A Coming or Going of Age?

Abstract

Children’s literature, as a discrete entity, is commonly traced back to the eighteenth century in England, to a time when the new middle classes began to carve out a protected space for their progeny. Distinct commodities were developed, including games, furniture and clothing — and, of course, books, seen as perfect vehicles to instruct and entertain the future citizenry. The Romantics rounded out and mythologised this new being, the child, as innocent, pure and, therefore, unsullied by adult society. By the end of the Victorian period, the ‘cult of the child’, as it became known, was at its height, with the desirability of remaining a child, a Peter Pan, in the cultural ascendant. However, a century on from the fin de siècle, at the fin de millennium, this image had been severely questioned. The ‘century of the child’, as Ellen Kay (1900/1909) then termed it, had ended, and with it, a growing number of voices proclaimed a new century that foresaw the child’s disappearance, or death, even (Winn 1984; Postman 1994; Buckingham 2000). This chapter explores how this crisis over the child manifests itself in the era of Thatcher’s grandchildren. On the one hand, there are writers who celebrate a new freedom to discuss issues more candidly with children — whether about war, the Holocaust, homelessness, the family, racism, abuse, drugs, ecology, or sex and sexuality — whereas others fear that this very openness is destroying childhood, formerly defined in terms of protection, of relative innocence.