The Lion and the Unicorn

American Childhood: Essays on Children’s Literature of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries brings together fourteen essays by Anne Scott MacLeod that attempt to “discover what the culture is saying about itself, about the present and future, and about the nature and purposes of childhood” (vii) through books for children (primarily domestic fiction), adult memoirs and autobiographies of childhood, and foreign travellers’ accounts of the American children whom they encountered. The essays’ topics range in time from the early nineteenth century to approximately 1980; a brief epilogue attempts to connect her thoughts to issues in the early 1990s. Various essays study standard titles, such as Little Women and Tom Sawyer, while others deal with books now long forgotten; the breadth of MacLeod’s reading in children’s and adolescent fiction is impressive. The jacket reports that five of the essays are previously unprinted, four were revised for this volume, and five were evidently reprinted without revision.

Unburdened by post-modern, feminist, political, or historical theory, MacLeod’s essays gradually deduce a rather unsurprising course for “the nature and purposes of childhood” from its beginnings in didacticism and moralism and on to the Romantic revolution, then to the emphasis and insistence on the family in fiction in the first half of the twentieth century, and finally to the pessimism and uncertainty of writers, such as Robert Cormier and Paul Zindel, in the 1970s. The essays are blocked into five sections (“American Girls,” “American Boys,” “Children in Fiction and Fact,” “A World Apart,” and “The End of Innocence”), but this seems to be more of an arbitrary effort to impose form than to reveal an inherent and organic thesis. In fact, this is the central problem with American Childhood: it is a collection of overlapping, loosely related essays written [End Page 142] during a fifteen-year span, but it is not a coherent study of either concepts of childhood or juvenile literary history. Individual essays provide thoughtful, level-headed commentary on the books and issues they survey, but as a whole there is a frustratingly great amount of repetition across the essays—of theme, insight, example, and even specific phrasing. Again and again, the reader encounters the same analyses of Alcott, Burnett, and Alger, among others, or disquisitions on the utility of autobiography for the study of childhood. The essays zigzag unpredictably through time, sometimes backing up, sometimes jumping over large time periods within a section.

In short, these are essays better read separately than from beginning to end. But even so, there are problems; many of the essays are rather dated at this point. “Censorship and Children’s Literature,” for example, has not been updated since 1983, and in a world of crack, ice, and drive-by shootings of children sometimes by children, the essay seems almost naive; at the end of the essay, the Moral Majority is just beginning to loom on MacLeod’s horizon. Much has changed since then, and a more stringent editor would have called for revision prior to republication. For the most part, scholarship since 1980 in all disciplines is ignored or only cursorily mentioned in the notes; reference to publications in the 1990s is almost non-existent. Thus, the fourteen essays seem to me at this point to be useful as historical background and introduction to various moments in American cultural history, but they do not provide a thorough, coherent vision of the evolution (MacLeod might term it devolution) of childhood and children’s literature as institutions. Even given MacLeod’s limited attention to domestic fiction, some of the omissions here are glaring; no mention is made, for instance, of Katherine Paterson, Eleanor Cameron, or even Maurice Sendak. The “American Childhood” of the volume’s title, therefore, seems to me over-eager; “Essays on Childhood and Children’s Literature in America from 1800–1980” would have been more accurate, if less catchy.

Where MacLeod is best is with her placement of individual titles into specific, limited, cultural contexts. As a de facto “old historicist,” she seeks...