Jacqueline Wilson

Lucy Pearson

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781350308978
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Over the last 20 years, Jacqueline Wilson has published well over 100 titles and has become firmly established in the landscape of Children's Literature. She has written for all ages, from picture books for young readers to young adult fiction and tackles a wide variety of controversial topics, such as child abuse, mental illness and bereavement. Although she has received some criticism for presenting difficult and seemingly 'adult' topics to children, she remains overwhelmingly popular among her audience and has won numerous prizes selected by children, such as the Smarties Book Prize. This collection of newly commissioned essays explores Wilson's literature from all angles. The essays cover not only the content and themes of Wilson's writing, but also her success as a publishing phenomenon and the branding of her books. Issues of gender roles and child/carer relationships are examined alongside Wilson's writing style and use of techniques such as the unreliable narrator. The book also features an interview with Jacqueline Wilson herself, where she discusses the challenges of writing social realism for young readers and how her writing has changed over her lengthy career.

1

A Publishing Phenomenon: The Marketing and Branding of Jacqueline Wilson

Julia Eccleshare

Jacqueline Wilson’s writing career has been long, extremely productive and outstandingly successful. She has made an unparalleled contribution to children’s literature in two major respects: she has brought an unusually large number of children to reading because they so love her books, and she has pushed forward the frontiers of what it is possible to write about. In doing so she has not only created a particular niche for herself which can be defined as the Jacqueline Wilson ‘brand’, but she has also had a long-lasting effect on what can loosely be defined as ‘family fiction’. For any single author to have such an impact is unusual; it gives both Wilson’s books and her very public role an exceptional status and power in twentieth- and twenty-first-century children’s literature.

From the current vantage point, it would be easy to assume that Wilson’s success was assured from the outset. That would be a misreading of the facts. The exceptional place that Wilson holds in children’s books and her very long tenure of that place was created by a number of factors which, just because their impact has been so remarkable, should not be thought of as pre-determined or even assured. What may now look like a well-planned path to success took hold slowly. Most importantly, its origins lie in Wilson’s quality and integrity as an author: without the appeal of her books none of it would have happened. That, allied to her tenacity of purpose and the exceptional energy which led to an unusually large output, is the starting point of her success. But those attributes alone might not have been sufficient to have given Wilson the role she has attained. As with most exceptions to rules, her unique status can never be readily replicated or even entirely explained. It was shaped by a combination of deliberate actions by Wilson herself, her publishers and some critics; and by the special opportunities presented by the publishing and educational context of the time.

At the outset Wilson had no blueprint to follow in building her career, although with the benefit of hindsight it can be seen that it was forged in a number of ways: her ability to set her work in an entirely contemporary context, the needs of the readers at the time and Wilson’s fulfilment of those needs, the role her publisher played in understanding the special quality of her books and positioning them in the market accordingly, and finally, the burgeoning of children’s literature in the UK which took place during the time that she was writing. Her own work and reactions to it from both readers and commentators contribute to an understanding of how that came about and the role she and others played in creating the identity which led to her being marketable as a ‘brand’ in ways that reached far beyond the usual confines of a children’s author.

Wilson’s writing career and the publishing context in which it was developed is well-documented in her autobiography and has also been much discussed by her during her very many media appearances.¹ In all these accounts, she describes a solitary childhood which she enlivened by ‘inventing’ play companions and by writing stories. ‘The Maggotts’, written in an exercise book in her neatly formed, if somewhat loopy, nine-year-old hand, could be called the beginning of her career as a writer; Wilson certainly attributes her interest in her future career to that book and other childish attempts at writing. Her career began more formally and for wider public consumption with her first job as a writer for D. C. Thomson, the Dundee-based newspaper and magazine publishers. Seeing an advertisement calling for submissions, Wilson got the job on the strength of a piece she sent them describing the experience and feelings of a luckless girl at a disco. She was 17 and still at technical college but keen to leave home and to get into writing. She worked on the woman’s magazine Red Letter contributing short stories, horoscopes and articles about pregnancy and babies, and also writing the readers’ letters as there were never enough sent in. As Wilson said in Talking Books,

I was eighteen and had never been pregnant. It’s amazing what you can do with a bit of research and imagination! It was an invaluable training, because it taught me not to be precious about writing, to be adaptable, to turn my hand to anything and to write whenever it was needed.²

Wilson arrived at D. C. Thomson shortly before the company launched Jackie in January 1964. A weekly magazine filled with stories, ‘real-life experiences’, fashion tips and celebrity gossip, Jackie was the most influential magazine for teenage girls for almost three decades. Jackie launched with a circulation of 350,000 copies a week and peaked with sales figures of almost 606,000 copies a week before closing in 1993. Following Wilson’s enormous success with the same age group an apocryphal story that the magazine had been named after her seemed highly plausible and was widely adopted. However, in an interview in the Observer (23 March 2014) Wilson set the record straight:

The men in charge were Mr Cuthbert and Mr Tate, and on Friday mornings I had to take them their coffee and give them a report of what I’d been doing. On one of these mornings they told me they’d named it after me, and I was charmed. But later on, someone else said it had been nothing to do with me: the name was in the air thanks to Jackie O.³

Jackie Onassis, formerly Jackie Kennedy, wife of the then US president, was herself one of the female icons of the time. Despite the lack of absolute truth in it, Wilson went on to say that she continued to bring the story out as it is such a good one and Jackie, the magazine, had been read by all the mothers of the girls who loved her books.

From such a vantage point within teen culture it could look surprising that apart from a single children’s title, Ricky’s Birthday (1973), a story about inner-city children which was published in the Nippers series for beginner readers, Wilson’s first books were adult crime novels and a couple of radio plays. But a look at the market for teenage fiction at the time shows that the impulse to write for it would have been considerably less strong than it would be today. While magazines for teenagers thrived, teenage fiction in the UK was in its infancy; even over a decade later the entry on Teenage Novels in The Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature (1984) reads, ‘Teenage novels, often described as “young adult” or “adolescent” fiction, are, generally speaking, a modern phenomenon.’⁴ It identified this phenomenon as a largely US strand of publishing which, as it had developed from J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951), naturally led authors such as Paul Zindel, Judy Blume and Robert Cormier to create ‘Holden Caulfields of their own, with comic selfregarding attitudes and complicated feelings about the adult world.’⁵ Carpenter and Prichard’s examples of British authors in this category include K. M. Peyton, whose Flambards series and Pennington novels are lightly dismissed as belonging to the well-established genres of romantic fiction and school stories respectively. It concludes with Jill Paton Walsh and John Rowe Townsend who are described as typical of their generation in ‘producing “adolescent” books which deal with their heroes’ quests for personal identity, but do so in a reflective “interior” manner derived from the mainstream of the English novel rather than from Salinger’.⁶

Definitions like this reflected the widespread view of UK critics in the 1970s and 1980s most of whom were slow to value the UK’s own ‘realist’ teenage novel. The result was that the UK market was dominated by the US authors Carpenter names above, who were imported alongside titles from Sweden such as Gunnel Beckman’s The Girl Without a Name (1967), a story of contemporary teenage life, and Mia Alone (1973), which airs the dilemmas of a young girl facing an abortion, while the UK authors were paid less attention. Blume – to whom Wilson is most often compared, as both speak directly to teenage girls about their complex inner emotions – was quickly a bestselling author achieving widespread praise as early as 1970 when Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret was named as Outstanding Book of the Year in the NewYork Times.⁷ With the publication of Forever (1975), her groundbreaking title which is cited as the first title for teenagers to describe intercourse overtly, Blume became a household name as well as one of the most banned authors in schools and libraries.

It was against that background and its implicit expectations about what British teenagers would read that Wilson’s first ‘children’s’ books were published. The switch from writing for adults to writing for younger readers was not as extreme as it might look, as Wilson’s characters in the later titles were 15-year-olds who, in those days, were on the edge of leaving school if not deemed ‘clever’ and so were facing the tensions around the ending of childhood and the step into adulthood. Although these books were categorised so differently in the market and therefore involved a repositioning of Wilson in readers’ minds, Wilson herself saw the switch as a natural one given that each of her adult titles had a prominent child character in it. The move to writing for and about children also fitted with her own often-repeated accounts of how she wrote stories as a child and the games she created to play with the child characters she imagined.

Unrelated in terms of character or specific content but closely linked in terms of style and subject matter, the six early novels are: Nobody’s Perfect (1982), Waiting for the Sky to Fall (1983), The Other Side (1984), Amber (1986), The Power of the Shade (1987) and This Girl (1988). These books are dark stories with rough edges and unhappiness bubbling not far below the surface. They all centre round a girl although there are boys in them – necessary where love is burgeoning as in Nobody’s Perfect and Amber. As Ika Willis’s essay in this volume shows, they all contain much that is recognisable in Wilson’s later and more successful stories, but the telling of them is bleaker and pitched at teenagers rather than younger readers. Well-constructed stories with believable characters, they are about family, friends, class, sex, identity – all the issues of adolescence which the characters tackled in a convincing if a rather too sober way. While in terms of subject matter they were close to contemporaneous titles such as Robert Westall’s The Scarecrows (1981), an angry story of family breakdown as seen through the eyes of a teenage boy which won the 1981 Carnegie Medal, and Madame Doubtfire (1987), Anne Fine’s wildly humorous but nonetheless hard-hitting story on the same subject, they lacked a distinctive enough voice to make Wilson either a prize winner or readily identifiable to consumers. Critics were, however, noticing this newcomer. In Children’s Books of theYear 1986, Julia Eccleshare selected Amber for inclusion and in its annotated entry praised Wilson’s ability to recognise contemporary lives – in this case Amber’s rejection of her hippy parents: ‘At last a book which sets today’s teenagers in a proper context, with parents whose experiences reflect the particular time they lived through rather than some generalised idea of “parent” or “adult”.’⁸ However, the books were not of enough significance as a body of work to earn Wilson a place in the 1987 revised edition of Written for Children, for example.⁹

In the 1980s that omission was not so remarkable and it partly reflects the state of the publishing and distribution of children’s books at the time. The way children’s books reached the market was slow. It involved many adult intermediaries – parents, teachers and librarians, booksellers – and a laboriously constructed information system of print-based reviews and a handful of prizes. Only three years later, Wilson’s books had gained wider critical respect individually, and her work overall could be identified by common themes. Writing an entry for her in Twentieth-Century Children’s Writers based largely on those titles, Robert Leeson, a children’s writer who was himself a well-respected chronicler of contemporary children’s lives, describes this substantial contribution to teenage fiction in this way: ‘Wilson is one of those authors who can show from the inside how teenagers feel and who prove that British children’s literature no longer depends upon American authors for credible stories in this age group.’¹⁰ Wilson’s books already included the core elements she was later to distil more sharply, which led Leeson to describe her work as ‘contemporary […] with a strong emphasis on dialogue and inner feelings’.¹¹

While Wilson’s teen titles were beginning to attract critical success, they were not making a significant impact on the readers in shops. Fortunately, even as she was publishing the above titles, she was also writing in other ways and for other readers. Unusual for Wilson in having a boy as the main character, The Killer Tadpole (1984) was a light-hearted story for those embarking on solo reading. Pitched just a bit older, How to Survive Summer Camp (1985) revealed Wilson’s unerring ability to understand the critical importance of friendship for pre-teens. Capturing the different voices of her characters through first-person narration and speaking directly to her readers, it is here that the origins of what was to become her trademark voice lie (it is no coincidence that this is the only one of her early titles to remain in print). Other titles from the same period such as Glubbslyme (1987) showed other skills; her ability to write about magic, for example.

Published in paperback with attractive covers, these titles were the ones which began to put Wilson directly into the hands of her readers. They were funny and easy to read, a perfect combination for the difficult ‘middle-grade’ area of the market. In terms of reading age and complexity of characterisation at the time they seemed slight compared with Wilson’s teen novels. As her writing developed and her success began to be established, these stories with their perky tone and light touch are clearly as central to her writing as the darker tones of her teenage novels. By the end of the 1980s, Wilson was displaying two different but related styles in her writing, which between them were attracting critical notice and a loyal following of readers. Also evident was the creative energy and ability to write at speed that was to characterise her years of prodigious success.

Breakthrough book

Those almost two decades of Wilson’s writing and the very different way in which her books were received are frequently forgotten by the contemporary headlines that surround Wilson today. This long apprenticeship must ...