Children’s Literature: Ideologies of the Past, Present and Future

Abstract

In 1945 the state of British children’s literature was not a particularly healthy one. The United Kingdom was not only emerging from a shattering conflict, it was also in the midst of an extended period of austerity, one aspect of which — paper rationing — had had a particularly direct effect on the publishing industry. At the end of the war there was only one specialist children’s publisher in the country, the Brockhampton Press.¹ Even Penguin’s Puffin imprint, founded in 1940 and destined to be a dominant force in shaping the priorities and canon of modern British children’s literature from the 1960s, initially published a mere dozen books per year. In the immediate post-war years publishers’ output was dominated by reprints of pre-war favourites, and by newer books that tended to replicate almost exclusively their comfortably middle-class settings and norms.² By the end of the period covered by this volume the situation had been transformed, and British children’s literature was in the middle of what would become known as its second Golden Age (the first being at the turn of the twentieth century). This transformation was due in part to a growing economy more able to support a flourishing industry, in part to a number of energetic and enlightened publishers and editors, and in part to a new generation of writers with a determination and vocation to produce high-quality literature for children and to reject the view of children’s books as works of secondary merit.