Another Harpist On My Theme

        A month ago children’s author and professor of literature Katherine Rundell released a book entitled Why You Should Read Children’s Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise.  I have not yet got my hands on it, but from the excerpts that have appeared in articles, she is most certainly singing my song - and singing it beautifully, too.

        Defy those who would tell you to be serious, those who would limit joy in the name of propriety. Cut shame off at the knees... Plunge yourself soul-forward into a children’s book: see if you do not find in them an unexpected alchemy; if they will not un-dig in you something half hidden and half forgotten…

        To miss out on something so rich, strange, varied and enticing in adulthood, just out of embarrassment or perhaps because it hasn’t occurred to you, seems such a waste. There is such joy to be had.

        So one point is simply the joy of children’s literature.  (The Good Stuff, of course!  As with anything, there's plenty of rubbish, as well.)  Some of this may be the joy that adult lit snobs sneeringly refer to as “escapism,” about which read my previous post.  A lot of it is the “wise” cynicism that believes misery is realistic while happiness is unrealistic, about which read this previous post.  There’s the puritanical suspicion that anything good and virtuous must be unpleasant, while anything you’re enjoying is probably some sort of sin.  But all of these attitudes are, quite simply, false.  As Rundell declaims, defy them!

        But there’s more than simply the potential for joy, as if that weren’t already enough.  Rundell reminds us that children’s books encourage us to long for impossible and perhaps-not-impossible things.  These things are, of course, the things worldly wise adults have all-too-often already given up on: justice, adventure, hope…

        I think there is a risk, in adulthood, through the compromises we make and the busyness of our lives, that we cease to cherish the imagination in the way we should. Because the imagination is absolutely essential for seeing the world truly.

        Writing books for children requires all the love, beauty, imagination, and hope that serious adult writers tend to leave out in the name of “sophisticated ambiguity” and “gritty realism.”  Which is precisely why adults should be reading them.

[Picture: Dingbat from Chap-Books of the Eighteenth Century, by John Ashton, 1882 (Image from Internet Archive).]

Rundell’s quotations from The Guardian, 20 April 2019.