Child Lit Educ (2006) 37:199210 DOI 10.

1007/s10583-006-9011-7 ORIGINAL PAPER

Depressive Stories for Children

Nicholas Tucker

Published online: 16 June 2006 Springer Science+Business Media, Inc. 2006

Abstract While stories with a depressing message are now common for teenagers, resistance to them remains where smaller children are concerned. But is this more a case of the publishers and providers concerned protecting their own particular image of childhood? This article looks at the case for books that also convey a sense of sadness to infants, starting with the stories of Hans Andersen and ending with some of the challenging picture books published more recently. Keywords childhood Optimism Depression Fairy tales Achievement motivation Images of

The centenary celebrations of Hans Andersen in 2005 reminded me of a remark once made to Professor Kimberley Reynolds and me by the writer and critic Edward Blishen when we were interviewing him for the archives of the National Centre for Research in Childrens Literature at Roehampton University. He told us that he and John Betjeman had once agreed during a discussion that the shared experience of having been brought up on Andersen had left a permanent streak of melancholy in us. And although Blishen had very catholic tastes in childrens literature, he was always adamant that one of the things you cant say to children is that life is utterly and bleakly depressing. For him, the tears, despair and frequent deaths in Andersens stories clearly constituted a step too far, at least where child readers were concerned.

This article is based on a talk given in the new series of lectures and events organised jointly by the Childrens Literature Unit (CLU) in the School of English at the University of Newcastle, UK, and Seven Stories, The Centre for Childrens Books. The series began with the rst annual Fickling Lecture, given by Philip Pullman. In future, selected lectures in the series will be published by the CLU. Details can be found on the website: http:// www.ncl.ac.uk/elll/childrensliterature/ N. Tucker (&) University of Sussex, Brighton BN1 9QH, UK e-mail: nicktucker@dsl.pipex.com

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So while Blishen could accept moments of sadness in childrens literature, he detested stories that seemed to set out to be depressing, leaving no room for hope even in their nal pages. Other leading British writers and critics have taken and often continue to take a similar view. Geraldine McCaughrean has spoken of her distaste for negative endings in childrens books. In conversation, Diana Wynne Jones told me recently that one reason she writes fantasy is that she can always engineer reasonably happy endingssomething she thinks would be harder to manage if she were writing strictly realistic stories. Many publishers and academics have also disliked books thought likely to have a depressive effect on child readers. In her acceptance speech after winning the Eleanor Farjeon Award for 2003, the late Miriam Hodgson, former chief editor of Egmonts Childrens Book Division, touched on this subject. She told her audience of an editors enduring need to remind an author, should this ever become necessary, that he or she is after all writing for children who deserve to keep a belief in good defeating evil (2004). Or as Roni Natov (2002) puts it in her inuential study The Poetics of Childhood, a book for children must not leave the child reader in despair. And although what evokes happiness varies from child to child.... A poetics for children requires a delicate rendering of hope and honesty. (p. 220) There may be personal reasons why some of these people so far quoted had strong feelings about the need of literature for the young to support and sustain rather than depress. Edward Blishens (1978) martinet father, memorably recorded in his sons fragment of autobiography Sorry, Dad!, was a constantly angry and potentially undermining presence during his gifted sons young life. Diana Wynne Jones was neglected as a child, while Geraldine McCaughrean has described a childhood where she was so shy that it took her a long time to discover the name of her primary school teacher, having missed it on the rst day. Miriam Hodgson also had memories of extreme shyness as a child. Books with strong messages of hope of better things to come can always seem particular allies for child readers such as these who once felt they were missing something important in their lives. But the general reaction against depressing childrens books goes wider than the personal involvement of just a few. When I asked a childrens literature internet discussion group I belong to for opinions on those childrens books that could reasonably be described as depressive, correspondent after correspondent complained about certain writers and stories that had once seriously upset them as children, with Hans Andersen easily coming out on top. This reaction against sad, potentially upsetting books is typical of almost all British adults where childrens literature is concerned. It is no accident that the words happy and merry outnumber sad and miserable in the Amazon title search engine by about ten to one. Not all the books referred to here were aimed at young audiences, but most of them were, particularly those with ultra cheerful titles. The 16th century poet Robert Wever (1550) may well have been romanticising the lives of many children when he stated so categorically that In youth is pleasure. But his words certainly sum up how the British have usually wanted to think about or remember childhood, however often the evidence may have been to the contrary. Reasons for such attitudes are easy to nd. Those 19th century cautionary stories, designed to frighten the young into good behaviour by feeding them visions of the awful consequences of youthful disobedience, nd no defenders now and have not done so for some time past. Former evangelical gloom has long been replaced in childrens literature by a general mood of secular optimism. Backed up by the growth of 20th century developmental psychology, childhood as described in contemporary child-rearing manuals is now seen as ideally an entirely positive time for all concerned, other things being equal. When something goes seriously wrong in a childs life, this is generally explained in terms of his or her parents, school or neighborhood being at fault. Popular experts in this eld still tend to insist that such children always have the capacity eventually to struggle back to an even keel, if only they are

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given the chance and the right support. In childrens literature too, it is unusual to feature troubled young heroes or heroines who do not nally overcome at least some of their problems by the end of a novel. Underpinning such optimism is a long-lasting belief in a general get up and go philosophy, typical of a condent British protestant culture and its abiding belief in the virtues as well as the efcacy of self-help. In this scenario, eventual happiness following a life of hard work and sound morals always remains a strong possibility. While fairy stories told in the rest of Europe tend to get gloomier and more fatalistic the further North or East they are located, British fairy tales, according to the great folklorist Katharine Briggs (1967), have always been marked by an atmosphere of positiveness. Never over-moralistic, they typically concentrate on qualities like kindliness, courtesy and openness. While Grimms tales contain references to times of starvation and even cannibalism, both of which were known as realities in mid-Europe during the Thirty Years War, British folk stories although mentioning poverty and hardship usually stop short at images of social catastrophe. This gentler view of life is of course easier to get away with in a country last invaded in 1066 and with no knowledge of internecine warfare at least on its mainland since 1745. British insularity, therefore, and the feeling of national pre-eminence over the rest of Europe that it so often lent and still sometimes lends itself to, could be another reason for the persistent vein of optimism running through so much of our childrens literature. The French critic Paul Hazard noticed this tendency when he wrote in 1932 about what he saw as the underlying message in so many 19th century British adventure stories. Love your country, strive to maintain the strength and grandeur of England. Its absolute superiority over all the other nations of the world is indisputable. This superiority must be considered a dogma established once and for all. At a time when popular writers were seen as major inuences on the attitudes held by British children, Hazard believed that any literary rocking of the national boat by way of questioning the received myth of national resilience and optimism would have come over as deeply unpatriotic as well as unmanly. Unsurprisingly, such stories for children hardly existed in Britain until the last 40 years. America is another country with no knowledge of invasion within its own boundaries over the centuries. It too has evolved a particular, optimistic strain of 20th century childrens literature, in tune with the national American dream of ultimate success. Immigrants over the years have been happy for their own children to experience such stories, largely untinged by the pessimism common to some of the traditional tales told in their own countries of origin. In this positive atmosphere, American childrens literature soon started producing numerous classics of its own. The author and critic Alison Lurie (2003) has recently linked this American and British supremacy in childrens literature with an undue idealisation of childhood itself found on both sides of the Atlantic. As she puts it in her book Boys and Girls Forever, In most countries there is nothing especially wonderful about being a child of school age. For the rst 4 or 5 years boys and girls may be petted and indulged, but after that they are usually expected to become little adults as soon as possible: responsible, serious, future-oriented. But in Englishspeaking nations, ever since the late 18th century, poets and philosophers and educators have maintained that there is something wonderful and unique about childhood: that simply to be young is to be naturally good and great. .... Because childhood is seen as a superior condition, many Americans and Britons have been naturally reluctant to give it up. They tend to think of themselves as young much longer, and cling to childhood attitudes and amusements. (p. 10) This idealisation of childhood ts in well with those attitudes extolling the virtues of selfhelp previously described. For cultures with a strong belief in overcoming rather than simply enduring the natural obstacles of life, childhood is obviously the pivotal time in which to

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introduce such ideas. Britain with an Empire to run and America with its frontiers to tame both had a strong investment in getting across the desirability of active participation plus individual initiative in all things. This idea was originally beamed particularly in the direction of those middle-class children expected to be the leaders of the future. Later on, with universal literacy, the same ideals were disseminated to much wider child audiences. Those children living in poverty and often without much hope in their actual lives could still relish the fantasy of high achievement against the odds common in British childrens literature and summed up in fairy tales like Jack and the Beanstalk and The Story of Dick Whittington. Fatalism was largely left to stories from abroad; in Britain and America, agency was all. What comes over primarily as fantasy in literature for some children however can still sometimes act as effective guidelines for others. Childrens war stories, for example, can act as pure day dreams for young readers with no real interest in ghting but as blue-prints for action for other children already actively planning a military career. On the more general question of what young readers take from their books, the American cultural psychologist David McLelland and his associates (1953) were strong advocates of the importance for any culture of what they dene as achievement motivation in literature. For McLelland, the incidence of achievement motivation in any text is measured by how often a hero or heroine is shown overcoming a particular obstacle in his or her path during the course of a story. On this measurement, Western fairy tales score signicantly higher than those stories coming from the East or North of Europe, with the more successful the economy of any country, the more generally optimistic its folk-lore. The obvious question this raises is whether it is the economy and environment of any particular country that produces such achievement motivation in literature or whether it is optimistic stories themselves that lead to a more positive approach within the real world. McLelland himself tends to believe that it is stories that inuence attitudes to life rather than vice-versa. This idea that positive examples in literature necessarily lead to positive reactions in children is as old as childrens literature itself. Small wonder that those dictatorships in Russia, China and Germany in the last century so regularly sought to replace or re-write traditional tales with childrens ction clearly and repeatedly reecting the values of the new regime. Strong endorsement of the potentially desirable effects of childrens literature on personal initiative and self-belief can also be found in the work of Bruno Bettelheim, one of the last prewar concentration camp Jewish inmates to be allowed a visa to go to America by the Nazi authorities. His famous book The Uses of Enchantment (1976) describes what he sees as the unfailingly positive psychological thinking found in fairy tales, particularly those recorded by the brothers Grimm. But he disapproved of Hans Andersen, nding his stories extremely sad; they do not convey the feeling of consolation characteristic of fairy tales at the end. (p. 37) He also described The Ugly Duckling as not helpful to the child; even though he enjoys it, it misdirects his fantasy. (ibid) The story of The Little Match Girl is characterised by Bettelheim as hardly one suitable for identication. The child in his misery may indeed identify with this heroine, but if so, this leads only to utter pessimism and defeatism. The Little Match Girl is a moralistic tale about the cruelty of the world; it arouses compassion for the downtrodden. But what the child who feels downtrodden needs is not compassion for others who are in the same predicament, but rather the conviction that he can escape this fate. (p. 105) Bettelheim had many interesting and pertinent things to say about these tales. But he was also by now sufciently soaked in the American tradition to ignore the fact that there is another darker, more nihilistic side to some of the Grimms tales, making them closer in mood to Andersens own stories. But while the American dream and Andersens melancholy ction would always remain uneasy bed-fellows, Grimms tales, viewed selectively as a type of

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psychological self-help manual, could more easily be accommodated to what Bettelheim had come to respect as the American way of life. In 2005, the popular television series Desperate Housewives included an episode about a bossy parent in charge of a school production of Little Red Riding Hood. She is shown unilaterally altering its ending so that the wolf, now seen primarily as an object in need of conservation, nishes by becoming best friends with the other principal characters. This particular intervention is eventually thwarted by Lynette, the feisty mother gure of the series played by Felicity Huffman. The revolt led by her nally restores the wolf to his traditional threatening presence. But it is a close run battle, and quite typical of various real life discussions taking place over the years about the suitability for infants of those fairy stories. These disagreements most typically arise from unease about the darker imaginative vision found in some traditional tales now seen by many as out of step with life in the more prosperous parts of the globe. One of the most notable British defences of all determinedly optimistic childrens ction was made in 1940 by Frank Richards. This was one of the pen-names of Charles Hamilton, creator of the Billy Bunter stories and many other best-selling fantasies set in idealised 20th century boarding schools catering for afuent pupils. Stung by criticism made by George Orwell (1970) in his essay Boys Weeklies, where he took Richards to task for what he described as the escapist unreality of his stories, the author came back strongly on his own account. Let youth be happy, or as happy as possible. Every day of happiness, illusory or otherwiseand most happiness is illusoryis so much to the good. It will help to give the boy condence and hope. Frank Richards (1970) tells him that there are some splendid fellows in a world that is, after all, a decent sort of place. He likes to think himself like one of those fellows, and is happy in his day-dreams. Mr Orwell would have him told that he is a shabby little blighter, his father an ill-used serf, his world a dirty, muddled, rotten sort of show. I dont think it would be fair play to take his twopence for telling him that! Orwell could well have replied that it was precisely because of what for him were the irrelevant distractions offered by writers like Richards that working-class children in particular were losing out in their literature. For him, learning subservience to snobbery at a young age would be of little political use to them later on in a patently inequitable world where many of them too were doomed to becoming ill-used serfs themselves. But 1940 was not a good year for urging the necessity of more honest writing for children. Mass market comics in particular were now peddling comforting but simplistic stereotypes of national supremacy over Britains enemies each week of the type that even Orwell might have considered good for civilian morale at a time of genuine crisis. And while Orwells famous essay made many shrewd points, his attack on escapist pre-war childrens comics and magazines was to an extent undermined by the affection which he and many others of his generation still so obviously felt for them, including other political gures quite as radical as Orwell himself. This general nostalgia among adults for the positive childrens literature of their youth has made it hard for childrens writers in the West to take on themes and characters over the years that are not obviously desirable or worthy of imitation. But this could be a short-sighted strategy where many children are concerned. Some young readers may actually welcome examples in their literature of moods, characters or situations worse than anything known in their own lives. Ever since Aristotle wrote his Poetics, it has been received knowledge that tragedy suffered by ctional others can always have a potentially tonic effect upon audiences happy that they are spared the miseries that they are witnessing on the stage or page. And if young readers nd characters in their ction suffering from the same type of misery they may be going through at the time, some comfort can also be gained from the recognition that at least one writer seems to know what they are going through. Novels that reveal to readers that

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they are not quite alone in all their various thoughts, feelings and occasional troubles have always had an important role to play in the reading experience at any age. Graham Greene (1951) well remembered his childhood need for characters in ction that did not habitually make him feel diminished as a person himself. In an essay later included in his collection The Lost Childhood, this was how he describes the Victorian adventure writer Rider Haggards heroes, Allan Quartermain and Sir Henry Curtis. They were men of such unyielding integrity (they would only admit to a fault in order to show how it might be overcome) that the wavering personality of a child could not rest for long against those monumental shoulders. A child, after all, is quite well aware of cowardice, shame, deception, disappointment. Clearly Greene as a young reader was waiting for heroes closer to the same questioning and uncertain approach to life that he possessed, later on creating numbers of characters of this type in his adult ction. When writing years later for children himself, however, he stuck to familiar, optimistic formulae in the texts of his wartime picture books, given that any other type of new book for very young readers at that time was practically unthinkable. (p. 15) The galvanising, almost intoxicating effect that depressive literature can sometimes have upon sensitive readers at a certain age has been brilliantly described by Jane Gardam (1971) in her novel, A Long Way from Verona. Here is the novels teenage heroine Jessica Vye, on the experience of rst reading Thomas Hardys Jude the Obscure in her local library: I hope I never read another book so utterly terrible as this. It is a marvellous book, and I didnt skip any of it, and I read on and on and on; but all the time I was thinking of Thomas Hardy, of the terrible sorrows and sadness of him. It seemed terrible to me that anyone who knew that he was a writer beyond all possible doubt should have not one glimmer, not one faintest trace of happiness in him. There was one thing that he said that beat in my head, over and over and over again. It was at the point where poor Jude just misses meeting someone who might have changed the whole terrible pattern of his life. If he had, who knows, says Hardy, then all might yet have been well. Then he adds, but this did not happen, this good fortune, BECAUSE IT NEVER DOES. I could not get this terrible idea out of my mind, even while I read on to see what happened next, taking it all in and understanding itbut only on the top. Underneath there was this awful, awful idea: BECAUSE IT NEVER DOES. (p. 180) In Gardams novel, the book is then snatched away by a well-meaning librarian with the words, We cant have you reading Thomas Hardywell have you getting all depressed. Your father will never forgive me. (p. 182) This note of adult alarm at any signs of adolescent depression is entirely typical. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is no longer simply an American ideal; 20th century British culture has also generally subscribed to the notion of the right or perhaps even the duty to be happy, especially during childhood. In this atmosphere, adolescents quickly discover that continuing to pull a long face in company usually has the capacity after a while to unsettle or irritate. In the case of parents, it is often especially hard when such angst surfaces during earlier childhood itself, so confounding what have become normal expectations of happiness during this period of life. In adolescence too, the contrast between what may have previously been an ordinarily cheerful smaller child and what has now turned into a moody, sometimes gloomy teenager has long been a particular cross for numbers of parents to bear as patiently as they can. But Gardam also catches the note of excitement, perhaps even glee, running through Jessicas description of reading what she describes as this terrible but marvellous masterpiece. An authentic note of self-dramatisation can also be heard here, whatever her feelings of grief for Hardys doomed characters. Gardam is describing how a bookish teenager comes to relish

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the way that familiar, more or less optimistic conventions common in the literature she had read up to that moment are then so comprehensively outed in Hardys sombre novel. Jessicas sense of heightened interest is quite understandable, having at last encountered a novel that insists on nishing on a note of such general pessimism. Still at school, she now enters a new, confusing phase in her development, convinced that everything comes to nothing in the end but also knowing that good things take place. Ready now to leave the simpler faiths of childhood behind, she is starting on the long, necessarily up and down journey to becoming an adult as well as a writer herself. Although Jessica is shown as well able not only to take on Hardys sense of depression but also to nd within it a strong source of stimulation, the librarian who whisks the book away from her is still convinced that she is doing the right thing. The question then arises whether, in seeking to protect children from depressing novels, adults are not in fact often more concerned with protecting their own, idealised image of childhood as primarily a time of innocence and enjoyment. This particular question immemorially arises during adolescence, when young people are often experimenting with adult reading material that many of their teachers or parents may still see as inappropriate. Parents have some preparation for this often argumentative stage of life, given that the words adolescent and problem have long been coupled together. Tussles over what to read can be seen as part of a more general battle between teenager and parent, with moments of depression on both sides an almost natural offshoot. Yet experience of depression, once thought of as something that only starts during adolescence, is now believed to be far more common among many smaller children too. Could they also nd personal meanings of value in books written for younger audiences that actually embrace rather than deny the existence of depressed feelings within their own pages? Support for this position can be found in Perry Nodelmans The Pleasures of Childrens Literature (1996). He writes that To deprive children of the opportunity to read about confusing or painful matters like those they might actually be experiencing will either make literature irrelevant to them or else leave them feeling they are alone in their thoughts or experience. (p. 86) Any policy of trying to shelter children indenitely from moments of fear, horror and depression experienced through the imagination seems anyhow almost bound to fail with time. In her article Child readers and violence in fairy tales, published in Childrens Literature in Education (1989) Ann Trousdale describes using one particular toned down version of Little Red Riding Hood with some infants. This re-telling proved far more frightening to one of them, aged two and a half, who kept predicting that the spared wolf of the story would eventually come back and do his worst after all. Another 7-year-old child preferred his own unconscious reconstruction of the Three Little Pigs, insisting that the wicked wolfagainwas well and truly eliminated by the end, despite the fact that he was spared in the particular re-telling that the child had originally heard. Trousdale concludes from these and other studies that she carried out that in certain, would-be scary fairy tales the lack of resolution to a danger which has been presented may be frightening to a child on a level far deeper than that of the threat of the external danger alone. (p. 77) Another article Aesop and Grimm: contrast in ethical codes and contemporary values in Childrens Literature in Education (1983) makes a different point. Its author, P.G. Reinstein writes about the reception by some children of Aesops fables, which she describes as ercely pragmatic rather than idealistic in character. These came over as unpleasantly cynical to a group of young single white middle-class students she was teaching at the time, who did not think they were suitable for younger readers. Yet the Grimms tales, with their greater

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emphasis on kindliness, loyalty and love, received much fuller approval as material for small children. But another community class made up of poorer, older and mostly working-class students felt that Aesops fables taught valuable, street-wise lessons to even the smallest child about the necessity of using your wits and in general taking care. Those in this particular group tended to laugh cynically at what they saw as the more unlikely, idealised behaviour they came across in Grimms fairy tales. They believed that these stories should be kept for children over eight or so and therefore at an age where they are able to distinguish reality from wishful thinking. This raises the question whether the urge to protect children from premature cynicism in their ction may also be linked to social class as well. When critics demand that children be protected from coming across depressing stories too young, are they mostly thinking about children who live fairly sheltered lives anyway? Could this once again be an example of the middle-classes getting the literature they think is right not necessarily for all children but certainly for their own? Philip Larkin (1988) took a typically down-beat attitude to the disillusion possible after reading too many optimistic, escapist stories when young. His poem A Study in Reading Habits describes how a bespectacled, solitary young reader consoles himself for his inadequacy by indulging in fantasies about violence and sex found in some popular ction. But such consoling day-dreams turn out to be severely time-limited, nally giving out on him altogether: Dont read much now: the dude Who lets the girl down before The hero arrives, the chap Whos yellow and keeps the store, Seem far too familiar. Get stewed: Books are a load of crap. Larkins bleak poem is set in a pre-televisual age, at a time when reading material was still one of the main sources of stimulation for a young persons imagination. Before the arrival of paperbacks and at a time when childrens libraries were severely limited, parents, schools and libraries still had a form of control over what was read by virtue of which books for their children they chose to provide. But the growing ubiquity of television eventually put paid to this type of cultural control as a practical possibility, particularly given the popularity of soap operas with the young. Young viewers can now nd out about all types of domestic disruption and disaster, as displayed in the warring ctional families that form the basis for so much popular viewing. If children watch the news too, they will also be informed as never before about what is going on in the rest of the world, both for good but more often for bad. Books for children have for some time now also started exploring darker areas, both in terms of subject matter and in general atmosphere. Robert Cormiers ground-breaking The Chocolate War (1974), which ends with the young hero comprehensively beaten up by the chief villain, was written over 30 years ago. Some of his novels after that are even more nihilistic. Numbers of authors have since followed suit, with grim, confrontational novels for teenagers now the norm rather than the exception. Only in the picture book world could infants still for some time be guaranteed a comparatively safe and uncontroversial passage, but even here this particular consensus is starting to break down. A number of European countries with traditionally tougher attitudes towards children than those found in English-speaking countries have recently produced picture books of a dis tinctively depressing quality. Serge Kozlovs Petit-Ane, illustrated by Vitaly Statzynsky and translated from the Russian by Pavlik de Bennissen, was published in France in 1995. It told the dream-like story of a donkey who for no apparent reason simply wants to die and nally

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succeeds in hanging himself. Although the French publishers compared it to Antoine de Saint Exuperys (1943) war-time classic Le Petit Prince, another story which ends in the death of the main character, this book attracted much criticism in France and was nally withdrawn. Other controversial titles were soon there to take its place. Tomi Ungerers Le Nuage Bleu (2000) also alluded to suicide in a story about an otherwise joyful blue cloud that decides to self-destruct as the only way of extinguishing the res raging during the course of a cruel war going on below. La Petite Marchande DAllumettes (1999), a re-working of Hans Andersens classic tale translated by P.G.La Chesnais and illustrated by Georges Lemoine, takes place in war-ravaged Sarajevo. The abandoned child of the story ends here as yet another tragic statistic, with the roses surrounding her corpse, as described by Andersen in his original text, now replaced by traces of shell re on the ruined wall behind her. The impersonal brutalities of modern warfare also form the theme for Une Si Jolie Poupee, (2001) written and illustrated by Pef, the pen-name of Pierre Elie Ferrier. This unforgettable picture book shows the manufacturing process by which an innocent-looking doll is converted into an anti-personnel mine. Told as if by the doll itself, the story nishes with a child in a foreign war-zone ending up mutilated and what is left of the doll admitting to a deep and lasting shame. The English and American childrens market has proved more resistant to such controversial, often politically charged picture books. But things are slowly changing here as well. The British version of Roberto Innocentis (1991) haunting picture book Rose Blanche (text by Ian McEwan, based on a story by Christophe Gallaz) came out in 1985. It tells the story of a German girl during the Second World War slowly coming to realise that there is a concentration camp situated just outside her small town. Drawn towards the starving children she sees behind the wire, she is herself accidentally shot by an approaching soldier. Beautifully illustrated, its reception in both Britain and America proved unproblematic to most teachers and parents, despite its sombre message. Clark Taylors The House that Crack Built, illustrated by Jan Thompson Dicks (1992) is another powerful picture book, this time on the theme of urban drug-taking. It too was published in Britain and America, as was Libby Hathorns Way Home (1994), whose illustrations by Gregory Rogers won him the Kate Greenaway Award for the outstanding picture book for 1995. Set in down-town Australia, it featured a child coping alone with homelessness, plagued by feral dogs in an environment where his only support comes from kindly prostitutes. In Britain, one notable addition to this acknowledgement of tragedy and despair in the world of childrens picture books is provided by Michael Rosens Sad Book (2004). This describes the authors grief over the sudden and unexpected death of his teenage son Eddie. Quentin Blakes accompanying illustrations show Rosen at times grey-faced with suffering. The text describes his different ways of coping with grief, suggesting that this is something everyone has to learn at some stage, even some of the young readers of this particular book. It ends on a note of only partial resolution, with the author staring bleakly into a lit candle, still mourning for his lost son. Reception of this book has been extremely positive. But this does not mean there is no longer any will to protect even the smallest of children from all potentially depressing material. Rosens book is expertly crafted, with pictures and text made accessible to all children. Other possibly upsetting books for infants have had more mixed responses. Maurice Sendaks (1983) picture book about homelessness We Are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy produced this reaction in an unsolicited readers review recorded on the Amazon web-site on October 2, 2003. As a trainee teacher I took part in a session researching childrens reactions to this book. Not only did the children not get the ideas behind the book, they could not tell you the books storybecause there isnt one! And the book contains things like babies being bitten by rats! I

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couldnt stand itfar too dark and grim for a kids book! I strongly recommend you dont buy this book for your children or class! This is surely a fairly typical response from those many adults with no desire to return to the days when old shockers like Foxes Book of Martyrs were once pressed upon children, regardless of the feelings of fear and dread such graphically detailed pictures of pain and torture might cause. Both Charles Lamb and later E. Nesbit complained bitterly about what they remembered as this horrible book, and the way its subject matter remained to haunt their imagination. Although others recalled actually enjoying it when young, enough remembered the fear and occasional nightmares it caused, making the point that many small children remain particularly vulnerable to extra upsetting images in their picture books. Parents who want their infants to enjoy good nights may still be wise to try to avoid any such material. But there is also the argument that children, even infants, have a right to know some of the less palatable facts about the world they live in. The argument then would be not whether they should be told about such things, but exactly how. Challenging picture books, in this scenario, would be judged not simply by the material they are putting forward but by how sensitively they manage to get their message across without totally horrifying young readers at the same time. But some level of upset must always remain a possibility if such books are to appear at all. Contemporary urban homelessness is by its nature upsetting, particularly if children are involved, so how could any picture book make it seem other than that? By the same token, if small children can be blown up by anti-personnel mines, as in Pefs (2001) Une Si Jolie Poupee, other infants should have the right to know that this can sometimes happen to people their age. If the total effect is to help turn them against such technological brutalities early in life, does this make the risk of possibly disturbing them at the same time worthwhile? The same arguments apply to some worrying novels written for older children. Gudrun Pausewangs apocalyptic story Fall-Out (1994) about a fatal explosion in a nuclear power station in Germany, is indeed horrifying and frightening in its implications. But so too was the real-life Chernobyl disaster. Children have no direct say in how their country is run. Yet one day they will be expected to take part in democratic processes, and writers could argue that they have a duty to inform every potential citizen about what they see as the major problems facing them all both now and in the future. Robert Westalls Gulf (1992) about the horrors of the rst desert war in 1991, is also a deeply upsetting novel. I have heard anecdotal evidence about how this story particularly depressed one young reader over a period of months. But again, how else should such a novel be written? And in the wake of a second war in Iraq, it is surely right that at least one childrens writer in Britain took such a powerful stand against the rst. Public opinion on such matters is inuenced by numbers of different sources. Childrens literature can always be one such inuence, particularly when read at a peculiarly impressionable time of life. The traditional way of protecting children, especially small ones, from material thought to be unduly disturbing is for parents to make such judgements about such literature for themselves, bearing in mind the particular personalities of the children concerned. Nothing can or should change this practice, although it could be argued that publishers do not always provide enough guidance for parents or teachers on a books jacket as to what exactly a story is going to contain. Inevitably some books will get through which, with hindsight, may prove too powerful for a small reader. But the argument here is one of timing, rather than whether such books should exist in the rst place. In more general terms, the justication for the presence of at least some disturbing childrens picture books and novels in the whole corpus of modern childrens literature now seems fairly strong. Recognition of the validity of such books for certain moods and needs is one thing; swamping the market with them would be another, and most would surely agree that books

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with an overtly depressing message should still only constitute a small minority in current childrens literature. But a culture that does not admit the existence of occasional depression among children or their books seems not so much healthy as having something to both fear and hide. Hans Andersen has always been a somewhat marginalised gure in the English-speaking world. His haunting stories managed to win an unofcial licence to set a mood largely unavailable in British childrens literature at the time, helped perhaps by the fact that they were written by an eccentric cultural outsider described and patronised as the gloomy Dane. If a new, British Andersen were one day to emerge, perhaps his or her stories could now take their legitimate place alongside the many more optimistic books that still make up the bulk of the literature written and illustrated for British and American children today.

References
Andersen, H. (1999). La Petite Marchande DAllumettes, translated by P.G.La Chesnais, illustrated by Georges Lemoine, Paris: Editions Nathan Jeunesse. Aristotle, Poetics. Bettelheim, B. (1976). The uses of enchantment. London: Thames and Hudson Blishen, E. (1978). Sorry dad!. London: Hamish Hamilton. Briggs, K. (1967). The fairies in tradition and literature. London: Routledge. Cormier, R. (1974). The chocolate war. New York: Pantheon. Foxe, Book of Martyrs. Gardam, J. (1971). A long way from Verona. London: Hamish Hamilton. Greene, G. (1951). The lost childhood and other essays. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode. Hathorn, L. (1994), illustrated by G. Rogers, Way home, London: Random House. Hardy, T., Jude the Obscure. Hazard, P. (1932). Books, children and men. Boston: Horn Book. Hodgson, M. (2004). On being an editor, in London: Books for Keeps, 144, January. Innocenti, R. (1991). Rose Blanche. London: Jonathan Cape. Larkin, P. (1988). Collected poems. London: Marvell Press and Faber. Lurie, A. (2003). Boys and girls forever. London: Chatto. Kozlov, S. (1995), illustrated by Vitaly Statzynsky, translated by Pavlik de Bennissen, Petit-Ane, Paris: Ipomee Albin Michel. McClelland, D. C., Atkinson J. W., Clark R. A., & Lowell, E. L. (1953). The achievement motive, New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts. Natov, R. (2002). The poetics of childhood. London: Routledge. Nodelman, P. (1996). The pleasures of childrens literature. London: Longman. Orwell, G. (1970). Boys Weeklies, in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Vol. 1, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Pausewang, G. (1994). Fall-out. London: Viking. Pef (2001). Une Si Jolie Poupee. Paris: Gallimard. Reinstein, P. G. (1983). Aesop and Grimm; contrast in ethical codes and contemporary values. Childrens Literature in Education, 14(1), 4453. Richards, F. (1970). Frank Richards replies to George Orwell, quoted in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Vol. 1. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Rosen, M. (2004). illustrated by Quentin Blake, Michael Rosens sad book. London: Walker Books. Saint-Exupery, A. (1943). Le Petit Prince. New York: Reynal and Hotchcock. Sendak, M. (1983). We are all in the dumps with Jack and Guy. New York: HarperCollins. Taylor, C. (1992). The house that crack built. New York: Chronicle Books. Trousdale, A. (1989). Child readers and violence in fairy tales. Childrens Literature in Education, 20(2), 6979. Tucker, N. (2005). Interview with Geraldine McCaughrean, The Independent, July 22, 2005 Ungerer, T. (2000). Le Nuage Bleu, Paris: Ecole de Loisirs. Westall, R. (1992). Gulf, London: Methuen. Wever, R., Lusty Juventus, 1550

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Nicholas Tucker is honorary Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of Sussex. A former teacher and then an educational psychologist, he is the author of nine books about children, childhood and reading, including The Child and the Book, (Cambridge University Press, 1981 and 1990). He has also written six books for children, broadcasts frequently and reviews in the Independent and for all three Times supplements. Recent publications include Family Fictions; Contemporary Classics of Childrens Literature (part author with Nikki Gamble) Continuum (2001), The Rough Guide to Childrens Books 0-5 and 5-11 (2002), The Rough Guide to Teenage Books (part author with Julia Eccleshare, (2003) and Darkness Visible: Inside the World of Philip Pullman, Icon Books (2003).

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