, this is a factor that sales figures cannot register. Such books may have been popular with purchasers rather than end-users. Above all, they have been popular with those who stand to gain from sales rather than user-approval: publishers, printers, booksellers and authors.

An example of a more structural kind of distortion of the sales-equals-popularity equation occurs in Aileen Fyfe's chapter on children's science books in this volume, where she discusses the role of the Religious Tract Society in bringing certain kinds of publications to vast audiences in the early and mid-nineteenth century. Estimates of sales for the most popular of the Society's children's tracts run comfortably into six figures – arguing that these short, didactic pamphlets (including those that mixed the traditionally unpopular subjects of science and religion), sold better than almost any other contemporary children's text. Were they actually as popular as, say, Hans Christian Andersen or Captain Marryat, or even Charlotte Yonge or Maty Louisa Charlesworth? Surely not, for in large part the tracts owed their huge print-runs to the Society's practice of pricing their publications at two or three shillings per hundred, the idea being that they could be bought in bulk, and then given away to children. What was true of Religious Tract Society publications was also true of many other kinds of children's literature – of Hannah More's 'Cheap Repository Tracts' (1795–98) which were also distributed in bulk to children and adults alike, and of many primers, catechisms and textbooks, designed for school and church. Heavily discounted and efficiently distributed, such books were printed in their hundreds of thousands. But it is also true in a more general sense that price and distribution networks have always played a large part in determining sales. In this way, publishers, together with those who bought tracts by the hundred to give away gratis, may be said to have imposed popularity on children.

Indeed, it might be argued that almost all children's books have been imposed on their end-users. It is a commonplace that children seldom choose their own books, but have them selected on their behalf by parents, relatives, teachers and other adults (though today this may be becoming less true). This process, benign though it often is, further problematises attempts to determine popularity from sales figures. It is dramatised most clearly in Kim Reynolds's chapter on reward books – that is, books given by schools or religious organisations to some or all of the children who attended. These were titles clearly imposed on their end-users, texts chosen in many cases, not to please the recipients, but to improve them or bind them to the organisation that awarded the prize, or to demonstrate the generosity of the donors. But, though less overt, exactly the same process was at work whenever adults selected books for children. It has often been observed, for example, that the popularity of children's texts is affected by a time-lag. Adults buy for their children the books they themselves had enjoyed a generation before. Even though the next generation may also enjoy the books their parents had been so pleased with, the difficulty of equating commercial success with genuine enjoyment is only too evident.

Further evidence of the frequent disjunction between books liked by children and books liked by their elders comes from the chapters on Enid Blyton and Roald Dahl in this volume. David Rudd points out how often parents, teachers, reviewers and librarians have disapproved of the dullness and repetitiveness of Blyton's books (two-thirds of the primary schools surveyed by Whitehead in 1971 refused to stock them).¹⁰ With Dahl. Peter Hollindale notes, it was the irreverence, darkness and even sadism of the text that adults disapproved of (though Dahl, as Hollindale shows, deliberately cultivated an appearan...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 General Introduction
• PART I OLD TALES RETOLD
• PART II FORGOTTEN FAVOURITES
• PART III POPULAR INSTRUCTION, POPULARITY IMPOSED
• PART IV THE FAMOUS THREE: BLYTON, DAHL AND ROWLING
• Further Reading
• Index