A Little History of Literature (20 page)

How, though, does Dickens frame his critique of cruel Britain? By following the ‘progress’ of a young child from orphan to ‘workhouse boy’, to under-age chimney sweep, and – finally – to apprentice criminal. You want to know why your society is as it is? Look at how you treat your children. ‘As the twig is bent, so the tree is shaped’, as they would have said. Dickens believed that his own character as a man and an artist had been formed by what had
happened to him before he was thirteen years old and instructed his biographer to make that clear.

After
Oliver Twist
, Wordsworth's theme that children's experiences shape them for life can be followed through Charlotte Brontë (notably
Jane Eyre
, 1847), Thomas Hardy (especially
Jude the Obscure
, 1895), D.H. Lawrence (see
Sons and Lovers
, 1913), all the way to works such as William Golding's
Lord of the Flies
(1954) and Lionel Shriver's
We Need to Talk About Kevin
(2003).

Literature, in short, ‘found’ the child in the nineteenth century and has never lost its interest in him and her.

So far, we've covered books by adults, for adults, about children. There is, however, a category of books that works equally well for child readers and older readers, even if they were not initially targeted at the latter. For example, Lewis Carroll's
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
(1865), Mark Twain's
Huckleberry Finn
(1884) and J.R.R. Tolkien's
The Lord of the Rings
(1954–55). These works can be read to, or by, young readers. And it's worth reminding ourselves, at this stage, that ‘child’ is a very broad definition. The reading, listening and understanding of a five-year-old is very different from that of an early teen, and bookshops have separate sections for them. But however many candles on our birthday cake, there is, of course, a child in all of us and these three works satisfy readers (or listeners) from seven to seventy.

Lewis Carroll, an Oxford University professor and philologist, wrote his ‘Alice books’ for the clever daughters of a colleague. The story he span to entertain the youngsters on a summer afternoon's punt down the river, tells of a girl who follows a white rabbit down a hole in the ground. In the curious underground hall in which she finds herself, she drinks a potion that makes her shrink, and eats a cake that makes her gigantic, then journeys through a world full of mysterious and sometimes violent adults. Carroll's story is clearly a fable about the trials and tribulations of ‘growing up’ and it has always fascinated young readers going through that process. But embedded within it are innumerable things to amuse and interest Carroll's university colleagues – parodies of poems, for example (including one hilarious spoof of Robert Southey on
the subject of growing old), and a range of other philosophical conundrums.

Mark Twain's
Huckleberry Finn
is the most admired and written-about American book for, and about, the child. It has a simple story. Huck, Tom Sawyer's friend in an earlier story, goes on the run with an escaped African-American slave, Jim. They ride an improvised raft down the Mississippi to where, it is hoped, Jim will find freedom. They have adventures, and Huck learns to respect Jim as an equal. Tom Sawyer appears in the last, highly comic chapters. Mark Twain got sackfuls of letters about ‘Tom and Huck’ from young readers, some as young as nine, most around twelve. They loved the lads' scrapes.
Huckleberry Finn
was so popular with young readers, in fact, that it was banned in American libraries in case ‘the young’ imitated Huck's ungrammatical way of speaking and love of ‘stretchers’ (lies). But, particularly over the years since the Civil Rights Act of 1964, adult readers have been fascinated by Twain's subtle depiction of the relationship between Huck and the African-American Jim, and the way in which the young hero's racist prejudices are gradually corrected. This is an adult theme. Yet it co-exists with the pleasures the story can give readers of all ages.

The Lord of the Rings
ponders the perpetual conflict of good and evil – as do the more recent works of Philip Pullman and Terry Pratchett. The latter have their adult readership. But Tolkien's narrative of the epic struggle between the dark Lord Sauron, in his quest to take over Middle-earth, and its elvish, dwarf and human populations, has an added dimension. Tolkien was the most respected literary critic of Old and Middle English of his time, and an expert on
Beowulf
(see Chapter 3).
The Lord of the Rings
is a novel that has kept children awake until well past lights out, night after night, but it also teased the minds of Tolkien's fellow scholars. It was with a group of them, in the pleasant surroundings of an Oxford pub, that he first discussed his project.

Digging down into what is meant by ‘children's literature’ raises some fascinating questions. Let's look at three of them. The first is: How do we, as children, come by the basic skills required to ‘take in’
literature? We are not born literate. Typically our first experience of literature is through the ear, aged two(ish), with bedtime stories and nursery rhymes:
Jack and the Beanstalk
and ‘Three Blind Mice’, for example. Illustrations draw the child's attention to the page. The tales and ditties become more complex, and the illustration less central, with the passing months. Roald Dahl becomes the bedtime favourite. Dr Seuss takes over from the nursery rhymes.

Many of us learn to read and love literature at home – the bedtime story is one of the treats of the day. Children go on to read ‘with’ their parent (or sometimes an older sibling) rather than being read ‘to’ by their parent. For many children, as they progress, there is a third stage – reading by themselves under the blankets, with a torch, after lights out. The books we have read as a child tend to be our dearest literary companions through life.

There is another aspect of children's literature that makes it distinct from the adult kind. Books are expensive and children have little cash to spend. A new novel has over the last hundred years cost a sizeable chunk of the average person's weekly income. Historically children have had empty pockets. So children's literature has tended to be bought for them, not by them. The Victorians were particularly fond of what were called ‘Rewards’ – gift-books for good conduct (often given by the Sunday School). Children's literature, because of their minimal financial clout, has always been subject to adult control and censorship in the interest of instilling that same ‘good conduct’.

Children by nature prefer sweets to medicine. When he could scrape together enough of his meagre pocket-money, the six-year-old Charles Dickens splurged on ‘penny bloods’, as they were called – grisly illustrated stories of crime and violence. One, about rats, haunted him all his life.

All of which brings us to the most interesting phenomenon in recent children's literature – J.K. Rowling. Rowling's
Harry Potter
books sold, by the time the seven-part saga concluded, getting on for half a billion copies. Part of the reason for her success lies in the fact that Rowling has refused to fence herself in. She titled herself ‘J.K. Rowling’ to avoid being ‘branded’ as a boys' or a girls' author
– and the series is as much about Hermione as it is about Harry. As the years have passed she has also cunningly avoided the ‘age group’ trap. In the first volume,
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone
(1997), the hero is a bullied eleven-year-old cowering in a cupboard under the stairs. In the seventh and last of the series,
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
, the hero and his Hogwarts comrades are on the verge of seventeen. Fleur gives him an ‘enchanted razor’ (‘eet will give you ze smoothest shave you 'ave ever 'ad’, the worldly Fleur tells him). That razor represents Harry's entry into the adult world as symbolically as his first broomstick represented his entry into the world of wizardry.

Children's literature – a non-existent thing 150 years ago – is now, as Rowling supremely demonstrates, not merely a vast moneymaking enterprise but where many of the most interesting things, for readers of all ages, are happening. It is evolving, excitingly. Keep reading.

CHAPTER
21

Flowers of Decadence

W
ILDE
, B
AUDELAIRE
, P
ROUST AND
W
HITMAN

Towards the end of the nineteenth century a new image of the writer begins to take centre-stage in Britain and France: ‘the author as dandy’. Suddenly writers were not just writers but ‘celebrities’. Their modes of dress and demeanour were closely studied and imitated, their
bon mots
recycled. Their persons were admired as much as their writings. The authors, on their part, played up to their celebrity. As Wilde quipped in his novel,
The Picture of Dorian Gray
, ‘there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about’.

Historically one can see Lord Byron (‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’ – Chapter 15), with his hallmark shirt-collars and
hauteur
, as the first author to be as notorious for his lifestyle and image as he was revered for his poems. Byronism took on new life in the
fin de siècle
(‘end of century’) period as the Victorian era was winding down and new literary, cultural and artistic influences – notably those from France – were eroding middle-class English certainties.

In end-of-century Britain the cult of literary dandyism was epitomised by one writer above all others, Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie
Wills Wilde (1854–1900). Wilde's career was spectacular. As a celebrity, no author promoted himself more successfully. But where it eventually took him demonstrates the dangers for writers whose lifestyles were too flagrantly different from what was felt to be ‘respectable’ at the time. Dandyism, decadence and degeneracy were easily run together in the public mind. Wilde crossed the line – but not before he blazed magnificently.

Wilde's literary achievements, viewed objectively, are not over-whelmingly impressive. He has one undisputed masterpiece to his credit, the play
The Importance of Being Earnest
(1895). He published a gothic novel,
The Picture of Dorian Gray
(1891), sensational in its own time, interesting today largely because of its floridly gay subtext. It chronicles a ‘Faustian pact’ with the devil by which the hero Dorian (
d'or
– French for ‘made of gold’) remains for eternity a ‘golden youth’ while a portrait of him in the attic (his ‘grey’ self) withers and degenerates. Other writers have handled the theme better, but none more provocatively than Wilde.

Wilde was born in Dublin into a highly cultivated world. His father was a distinguished surgeon; his mother herself a woman of letters. Socially the family belonged to the Anglo-Irish ‘Ascendancy’ – the Protestant colonist class. (Always religiously ambivalent, Wilde would convert to Catholicism on his deathbed.) After reading Classics at Trinity College in Dublin, he completed his education at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he came under the influence of the high-priest of aestheticism (the ‘cult of beauty’), Walter Pater, whose instruction to his young pupils was that they should ‘burn always with this hard, gem-like flame’. None burned more gem-like than young Mr Wilde. Pater's doctrine of ‘art for art's sake’ was given an extreme expression in one of Wilde's later witticisms: ‘All that I desire to point out is the general principle that Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life.’

Even religion was secondary to art: ‘I would number Jesus Christ among the
poets
’, Wilde asserted – not a remark to please strait-laced Christians. Elsewhere, and even more provocatively, Wilde proclaimed that ‘The final revelation is that Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art’ – not
a remark to please lawyers. In these daring statements Wilde came close to the philosophical theory later to be called ‘phenomenology’ – a simpler doctrine than it sounds. It is through the forms of art, phenomenology suggests, that we shape and understand the formlessness of the world around us. In Wilde's frivolity there is always a kernel of what Matthew Arnold (a poet he admired greatly) called ‘high seriousness’. He played the dandy, but never the fool.

Wilde left Oxford formidably well read and deeply cultured. He wore his learning (like his exquisitely tailored clothes) lightly and with panache. He threw himself into the London literary world and was feted in Paris and New York when he went there. Everyone wanted to see Oscar, and hear what his latest provocative quip was – for example, on seeing Niagara Falls, a favourite honeymoon location, ‘It must be the second greatest disappointment for American brides’.

Above all he threw himself into the world of publicity, gossip sheets, newspapers and photography. His image was as famous to his age as Queen Victoria's. (She was not, one suspects, one of his admirers – Alfred, Lord Tennyson was more to the monarch's taste.) The ‘unnatural’ green carnation in the buttonhole, the ‘effeminate’ velvet jackets, the flowing hair, the cosmetics were all justified by Wilde as neo-Hellenism – the age of ancient Athens and Platonic love which he, and Pater, revered. He was the incarnation of Narcissus and ‘gilded youth’ and, as he drew on in years, became the patron of gilded youth.