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Home is where our books are—an over-simplification but one that contains a grain of truth, at least for many successful readers. Children often learn to read in the classroom but it is more frequently at home that they become readers, not at all the same achievement. Bedtime stories represent one important focus of many parent–child relationships, and shared knowledge of characters and plots become family reference points. It is for these reasons that educators place such emphasis on the importance of home reading, that organizations like Booktrust in the United Kingdom hand out early reading packs to the families of babies, and that libraries devote resources to programs for small children and their caregivers. Statistics about families that do not provide books for their children at home are regarded as news. A recent report from Booktrust, for example, suggests that nearly 60 % of families do not own a baby book until they receive their Bookstart package (after which 75 % of parents report that they engage their babies with the books) (Williams 2012).

Observations about the importance of book reading at home are manifestly true for many children; are they also sentimental? Do they disguise or co-exist with more commercial domestic realities: that home is also where habits of consumption really take root? that many children’s stories, under the pretty guise of wish-fulfilment, engender depths of covetousness in the reading child?

Certainly some commentators would think so. “Domestication and commodification are intimately connected,” says Lauwaert (2009, p. 86). “Consumption [is]…deeply ingrained in the structures of the domestic sphere: local, private, persistent”, say Silverstone and Hirsch (1992, p. 5). Such consumption is not confined to the demographic that buys cheap tie-ins; it is arguable that many intellectual children, in the comfort and privacy of their own homes, also learn forms of book greed that some readers of this chapter may regard more benevolently than other kinds of consumption because of entrenched cultural prejudices or because of the apparent benefits of book ownership. Not every owner of a domestic library thinks on terms of possessing shelves of commodities but a book, of course, is one form of collectible.

3.1 Theoretical Perspectives on Children’s Domestic Consumption

General theories of consumption posit a “perpetual and relentless round of having and yearning…. Yearning drives consumption, and one way to begin to grasp this massive, pleasurable, painful, and finally destructive impulse is to understand simply that we yearn” (Rosenblatt 1999, pp. 3, 6). The idea of consumption as destructive is a common motif, but the realities of domestic life complicate this simplistic approach. As Jane Smiley points out with some asperity, “feminism and consumerism are tightly linked” (1999, p. 162). She suggests that modern American consumerism (and, by extension, that of much of the West) “is not just a consumerism of pleasure, it is also a consumerism of work—housework, farm labor, transportation, industrial labor, construction” (1999, p. 156). The amelioration of grinding domestic labour associated with keeping the home habitable is particularly important for women:

The freedom to be educated in something other than home economics and the freedom to earn money, to have a voacation, to have an avocation, to engage in all the useful and useless activities of our historical moment, depend on the lightening of the domestic load through contrivance, technology, and the use of nonhuman, nonanimal power (1999, p. 163).

Smiley (1999) thus reminds us of the significance of domestic consumption as the release of women from the intolerable pressures of keeping the fire going, fetching the household water, and managing issues of domestic hygiene (the hard manual labour of laundry, the repetitive drudgery of dealing with the household chamberpots).

Grant McCracken looks at household consumption in a different light, teasing out an extensive sociological and cultural description of “homeyness,” exploring the ways in which people “feather their nests”, sometimes in the cause of ostentatious display but often with the aim of buttressing their own psychological security. There is not space here to do justice to his argument but it is worth highlighting his observation that people sometimes make use of their “homey” priorities as strategies against consumption and display. “Homeyness allows the individual to defend against status strategies. It allows for the containment, management, and repudiation of these strategies” (2005, p. 41).

Domestic consumption can thus be perceived as a more complex endeavour than the fruitless and unending attempt to satiate desire. The issue becomes more complicated again when the question of how children consume is brought into the picture. No doubt contemporary children are subject to mass persuasion to increase and specify their desires, and to look to consumable items as an iterative answer to such yearning. But, as Susan Willis suggests, children may perceive their activities with consumable items in rather different terms:

Children transform commodities into use values and use these as a means for articulating their social relationships. What is more, they do not recreate lost values or bygone forms of utility…. Rather, children’s play produces newly imagined social possibilities (1991, p. 32).

Without subscribing to an essentialist and potentially reductive concept of childhood as innocent, it is still possible to observe children investing consumption with such social relations in ways that adults are less likely to perform. At the same time, children are somewhat more able than adults to substitute for actual consumption with pretend consumption; imaginary substitutes sometimes function just as well as the purchased item for play purposes. Adults are less likely to be satisfied with imagined ownership.

This is a topic that would bear much more substantial investigation than I propose to give it here. For my purposes, it must suffice to say that many complex elements are at work in children’s approaches to consumption in the home; reproducing the work of creating “homeyness” may be one ingredient of their play, and using toys to open social worlds may be a priority that exceeds the lure of ownership for its own sake. Over-simplification of a complicated network of determinants does no one any favours.

Much imaginative activity occurs within mediated frameworks that children must learn to comprehend. In this chapter, we will contrast Lankshear and Knobel’s (2007) concept of “bookspace,” and Sekeres’ (2009) delineation of the “playspace” as virtual locations for vicarious and actual acquisition, with a view to teasing out some of the complexities of the role of consumption in children’s literate lives.

3.2 Owning and Wanting to Own

Consumption and its role in the home and in children’s developing awareness have been controversial for a long time. L.M. Montgomery provides a vignette of one contested interpretation of consumer pleasures in Anne’s House of Dreams, first published in 1926:

“Well, you certainly have a lovely day for your wedding, Anne,” said Diana….“You couldn’t have had a finer one if you’d ordered it from Eaton’s.”

“Indeed, there’s too much money going out of this Island to that same Eaton’s,” said Mrs. Lynde indignantly. She had strong views on the subject of octopus-like department stores, and never lost an opportunity of airing them. “And as for those catalogues of theirs, they’re the Avonlea girls’ Bible now, that’s what. They pore over them on Sundays instead of studying the Holy Scriptures.”

“Well, they’re splendid to amuse children with,” said Diana. “Fred and Small Anne look at the pictures by the hour.”

“I amused ten children without the aid of Eaton’s catalogue,” said Mrs. Rachel severely (1981/1926, pp. 33–34).

The mail-order catalogue, here represented by the Canadian example of Eaton’s department store, presented a deluge of illustrated consumer goods, targeted advertising, and, crucially, a distribution strategy that made such materials accessible (and yearned over) even in small rural outposts such as Avonlea. They were a tangible representation of the idea of local and domestic access to plenty, a concept that features in many examples of children’s literature. The question of access is as important as the idea of more than you could ever want. And much of the focus of such consumption is domestic.

Many adults lament the excesses of the huge commercial network that targets contemporary children to buy (or persuade their parents to buy) ever more and more. Parents and teachers often worry that stories are utilized to fuel desire for related commodities, that children’s emotional commitment to their fictions is cynically converted into associated forms of financial investment. But the relationship between children’s stories and unrestrained consumption is more ancient; folktales and fairy tales often supply vistas of unlimited treasure as part of the delights of their invented worlds. What tempted Hansel and Gretel but greed over the chance of consuming the witch’s cottage? How often are three wishes converted into a vision of never-ending acquisition?

The contemporary Western world of child consumption may seem overwhelming, even metastatic, in its endless invitation to children to spend ever more money, but some domestic links between child reader and child greed have been long established. Some of the earliest books written deliberately for children were sold with commodities, as in the example of John Newbery’s A Little Pretty Pocket-Book, which could be purchased along with a pin-cushion for girls or a ball for boys (http://www.history.org/history/teaching/enewsletter/volume2/june04/pocketbook.cfm, accessed June 23, 2012). Denisoff speaks of nineteenth century children being inculcated into a “habituated commercial lifestyle” (2008, p. 2). The Tale of Peter Rabbit and The Wizard of Oz, to take two impressive examples of commodification, were associated with toys and tie-ins from their initial appearance in the world at the beginning of the twentieth century. And, as we shall see, in many of the early series books, child readers were inducted into a kind of consumer voyeurism.

In this chapter, I explore areas of overlap among children’s literature, domestic life, and consumption. I will single out examples of children’s stories that focus on the domestic, simply for the sake of streamlining my argument. My test sample of three American text sets covers a century of publication for children: the Maida books by Inez Haynes Irwin, the Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder, and the American Girl s collection of dolls, books, and thousands of accessories.

3.3 Little Centres of Consumption

Children’s fiction offers a home for many kinds of wish-fulfilment. The association between children’s novels and food is well established and is being treated separately in this book. But children can lust after many forms of commodity, even before their innate potential for covetousness is cultivated and expanded by contemporary marketing and branding exercises.

In the following discussion, I will explore issues of consumption as they appear in and impinge on my selected examples of children’s literature. American Girl s strikes some as an apotheosis of consumption but my other two sample texts challenge the notion that spin-offs and commodities represent a new and cancerous outgrowth on the previously pure world of children’s books. Through the course of a century, we may see children invited to ogle, to envy, and to want as they pore over their books; the lures of virtual consumerism, at least, are not new, and in some ways are more voracious since there are no constraints enforced by a real-life budget.

My two twentieth-century series offer some interesting contrasts and comparisons—and also suggest that the delights of imagined ownership are not confined to a particular ideological persuasion. They were written by women whose lifespans significantly overlapped, although their politics were radically different. Inez Haynes Irwin wrote fifteen books about Maida between 1909 and 1955, and, in a fortuitous element of symmetry, one book is actually entitled Maida’s Little House (1921). Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote the seven books of the Little House series and their partner volume Farmer Boy between 1932 and 1943; many other materials were published after her death in 1957, mostly under the aegis of other authors. The Maida books and the Little House books linger in the marketplace today via very different selling arrangements.

The vast orgy of merchandizing that has grown up around the works of Laura Ingalls Wilder provides a contemporary link to my third text set: the more market-driven literature of the American Girls empire of dolls, accessories, and children’s books. This third exemplar bears a surprisingly large number of elements in common with my first two prototypes, though its origins and motivations are quite different. It presents an opportunity to assess what has changed and what remains the same over the span of more than 100 years.

3.3.1 Maida’s Little Universe

Maida’s Little Shop (1909) sets out the initial parameters of Maida’s world. Daughter of millionaire Jerome “Buffalo” Westabrook, she has been sickly all her life. Surgery has now cured her lameness but she remains aimless and depressed. A chance encounter with a little neighbourhood store provides the first spark of life that her father has seen in her, and he is well equipped to grant her wish to run her own little neighbourhood shop in Primrose Court.

Author Inez Haynes Irwin was a feminist and a suffragette. Her plots include a variety of nods to radical politics and her inclusion of gypsy siblings in the main group of protagonists is unusual. Despite such progressive deviations from the norm of children’s series writing, however, Irwin is very willing to set out displays of luxuries, lovingly and lengthily described for the delectation of her child readers.

Initially Maida’s riches are within the compass of a child’s imagination, as she sets out her wares in her shop window.

The window certainly struck the key-note of the season. Tops of all sizes and colors were arranged in pretty patterns in the middle. Marbles of all kinds from the ten-for-a-cent “peeweezers” up to the most beautiful, colored “agates” were displayed at the sides. Jump-ropes of variegated colors with handles, brilliantly painted, were festooned at the back. One of the window shelves had been furnished like a tiny room. A whole family of dolls sat about on the tiny sofas and chairs. On the other shelf lay neat piles of blank-books and paper-blocks, with files of pens, pencils, and rubbers arranged in a decorative pattern surrounding them all.

In the show case, fresh candies had been laid out carefully on saucers and platters of glass (1909, pp. 45–46).

Because Maida is stocking her shelves to suit the tastes and budgets of the children of the neighbourhood who are so much poorer than she is, because she gives away little goodies to children too poor to be able to afford even her modest prices, because everything is done with love and taste and concern for the child customer, Irwin is able to have her cake and eat it with a vengeance in this little tableau. We get to gloat over the wealth of treats without feeling decadent about it. Indeed, one of the delights of imagined treasures like these is that we do not even have to choose; we can have it all if we like (unlike the child I heard in an American Girl store recently who had taken on the substantial challenge of persuading her father that “$58 is not really a lot of money.” From her father’s snort in reply, I do not think her chances of success were very great, highlighting the paradox that when the commodities are real there are very many that you do not get to own).

“Buffalo” Westabrook is nowhere near so restrained as Maida, showering his child with delicacies suited to the super-rich. We soon discover that his gifts to his daughter have included her own weight in twenty-dollar gold coins, a walk-in doll’s house, her own limousine, and the like. Naturally she is unspoiled by this largesse and enjoys none of it so much as she loves playing with the children in Primrose Court. Nevertheless, the table is set for the defining plot engine of the series, which is initially laid out in the second book, Maida’s Little House (1921).

“Buffalo” Westabrook sets up a group of the Primrose Court children in Maida’s “little house,” where they live a communally organized dream existence: every comfort and luxury, just enough work to make them feel good about themselves, and a never-ending assortment of recreations and adventures. In time, they add a camp, a set of cabins, a zoo, a theatre, a lighthouse, even an island to Maida’s little list of properties. To adult eyes, this catalogue is beyond ridiculous, but as a child reader of this ever-expanding empire, I felt nothing but a comfortable form of yearning. I especially fancied the little island, and drew maps of it in school when I should have been working. All that I required to join the Westabrook plutocracy of island-owners was a piece of paper and a pencil.

Even in the overblown universe that Maida controls from the second book onwards, the delights of domestic ownership are constantly reiterated. Here is Maida’s bedroom in the Little House:

The room was simple—it held but a big, double, old-fashioned canopied bed; an old-fashioned maple bureau; and an old-fashioned maple desk; a little straight slat-backed chair in front of the desk and a little slat-backed rocker by one of the windows – but it was quaint. In front of the rocker was a cricket as though just ready for little feet. The flowered wall-paper matched the chintz curtains and the chintz ruffles on the little cricket (1921, p. 54).

This interior reminds me very strongly of many scrapbook pages of domestic settings that I lovingly compiled as a child from none other than the pages of the Eaton’s catalogue. Irwin multiplies the impact of her trope of coziness through theme and variation:

[Rosie’s] room….did not differ much from Maida’s or from Laura’s across the way – except where the key-note of Maida’s wallpaper and chintzes were yellow, that of Rosie’s was crimson and Laura’s blue…. [A]lthough all the rooms showed a similarity, they also showed an individuality. Rosie and Laura went wild with excitement.

Oh look at my sweet, sweet closet!” Laura called from her room. “What a queer shape with the roof slanting like that. And a baby window in it! (1921, p. 55).

These rooms are consciously “homey” in McCracken’s sense of the term, and the girls delight in the work of keeping them snug and welcoming.

There is much more of the same. The boys, meanwhile, have their quarters in the barn—more Spartan but beguiling in a different way, no doubt perceived at the time as gender-appropriate. They too have their chores; domestic comfort and domestic labour are not conceptually separate in Maida’s world.

The general motif of the series is a grand theme of and–and–and. “Buffalo” and his helpers never run out of things to give the children. And child readers, presumably, never tired of reading about it because Irwin went on publishing this series until 1955.

3.3.2 Laura’s Little Luxuries

At first glance, Maida’s universe has nothing in common with the austere pioneer world described by Laura Ingalls Wilder. Laura had few possessions, and those she had were hard-acquired and highly valued. Wilder has somewhat fallen out of favour nowadays because of the perception that her historical account is irretrievably marred by racist over-simplification (though she unquestionably remains much loved by many children and parents). In terms of her personal political standpoint, she was strongly individualistic to the point of libertarian, thoroughly opposed to the community ideology of the New Deal. Her daughter Rose, who edited her manuscripts, was even more extreme in her stance, and re-shaped some of her mother’s narratives to increase the solitary, individual fortitude and skill of Pa and Ma as they forged their way across the west. “There are… many examples of how Wilder and Lane self-consciously altered the Ingallses’ story so as to highlight a view of them as self-reliant, individualistic, restless, buoyant, and innovative,” says Fellman (2008, p. 82).

However she adjusts the components of history to promote individualistic and Eurocentric virtues, Wilder has few peers when it comes to describing the complex labour required to make even a simple household object. Unlike “Buffalo” Westabrook who simply appears to wave his wallet around, Laura’s Pa brings specific skills, tools, time, energy, and imagination to the creation of goods for his family. Much of his work goes into the manufacture of a sequence of domestic interiors. In Little House in the Big Woods, Pa carves a bracket for Ma’s china shepherdess, her icon of domestic stability (throughout the series, she brings it out only when she judges her current home has become civilized enough to receive it; it is an enduring emblem of homeyness). The work involved in creating this shelf is detailed over several pages, culminating in its assemblage:

At last he had the pieces finished and one night he fitted them together. When this was done, the large piece was a beautifully carved back for a smooth little shelf across its middle. The large star was at the very top of it. The curved piece supported the shelf underneath, and it was carved beautifully, too. And the little vine ran around the edge of the shelf… .

The little china woman… was beautiful standing on the shelf with flowers and moons carved all around her, and the large star at the very top (1932/2004, pp. 61–62).

In Wisconsin, before the family travels west in that famous covered wagon, the small Laura lives a relatively social life. In the year of this story, she is finally old enough to go to town with her parents in the spring. As she nears the general store for the first time, “Laura’s heart was beating so fast that she could hardly climb the steps. She was trembling all over” (1932/2004, p. 167).

Wilder produces a description of plenty that is more utilitarian than Maida’s set of toys and treats, but the psychological impact is not so different:

The store was full of things to look at. All along one side of it were shelves full of colored prints and calicos. There were beautiful pinks and blues and reds and browns and purples. On the floor along the sides of the plank counters, there were kegs of nails and kegs of round, gray shot, and there were big wooden pails full of candy. There were sacks of salt and sacks of store sugar… .

Laura could have looked for weeks and not seen all the things that were in that store. She had not known there were so many things in the world (1932/2004, pp. 168–170).

Pa is a considerable craftsman but he is not as averse to store purchases as popular ideas of the series would sometimes imply. In the little house on Plum Creek, he invested heavily in ready-mades:

There was nothing more that a house could possibly have. The glass windows made the inside of that house so light that you would hardly know you were in a house. It smelled clean and piny, from the yellow-new board walls and floor. The cookstove stood lordly in the corner by the lean-to door. A touch on the white china door knob swung the bought door on its bought hinges, and the door knob’s little iron tongue clicked and held the door shut (1984/1953, p. 81).

The connections between consumption, coziness, homeyness, and the reduction of drudgery are once again made plain. What better, more humane use of money could there be than the creation of a comfortable, welcoming domestic interior?

The creation of such comfort out of a combination of skill, hard work, and good old American spirit may be part of the impetus that led to the extreme commodification of the Little House books. As long ago as 1998, Christine Heppermann lamented the corruption of the self-help ethos of the stories:

It is rather ironic that the original nine Little House books, those totems of something-from-nothing resourcefulness, now stand at the mouth of a raging merchandise river. Picture books, paper dolls, calendars, sticker books, craft books, board books (including two that play music): one imagines that seeing every one of the more than seventy titles that currently compose the “Little House program,” as a 1998 HarperCollins catalogue refers to it, en masse would be akin to watching the cloud of grasshoppers descend in On the Banks of Plum Creek. Before you know it, you are drowning in pests, and, judging from the healthy number of new Little House items published each season, they just keep coming (1998, p. 689).

To this day, the commodities “just keep coming.” In winter 2012, the Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum Online Gift Store (http://www.walnutgrove.org/store/, accessed March 2, 2012), listed a variety of new items, all the way from a reproduction of Laura’s engagement ring (while the original cost $1.40, the contemporary version costs $350.00) through a variety of doll accessories (picnic basket, boots, fishing rod, snowshoes, umbrella, etc.) to quilting materials and a book about repeating rifles. My personal favourite is “Pa’s bibs”—dungarees and shirt to fit a Ken doll. Keep in mind that this flood of bits and pieces represents the new items for a single season and the irony of such an excessive expression of an iconically frugal life becomes overwhelming.

The captions for some of the doll items in this online store explicitly mention that they will fit American Girl dolls. This crossover is not surprising; not only is it a good business decision on the part of the Walnut Grove museum, but it also exploits the ingenious transfer mechanism between stories of hardship and hard work and the attraction of owning lots and lots and lots of stuff, even if much of its charm lies in the fact that it is humble and thrifty stuff. This merger of sentiment and commerce reaches its logical apotheosis in the world of the American Girl.

3.3.3 A Celebration of Domestic Consumption

At American Girl, we celebrate girls and all that they can be. That’s why we develop products and experiences that help girls grow up in a wholesome way, while encouraging them to enjoy girlhood through fun and enchanting play (http://www.americangirl.com/corp/corporate.php?section=about&id=1, accessed March 3, 2012).

From its earliest days, American Girl has entwined dolls and their accessories with children’s novels featuring the character represented by the doll. It is a complex, never-ending universe: to take one example, I own a historic doll, Felicity, and a book starring the character Felicity, a girl who lived during the time of the American Revolution. But I also own a miniature Felicity doll (to be owned by another doll, presumably a contemporary one), and a miniature version of the Felicity book. Book as book and book as miniature plaything both take on supporting roles in this world.

In this world, consumption is not a late add-on to the fictions; it is built into the very process of fiction-building from the beginning (and vice versa). The logic of the brand informs the fiction inexorably, and the enticements of domestic ownership are everywhere.

Yet the company is capable of surprises. In 2009 they introduced Gwen Thompson, the homeless doll. Her existence highlighted complex and intriguing contradictions between American Girl’s commitment to representing American history (including such negative elements as slavery in the past and widespread homelessness in the present), the deliberate thwarting of the lure of domestic possessions through a doll character who had no home to put them in, and the $95 price tag, which put the doll insultingly out of reach of the very children she was representing.

3.4 Consuming in Bookspace and Playspace

The Maida books sideline issues of consumption by making them a matter of course. Everything the children might want, they soon acquire, but this acquisition is carefully thought through by attentive adults who have the children’s best interests at heart, so that’s all okay. Your every wish is wholesome in such a universe.

The Little House books foreground consumption in a different way; Laura’s belongings are modest indeed, but the creation of new things to own is a crucial element in a number of the books. Wilder cannot be held responsible for the orgy of commodities that now trail behind her books and the television program that arose from them; but the logic of the gift shop is not completely hostile to the ethos of the books. Things are important in the Little House books, and domestic things are particularly important. Mowder perceives an importance inherent in these things that goes beyond domestic limits to create a national movement to take over the American West:

The re-ordering of the West is not the masculine version of the cowboy gunslinger and the cattle drive, but of the continual erection of new homes in which to shelter the women, of new places to spread the tablecloth and display the china shepherdess (1992, p. 18).

Despite the metastasis of the china shepherdess (so to speak) in the never-ending growth of Little House tchotchkes, both the Maida stories and the Little House stories initially created their domestic interiors and adventure-filled landscapes through nothing more material than black marks on the page. In Lankshear and Knobel’s term, these stories are communicated in “bookspace” (2007, p. 13). The cross-over between American Girl books and American Girl dolls and accessories is much more tangible than anything that occurs in these two earlier text sets, and creates what Sekeres names “playspace” (2009, p. 406), a more multi-dimensional zone of textual encounters. In what Sekeres refers to as “branded fiction” (2009, p. 405), the dolls and other representations of the story impinge on the child’s response to the story by supplying concrete instantiations of what otherwise might be more freely imagined. At the same time, the stories potentially restrict free imaginative play with the dolls. Does the multimodal dialectic of the playspace compensate for the reduction of a free-rein imagination? Without talking to children who perform their imaginative lives inside that playspace, we should be wary of jumping to conclusions.

The historic dolls, who star as characters in their own sequence of books, are each branded together with an enticing set of domestic belongings: a bed, a chest or trunk, a desk, and other, more individual items. Rebecca is rich and Addy is poor but they have a roughly equivalent number of things; Addy’s bed is modest and Rebecca’s is sumptuous but each owns a bed. Rebecca owns a phonograph and Addy owns an ice-cream freezer—both historically appropriate belongings, and equally enchanting in their miniature fidelity to the original. In the company’s democratic (and commercial) fervour to make each character/doll equivalently desirable, the playing field is levelled in the initial character description. Rebecca is labelled thus: “Inspiring and confident, she is the star of her story. She’s a lively girl with dramatic flair, growing up in New York City” (http://store.americangirl.com/agshop/html/thumbnail/id/1182/uid/630, accessed May 13, 2012). Addy is described similarly: “Courageous and strong, she is the star of her story. Addy escapes to freedom, and now she wants to re-unite her family. Can she do it?” (http://store.americangirl.com/agshop/html/thumbnail/id/302/uid/43, accessed May 13, 2012).

These tags are recipes for the creation of more or less flat characters, and nobody would claim a great deal of literary merit for the American Girl historical novels. Even the obligatory shop scene contains a didactic component:

Everywhere Felicity looked, she saw something useful or pleasing. There were aprons, nightcaps, combs, spices, sponges, rakes, fishing hooks, tin whistles, and books. Felicity loved to daydream about the faraway places everything came from. The tulip bulbs came from Holland, the tea from China, and the cotton from India (Tripp 1991, p. 3).

The passion for admiring, creating, improving and owning the domestic interior is a much more dynamic force in this world than any manifestation of plot or character. Acquiring the accoutrements of a miniature household in the American Girl store is significantly more expensive than cutting up pictures of beds and trunks and desks from the Eaton’s catalogue and gluing them onto the scrapbook page, but the impetus of acquisition and display is not that different. And it is not hard to imagine that many contemporary children may still use the American Girl catalogues in exactly the same way as their predecessors: cutting out and manipulating images of consumable goods while occasionally managing to purchase an actual item or two.

The role of budget constraints in the creation of a domestic imaginary is under-analyzed. What is the impact of ownership when the representations are tangible and expensive? Is it psychologically different if the child acquires items through relentless, acquisitive nagging as opposed to lovingly saving her allowance in anticipation of furnishing her AG world? What is the imaginative role of the hybrid, in which expensive AG clothes and accessories are hung in a home-made cardboard closet? The studies of child culture in the consumer age do not really give us solid empirical answers to such questions.

3.5 Children’s Literature as Consumption

So far we have explored some of the ways in which children’s books may enable the pleasures of vicarious or actual consumption, with a particular focus on the acquisition of domestic accoutrements. One of many extremely clever features of the American Girl universe lies in the assumption, both explicitly and implicitly presented, that the ideal domestic interior will include books. Just as girl and doll may wear matching outfits, so they may own identical books, with the doll’s copy appropriately and appealingly scaled down to suit her eighteen-inch world (my miniature Nancy Drew volume is complete in every paratextual period detail and is highly evocative of the original, even though the text itself is shortened by several chapters).

The idea of books as items of consumption is not entirely compatible with our conventional notions of literary value. To many of us in the academy, the idea of owning books is entirely virtuous and nothing to do with commodification and greed. There is considerable research that associates book ownership among children and their families with higher literacy rates and better chances of success in life (e.g., Jumpstart 2009; Clark and Poulton 2011). Yet in their different ways, all three of my sample series provide examples of ways in which book consumption is fostered to more acquisitive ends.

3.6 Owning Books

Irwin’s publishers, Grosset and Dunlap, were responsible for producing books in bulk to a degree that is astonishing to contemplate—both from the Stratemeyer Syndicate and from prolific individual authors. Many North American libraries refused to stock such material (Ross 1997, p. 19), so it seems clear that Grosset and Dunlap were aiming their products at individual readers. The role of this publisher in the reading lives of children throughout the twentieth century deserves more complex study than it has received up to now, but it seems safe to say that its fortunes rested on the encouragement of individual consumption of its many titles.

Many of these Grosset and Dunlap titles have entered into a kind of half-life on the Internet. When I set about trying to procure titles from different early series, I was taken aback to find many sophisticated websites created by devotees in order to track and price extant copies of books that have long vanished from ordinary bookstores. They may not exactly be commodities, but they are most definitely collectibles. “Maida’s Other Little Website of Maida Books,” for example, supplies images of all the dust jackets and some of the frontispieces of different editions of the books (http://maidaweb.tripod.com/, accessed March 4, 2012). A related site offers a table of different bindings that includes nine headings for information to note about your binding and some extra advice about dating your copy:

If you are paying premium for a mint copy with dust jacket, make sure that the dust jacket and the book both list the same last book in the Maida series. If the two lists do not match, the dust cover may have come from another printing edition of the book. To some collectors, this will lower the value of the dust jacket if it is evident that they are not a matched pair (http://maidaweb.tripod.com/Bindings.htm, accessed March 4, 2012).

Like many other such websites, this one offers a mix of nostalgia and a more hard-headed approach to collecting—a mix of values that somehow works compatibly.

The Little House books survive in more mainstream ways, and in a variety of different forms: hardbacks, paperbacks, boxed sets, anniversary issues, black-and-white, full-colour, abridged, adapted, reworked into picture books and colouring books and sticker books. The books proliferate as expansively as the other Little House consumer items, and in their “gift-set” prettiness often serve a commodity role. It is impossible to know what Wilder would have made of the torrent of consumables connected with her stories but it is certainly conceivable that she would have been delighted by the ongoing sales of the books themselves.

The American Girl books serve the commodities more directly, but it is interesting to observe that while my Felicity doll has been discontinued, the books about Felicity are still for sale. The description of the boxed set of six paperbacks selling for a total of $39.95 gives some flavour of the approach:

This keepsake boxed set features all six of Felicity’s beautifully illustrated books, filled with her inspiring stories about growing up in 1774. The box opens up to reveal a fun-filled Felicity’s Favorite Things board game! Girls will have fun earning points as they move around the board collecting cards. Board game and pieces tuck into a storage pouch that folds-up with an elegant ribbon closure (http://store.americangirl.com/agshop/html/item/id/174417/uid/127).

Mattel (who took over ownership of the line from its original producers, the Pleasant Company) also encourages linkage between the dolls and other forms of text. With the purchase of a “My American Girl” doll, child customers gain access to an interactive environment known as Innerstar U (http://web.innerstaru.com/, accessed March 4, 2012). Here child purchasers create a virtual representation of their doll who travels to a variety of stations designed to encourage wholesome interactivity. This universe is obviously fictional, but it is not particularly narrative in its organization and its ontological status in relation to other official forms of children’s literature is complex. The fact that it opens with a “home” page draws attention to its relationship to domestic life.

Children may well move relatively seamlessly among doll, book, website, cut-outs from the catalogue, and their own imaginative play; and they may establish the limits and boundaries of their fictional world with little concern for the differential details of how it is instantiated on any particular occasion. Adults are very much less likely to consume in this fashion.

In their different ways, all of these approaches (with the possible exception of the ground-breaking Innerstar U) foster the significance of the bookshelf, both as a repository for items of value and also for its decorative domestic functions (all that emphasis on dust jackets and boxed sets).

Is the consumption of books somehow purer than other kinds of consumption? We certainly invest enormous cultural value in children’s reading of books, and use the book habit as a marker for future literate and other success. And there is no doubt that there are virtues to reducing the frustrations of the kind of happenstance access to books that I, for example, experienced in the 1950s. I did not know what it was like to read a complete series, or to read even two or three books in the right narrative order. The paperback revolution made many changes to children’s reading behaviour, one of which was the ability to read (or should we say consume?) a series of books in strict chronological order (many series heighten the importance of this approach by numbering the titles).

Like most middle-class parents of my era, I made sure to buy many more books for my own children than I had ever owned myself (though they were also prolific users of the library, just as I was). I am certainly not dismissing the pleasures or the psychological and educational importance of owning books for yourself as a child. Nor do I dismiss the damage caused by the kind of poverty summed up by the lives of those many children who do not own a single book. I do think, however, that it is important to articulate and question the drive to acquire more and more books that is so often marked off as worthy and significant and redolent of cultural capital, in contrast with other habits of consumption that are tagged as crass, commercial, and less deserving of respect.

3.7 Conclusions

In choosing popular series titles for closer exploration, I have opted for the reading materials perhaps most likely to be chosen by the child directly without adult intervention (though adult sponsorship may be involved in AG purchases). Perhaps in those titles more likely to be selected by adults, child heroes are more abstemious (not a proven case by any means!), but there seems little question that consumption of the vicarious or literal variety is an important element of these popular books. The consumption of the books themselves, either in large numbers or in a variety of presentation formats, is also highly encouraged, an invisible or valorized element of consumer behaviour that is not often scrutinized.

My first concern is to contest the ahistorical claim that heavy-duty calls to consumption are a new and insidious twenty first-century evil. My second aim is to challenge the scorn sometimes addressed to children and/or their parents whose consumptions patterns are sneered at as excessive or obsessive. The world of children’s literature itself has taken a sharp turn towards the idea that consumption at least of books is perhaps healthy after all. It will do us no harm and it might do us some good to consider some of the contradictions bound up in that pious assumption.

Children do seem to enjoy consuming and thinking about consuming. The politics of my three sample text sets—radical, libertarian, or corporate—all seem able to enfold the contemplation of consumption into their thematic concerns. A knee-jerk opposition to consumption as outside the austerity of the bookspace is hardly warranted today; we have some complex thinking to do.