Stories in Space: The Geographies of Children's Literature

Abstract

This paper argues for the uses of children's literature in the study of children's geographies. It focuses in particular on the nature of representations of urban space in children's literature, a genre more usually connected with the pastoral and explores the narrative strategies and approaches of children's literature which does venture into the city. I propose five modes in which the city is written for children and ask, from the position of literary criticism which distrusts children's stories' ability to speak for children, how far these modes can be said to coincide with children's lived experience of the city.

Keywords:

• Children's literature
• childhood
• urban
• pastoral

Acknowledgements

I am most grateful to the anonymous referees of this article who provided very constructive and valuable advice on earlier drafts. I would also like to thank panels at the Literary London Conference 2005 at Kingston University and the Emerging Issues in Children's Geographies 2005 at Brunel University, as well as the research seminar at the Centre for International Research in Childhood: Literature, Culture and Media at Reading University, for their useful discussions of this and related papers.

Notes

1. Lively is also an writer of children's literature, and the author of The Presence of the Past: An introduction to Landscape History (London: Collins, 1976).

2. See Jenny Bavidge, ‘Treasure Seekers in the City: London in the Novels of E. Nesbit’, in Lawrence Phillips (ed.) The Swarming Streets: Twentieth Century Literary Representations of London (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2004); Alice Jenkins, ‘Getting to Utopia: railways and heterotopia in children's literature’, in Carrie Hintz and Elaine Ostry (eds) Utopian and Dystopian Writing for Children and Young Adults (London: Routledge, 2003); Sara Spooner, ‘Going foreign’ in Arthur Ransome's ‘Peter Duck’, in Karin Lesnik-Oberstein, Children's Literature: New Approaches (London: Palgrave, 2004), respectively.

3. As ably argued in discussions of literary geography by Brosseau (1994), Blair (1998), King et al. (1995) and Gregory (1994).

4. Comprehensive critical studies mapping the history and development of children's literature and criticism include Peter Hunt, Children's Literature: The Development of Criticism (London: Routledge, 1990) and Criticism, Theory and Children's Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991); Karin Lesnik-Oberstein, Children's Literature: Criticism and the Fictional Child (Oxford and New York: OUP, 1994); Deborah Cogan Thacker and Jean Webb, Introducing Children's Literature: From Romanticism to Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 2002). A detailed online bibliography can be found at http://io.uwinnipeg.ca/∼nodelman/resources/allbib.htm.

5. Peter Hunt in ‘Childist Criticism: The Subculture of the Child, the Book and the Critic’, Signal, 43 (January 1984), 42–59.

6. Note, for example, Cogan Thacker's language in the quote above. Adult criticism is figured as destructive and even rather threatening, performing ‘surgery’ on an innocent, vulnerable, ‘beloved’ body of work. The ethical and methodological questions which have been raised so thoroughly by children's geographers about children's lives are, again, very similar to the qualms expressed by literary critics dealing with their books. Just as Valentine (1999) identifies the problems inherent in addressing children themselves as part of geographical research (including anxieties about trespassing on private or ‘adult free’ worlds, ‘translation’ problems and issues around competence), literary critics distrust the children's book: it is too slight and silly to take seriously as a text, it does not ‘belong’ to adults, adults have lost or forgotten the ability to read such texts ‘properly’, and so on.

7. Ecocriticism has recently encouraged new approaches to these debates within children's literary criticism. See for example the essays in Wild Things: Children's Culture and Ecocriticism, Sidney I. Dobrin and Kenneth B. Kidd (eds) (Wayne State University Press: Detroit, 2004).

8. See the database of titles included in the scheme at Bookstart's website: www.bookstart.co.uk.

9. See A.A. Milne When We Were Very Young (1924); P.L. Travers, Mary Poppins (1934); Dodie Smith (The Hundred and One Dalmations (1956); Noel Streatfield, Ballet Shoes, (1936). There are several contemporary picture books which operate as landmark literature themselves, offering fantastical means to take a tour of the sights of the city, such as Katie in London by James Mayhew (London: Orchard Books, 1994) or the New York-set Abuela by Arthur Dorros (New York: Dutton, 1991).

10. See, for example, Eve Bunting, Secret Place (New York: Clarion Books, 1996); Gerda Muller, The Garden in the City (New York: Dutton Children's Books); Jeannie Baker, Home (New York: Greenwillow Books, 2004); Sarah Stewart and David Small, The Gardener (New York: Frances Lincoln, 2004).

11. See, for example, Ben Bova, City of Darkness (New York: Tor Books, 2004)

12. According to such criticism, post-1970s children's literature presents us with alienated, isolated children facing a miserable world, and represents 'a general abandonment by contemporary authors of the traditional adult determination to modify the self-centredness of children […] the children of contemporary fiction work no miracles on the people or the world around them—no-one believes in miracles anymore—and they have few of the charms of their predecessors. Indeed, given their universal self-doubts, their waspish criticism of almost everyone and their entire preoccupation with their own, usually negative feelings, today's protagonists are often pitiable, but rarely loveable and almost never admirable (Murray, 1998, pp. 205, 209).

13. Hughes has written a number of series featuring different characters. Some of her stories take place in more ruralised settings, but the best examples of urban scenes can be found in the Alfie and Annie Rose series and in Tales of Trotter Street.

14. The story actually demonstrates the dangers inherent in such activities. Harriet's notebook is discovered and her secret writings exposed.