Year: 2002
Type: article
Abstract: Child's Place in Nature: Talking Animals in Victorian Children's Fiction Stories in which animals talk are a very ancient genre, or group of genres, dating back to Aesop or beyond.They can be used to teach a moral, to satirize humanity, to allegorise spiritual or political messages, to invert hierarchies in a carnivalesque mode. 1 These stories were not, initially, directed especially at children, and still need not be so: a twentieth-century example would be Orwell's Animal Farm, a book which caused me great distress when I read it as a child, thinking it was a children's book.(Though this anecdote contains all sorts of assumptions about what children should read, what children are, and how they are different from adults.)Margaret Blount maintains that children often do not like animal stories, but adults like giving them to children, because 'they are supposed to be "improving" in some way, pointing oblique and therefore palatable morals, or helping one's nature study along'.2 Another explanation would be that, like fairy tales, this is an adult genre that has drifted down to children's literature, as the boundaries of what is childish and what is adult have been redefined.A separate children's literature is a relatively recent development, beginning in the Eighteenth Century.Claims that childhood itself is a modern invention, unknown in classical or medieval times, have recently been much disputed by historians, but a particular Romantic construction of childhood was being formed in the late Eighteenth and early Nineteenth Centuries.3 If the child is seen as nearer to Nature than the adult, nature stories must be specially suitable for childish readers; if the child is more imaginative than the adult, the fantasy element (we all know animals don't talk) is also more suitable to children.Notice that these definitions of the child carry along with 1 See Margery Blount, Animal Land: The Creatures of Children's Fiction, London:
Source: Nineteenth Century Contexts
Author: Tess Cosslett
Institution: Lancaster University
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2153082858