Childrens Books From The 1940s

Children's Literature: A Very Brusque Introduction

May 25^thursday 2012

Children's Literature: A Very Short Introduction

Past Kimberley Reynolds

Come In by Olive Dehn. Illustration by Kathleen Gell. Image courtesy of Shakespeare Head Press & The National Library of Scotland. — Come up In by Olive Dehn. Illustration by Kathleen Gell. Image courtesy of Shakespeare Head Press & The National Library of Scotland.

Children'south books are like time machines. Coming across the same edition of a much-loved volume from childhood can instantly transport an individual back to the moment of reading. That visceral reaction, withal, is rather dissimilar from the fourth dimension-travel experienced by scholars who are working with children'due south books from before periods. Sometimes these allow admission to actual children and childhoods, as when their owners have written or drawn in them or otherwise afflicted the contents. More oft, even so, they have u.s. back to detail moments in culture. Considering children'southward books are generally designed to tell children well-nigh the globe and how it works, they can provide a wealth of data about everyday life and attitudes. Illustrated books can exist particularly helpful in reminding united states of america of what houses, schools, and high streets looked similar; who looked after children and how; the rhythm of daily routines and how families and communities interacted.

Often it is not the most famous books that are the about interesting in this respect. Olive Dehn's Come In (1946), for instance, takes us back to a time when children's books were printed in two colours, when vacuum cleaners and refrigerators were such novelties they had to be introduced and explained to readers, and when mothers followed the advice of Truby Male monarch and parked their babies in the pram at the end of the garden all day. In Come In the gardener has to remind the female parent to fetch her baby in because it is raining (although clearly non wealthy, this family has both a cleaner and a gardener, though neither alive in, another particular of how people lived in 1946). Forgetting the baby is neither a comic nor a dramatic moment in the story, but just function of a twenty-four hour period in the life of i family unit.

Come up In draws heavily on Olive Dehn'southward life, and this is another way in which the book tin can take us dorsum to an earlier time since the family it features is clearly modelled on her own, making biographical investigation relevant. Unusually in a children'due south volume of any time the male parent is an role player. Olive Dehn was married to the actor David Markham who was a Conscientious Objector in Globe War II. He was imprisoned for a period when Dehn was a very immature mother of three, so it is possible to see this story of domestic routine every bit a retort to the disruptions and difficulties the pair faced. It is also explicitly feminist in its stance. The volume is the work of two women: Dehn as author with illustrator Kathleen Gell. Implicitly the point of view is the illustrator's who, in a lovely metatextual moment at the cease shows herself walking away from the sleeping household with smoke curling upwardly from the cigarette she is smoking! The illustrator has been invited in to find the family unit for a day considering the mother has complained to the begetter that nil interesting happens to her. This is no folktale about being careful for what you wish. The mother's opinion is vindicated as she works through a round of daily chores while her husband, an actor, is off rehearsing for his latest play and is shown having an interesting and enjoyable time. He may be the staff of life-winner, simply women's work is demonstrably the more onerous.

Come up In is a rich text past a woman of smashing character and conviction — at historic period seventeen she was escorted out of Frg past the Nazis for writing a highly disrespectful poem nigh Hitler for Punch. Despite its interest in the position of women, still, it essentially holds upwardly a mirror to its time. Particular children's writers, illustrators, and publishers more overtly attempted to challenge and change existing ways of thinking, so give us a sense of how children were existence encouraged to understand the world. One example is Eddie and the Gypsy (1935), a translation of Ede and Unko (1931) past 'Alex Wedding ceremony', the pseudonym of Grete Weiskopf, a children'southward writer and so based in Berlin. Like Olive Dehn, Weiskopf was not a fan of Hitler. Ede and Unko was amongst the books burned in 1939, by which time she and her husband had already been forced to flee Germany. Although the story itself would take displeased the Nazi regime since it portrays friendship betwixt a German language boy and a gypsy daughter, no doubt the illustrations likewise offended the authorities since they were photographs of real children by John Heartfield (Helmut Merzfeld) who was known for his anti-Fascist montages.

Both Come up In and Eddie and the Gypsy are then rooted in their fourth dimension that reading them of itself starts a journeying to the by. As this brief give-and-take has shown, for scholars the interlocking histories of children's books and their creators can play a valuable office in helping to understand the mindset, the preoccupations and the taken for granted elements of life in the past.

Kimberley Reynolds is Professor of Children's Literature in the School of English language Literature, Linguistic communication and Linguistics at Newcastle Academy. Her most contempo book is Children's Literature: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2011). She currently holds a Major Leverhulme Fellowship to write Modernism, the Left and Progressive Publishing for Children in Britain, 1910 – 1949.

The Very Brusk Introductions (VSI) series combines a pocket-sized format with administrative analysis and big ideas for hundreds of topic areas. Written past our expert authors, these books tin change the mode you recollect almost the things that involvement you and are the perfect introduction to subjects you lot previously knew nothing almost. Abound your knowledge with OUPblog and the VSI series!

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only VSI articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
View more nearly this book on the

Our Privacy Policy sets out how Oxford University Printing handles your personal information, and your rights to object to your personal information being used for marketing to you or being processed as role of our business activities.

We volition only utilize your personal information to annals you for OUPblog articles.

Or subscribe to articles in the discipline area by email or RSS