1

Ideology and the Children’s Book It is sensible to pay attention to children’s judgement of books, whether or
Peter Hollindale not most adults share them.
It is sensible to pay attention to adults’ judgements of children’s books,
IDEOLOGY.4. A systematic scheme of ideas, usu. relating to politics or whether or not most children share them.
society, or to the conduct of a class or group, and regarded as justifying actions, Some of these statements are clearly paired or linked, but they can be read
esp. one that is held implicitly or adopted as a whole and maintained regardless separately in isolation. All of them seem to me to be truisms. It would surprise
of the course of events. me if any serious commentator on children’s reading were to quarrel seriously
Oxford English Dictionary with any of them. He or she might wish to qualify them, to respond as to Dr
I will start with an assortment of disconnected statements. F.R. Leavis’s famous 'This is so, isn’t it?’ with his permitted answer. ‘Yes,
It is a good thing for children to read fiction. but…’. Even so, I would expect a very wide consensus.
Children’s own tastes are important.
Some novels for children are better than others. However, if this series of statements is brought to bear on the controversy in
It is a good thing to help children to enjoy better books than they did before. recent years between so-called book people and so-called child people, it will
A good children’s book is not necessarily more difficult or less enjoyable be found I think that most of them drift naturally towards either one side or the
than a bad children’s book. other. In particular, there is likely to be a somewhat one-sided emphasis on
Children are individuals, and have different tastes. remarks about adult judgements and their importance (book people); about
Children of different ages tend to like different sorts of books. children’s judgements and their importance (child people); about differences of
Children of different ethnic and social backgrounds may differ in their tastes literary merit (book people) and about the influence on readers of a book’s
and needs. social and political values (child people).
Some books written for children are liked by adults.
Some books written for adults are liked by children. If these two little exercises do indeed produce the results that I expect them
Adults and children may like (or dislike) the same book for different reasons. to, much of the division between literary and social priorities which has arisen
Children are influenced by what they read. over the last fifteen years or so may come to seem exaggerated and sterile. We
Adults are influenced by what they read. have differences of emphasis disguised as differences of principle. (This may
A novel written for children may be a good novel even if children in general have happened because the extremes of each alternative reflect a much larger
do not enjoy it. public controversy about the chief purpose of education. People slip without
A novel written for children may be a bad novel even if children in general realizing it from talking about children’s books to talking about educational
do enjoy it. philosophy.) One result is particularly odd. By my own idiosyncratic but
Every story is potentially influential for all its readers. convinced reckoning, the statements which are left over, which seem not to
A novel may be influential in ways that its author did not anticipate or intend. bend towards the critical priorities of either side, are those which concern the
All novels embody a set of values, whether intentionally or not. individuality of children, and differences of taste or need between children and
A book may be well written yet embody values that in a particular society adults or between one child or group of children and another. It is a curious fact
are widely deplored. that these, the most obvious truisms of all, are also the most contentious
A book may be badly written yet embody values that in a particular society statements. They are contentious because on the one hand they cast doubt on
are widely approved. the supremacy of adult literary judgement, and on the other they suggest that
A book may be undesirable for children because of the values it embodies. we cannot generalize about children’s interests.
The same book may mean different things to different children.
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It is very easy and tempting to simplify a debate until its nature becomes
conveniently binary, and matters which are not associated by any kind of The trouble with this packaging of attitudes is that it over-simplifies, trivializes
logical necessity, or even loosely connected, become coalesced in the same and restricts the boundaries of debate. Admittedly most writers on both sides of
ideological system. Something of this sort has happened in the schism between the notional divide have at times unwisely offered hostages to fortune. One may
child people and book people. In the evolution of debate, the child people have take for instance Fred Inglis’s remark:
become associated not only with a prime concern with the child reader rather
than the literary artefact but with the propagation through children’s books of a Irrespective of what the child makes of an experience, the adult wants
‘progressive’ ideology expressed through social values. The book people, on to judge it for himself, and so doing means judging it for itself. This
the other hand, have become linked with a broadly conservative and judgement comes first, and it is at least logically separable from doing
‘reactionary’ ideological position. The result is a crude but damaging the reckoning for children. Tom’s Midnight Garden and Puck of Pook’s
conjunction of attitudes on each side, not as it necessarily is but as it is Hill are wonderful books, whether or not your child can make head or
perceived by the other. A concern for the literary quality of children’s books as tail of them. (Inglis 1981:7)
works of imagination has become linked in a caricatured manifesto with
indifference to the child reader and with tolerance or approval of obsolete, or This carefully formulated and entirely sensible statement offers an important
traditional, or ‘reactionary’ political values. A concern with the child reader has distinction between equally valid but separate ways of reviewing literary
become linked with indifference to high standards of literary achievement and experience. Yet I have seen the last sentence removed from its context and
with populist ardour on behalf of the three political missions which are seen as made to seem like a wanton dismissal of the child, a typical instance of the
most urgent in contemporary society: anti-racism, anti-sexism and anti-classism. book person’s negligent aesthetics.

If this is the general divide between book people and child people amongst On the other side of the chasm is Bob Dixon, who follows an assault on
the critics, a matching divide is said to exist between writers. The book people ancient symbolic and metaphorical uses of the word ‘black’ by a paragraph
amongst authors—those who are said by hostile commentators to have which seems ready on ideological grounds to consign Shakespeare and Dickens
produced the prize-winning, dust-collecting, adult-praised, child-neglected to the incinerator:
masterpieces of the illusory ‘golden age’—are those who write ‘to please
themselves’, or ‘for the child I once was’, or, in C.S. Lewis’s famous remark, Adult literature, as might be expected, is full of such figurative and
‘because a children’s story is the best art-form for something you have to say’ symbolic usages—when it isn’t openly racist. Shylock and Fagin,
(Lewis 1980:208). The child people amongst authors, on the other hand, would Othello and Caliban all deserve a second look, for there’s no need for
accept Robert Leeson’s analogy between the modern author and the oral anyone to accept racism in literature, not even if expressed in deathless
storyteller of days before the printed book: blank verse. (Dixon 1977:95)

is the public, the consumer, obliged to accept such a take-it-or-leave-it This is quite true. Any individual is free to elevate political judgement above
attitude, being grateful if the artistic arrows shot in the air find their literary judgement, and to be contemptuous of all literature which offends a
target? What happened in the old story-telling days? If the audience did political criterion. The converse is also true. Any individual is free to like and
not appreciate the genius of the storyteller, did that individual stalk off, admire a great work of literature, even if its ideology is repellent. These are the
supperless, into the night? Actual experience of story-telling suggests private freedoms of a democratic society, and I hope that any commentator
something different. You match story to audience, as far as you can. would defend both with equal enthusiasm. I make the second choice myself in
(Leeson 1985:161) the case of D. H. Lawrence, whom I admire as a great writer and whose
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ideology I detest. Neither principle is much use when we confront the problem racially divided country such as Britain (and most Western countries to some
of introducing children to great works of the past which do not entirely accord extent or other) there is not a uniform pattern of ‘fears and concerns’ on the part
with current moral priorities. But if anyone says, ‘We should not introduce of ‘those who bring up and educate children’. The ‘fears and concerns’ of a
them; we should ban them,’ I begin to hear the boots of Nazis faintly treading, teacher in a preparatory school in Hampshire are likely to be substantially
no matter what colour their uniforms. different from those of a primary school teacher in Liverpool; those of an Irish
Catholic parent in Belfast will differ from those of an Asian parent in Bradford.
My particular concern in this article is to argue that, in the very period when I wish to make only the obvious but neglected point that the same book, read by
developments in literary theory have made us newly aware of the omnipresence four children in the care of these four adults, will not in practice be the same
of ideology in all literature, and the impossibility of confining its occurrence to book. It will be four different books. Each of these children needs and deserves
visible surface features of a text, the study of ideology in children’s literature a literature, but the literature which meets their needs is unlikely to be a
has been increasingly restricted to such surface features by the polarities of homogeneous one.
critical debate. A desire on the part of the child people for a particular set of
social outcomes has led to pressure for a literature to fit them, and a simplistic It is of course important too for the writer’s creative freedom to be respected.
view of the manner in which a book’s ideology is carried. In turn, this But in order to be respected it must be understood, and on that score also I do
inevitably leads to a situation where too much stress is placed on what children not share Robert Leeson’s optimism. There is too much evidence of pressure on
read and too little on how they read it. At the very point in history when writers (from all points of the politico-moral spectrum) to conform to a
education seemed ready to accept the reading of fiction as a complex, important, predetermined ideology issuing in visible surface features of the text (Inglis
but teachable skill, the extremities of critical opinion have devalued the element 1981:267–70; Leeson 1985:122). Here, for example, is Nina Bawden, a writer
of skill in favour of the mere external substance. widely admired by critics of very different approaches.

Diversity and individuality Speaking to people who care, often deeply, for children, I have begun
Things can be made to sound very easy, as they do in Robert Leeson’s to feel that the child I write for is mysteriously absent…. ‘Are you
reassuring comments: concerned, when you write, to see that girls are not forced into
feminine role-playing?’ ‘What about the sexuality of children?’ ‘All
This is a special literature. Its writers have special status in home and writers are middle class, at least by the time they have become
school, free to influence without direct responsibility for upbringing successful as writers, so what use are their books to working
and care. This should not engender irresponsibility—on the contrary. It class/deprived/emotionally or educationally backward children?’
is very much a matter of respect, on the one hand for the fears and ‘Writers should write about modern [sic] problems, like drugs,
concerns of those who bring up and educate children, and on the other schoolgirl pregnancies. Aren’t the books you write rather escapist?’
for the creative freedom of those whose lives are spent writing for them. ‘What do you know about the problems of the child in the high-rise flat
I have generally found in discussion with parents or teachers, including since you have not lived in one?’ To take this last question. The reply,
those critical of or hostile to my work, that these respects are mutual. that you project your imagination, is seldom taken as adequate; but
(Leeson 1985:169–70) what other one is there? (Bawden 1975:63–4)

I should like to think that this was true and generally accepted. But it cannot, no Leeson’s dictum, ‘You match story to audience, as far as you can’, is less
matter how true, be so simple. In a socially and culturally, politically and straightforward than it seems. A diversity of authors exercising their ‘creative
freedom’—as they must, if they are to write anything worthwhile at all—will
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only match story to audience ‘as far as they can’. If there were indeed a single, For the caricatured child person the book exists chiefly in terms of audience
uniform audience, a theoretical ‘child’ who stood for all children, there would response. The distinguished children’s book is one which the ‘kids’ will like
be few problems. Either a writer would be able to match her story to this ‘child’, and which will aid their social growth. Historical periods will differ in the
in which case her credentials as a children’s writer would be proved, or she forms of social growth they cherish, but it is an article of faith that the current
would not be able to, in which case she might have to settle for being a writer period will be wiser than its predecessors. The child audience, by some
of those other children’s books supposedly beloved of the book people, the ideological sleight of hand, will be virtually identical or at the very least highly
ones admired by literary adults but unread by actual children. compatible with the preferred social objectives. In an age which desires to
propagate imperialist sentiments, children will be an army of incipient
However, one point I hoped to make with my opening anthology of truisms is colonizing pioneers. In an age which wishes to abolish differences between
that the most conspicuous truisms of all are ones which many adult sexes, races and classes, the readership is a composite ‘child’ which is willing
commentators are in practice loth to accept. When Leeson says ‘you match to be anti-sexist, anti-racist and anti-classist, and does not itself belong to any
story to audience’, he must surely be postulating many possible audiences, sex, or race, or class other than those which the equalizing literature is seeking
whether individual (parent reading to child) or socially grouped (teacher or to promote. The ‘kids’ are a Kid, who is sexless but female, colourless but
visiting author reading to school class). It is clear that these audiences will black, classless but proletarian. Children’s literature is implicitly defined as
differ greatly from each other, whether in age, or sex, or race, or social class, being for this Kid: it is not the title of a genre but of a readership. Ideology is
and that these different audiences will perceive the same story in different ways. all-important to it. Literary merit will be admitted to have a place, but it is a
Otherwise there would be no need for Robert Leeson to do any ‘matching’. He minor part of the critic’s responsibility to evaluate it.
is not suggesting that a writer who adjusts and improvises in order to make his
story work with one group of children can then sit back, assured of its success Both these caricatures exist. Both are extremely intolerant of anything which
with every other group thereafter. And yet at their own self-caricaturing lies outside their preferred agenda. The first kind is the one which says ‘I am
extremes this is precisely the assumption on which both book people and child almost inclined to set it up as a canon that a children’s story which is enjoyed
people seem to act. only by children is a bad children’s story’ (Lewis 1980:120). The second is the
kind which says, as someone did of Robert Westall’s brilliant anti-totalitarian
For the caricatured book person (a rara avis, perhaps) the distinguished story Futuretrack 5, ‘The book will appeal greatly to teenage boys, which is the
children’s book has a quality of verbal imagination which can be shown to exist best reason for not buying it.’ Both (though naturally for very different reasons)
by adult interpretative analysis, and this is a transferable objective merit which will abominate Enid Blyton, and perhaps it is true to say that both understand
the ‘ideal’ child reader (though unable of course to verbalize his experience) is the effective working of ideology less well than she did, in practice if not in
capable of appreciating and enjoying. The good literary text has an external theory.
existence which transcends the difference between reader and reader, even My purpose here is emphatically not to argue for or against any single
between child and adult. Consequently there is an implicit definition of ideological structure in children’s books (and certainly not to vindicate Miss
children’s literature which has little necessarily to do with children: it is not the Blyton’s), but to contend that ideology is an inevitable, untameable and largely
title of a readership but of a genre, collateral perhaps with fable or fantasy. uncontrollable factor in the transaction between books and children, and that it
Ideology will be admitted to have a place in it, but since the child audience and is so because of the multiplicity and diversity of both ‘book’ and ‘child’ and of
hence the teaching function are subordinate to literary and aesthetic the social world in which each of these seductive abstractions takes a plenitude
considerations, it is a small part of the critic’s responsibility to evaluate it. of individual forms. Our priority in the world of children’s books should not be
to promote ideology but to understand it, and find ways of helping others to
understand it, including the children themselves.
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customary behaviour. Ironically, the astonishing effect of The Turbulent Term

of Tyke Tiler as an anti-sexist story is largely due to its ingenious self-disguise.
Three levels of ideology Much the same is true of anti-racist or anti-classist fiction. In so far as it
Ideology, then, is present in a children’s book in three main ways. The first and diverges from stock assumptions about race or class, it may seem crudely
most tractable is made up of the explicit social, political or moral beliefs of the didactic. If on the other hand the author seeks to present as natural a society
individual writer, and his wish to recommend them to children through the without racial prejudice or class division and to leave out tutelary scenes of
story. An attractive example is this, offered by the late Henry Treece: conflict, she risks blunting the ideological content and presenting happenings
which readers simply do not believe. The writer faces a dilemma: it is very
I feel that children will come to no harm if, in their stories, an ultimate difficult in contemporary Britain to write an anti-sexist, anti-racist or anti-
justice is shown to prevail, if, in spite of hard times, the characters classist novel without revealing that these are still objectives, principles and
come through to receive what they deserve. This, after all, is a hope ideals rather than the realities of predictable everyday behaviour. If you present
which most of us share—that all may yet be well provided that we as natural and common-place the behaviour you would like to be natural and
press on with courage and faith. So in my stories I try to tell the common-place, you risk muting the social effectiveness of your story. If you
children that life may be difficult and unpredictable, and that even the dramatize the social tensions, you risk a superficial ideological stridency.
most commendable characters may suffer injustice and misery for a
while, but that the joy is in the doing, the effort, and that self-pity has The writer may opt for more circuitous methods. The more gifted the writer,
no place. And at the end and the gods willing, the good man who holds the more likely to do so. If the fictional world is fully imagined and realized, it
to the permanent virtues of truthfulness, loyalty and a certain sort of may carry its ideological burden more covertly, showing things as they are but
stoic acceptance both of life’s pains and pleasures, will be the fulfilled trusting to literary organization rather than explicitly didactic guidelines to
man. If that is not true, then, for me, nothing is true: and this is what I achieve a moral effect. Misunderstandings may follow if you are unlucky or too
try to tell the children. (Treece 1970:176) trusting. The hand of anti-racist censorship has begun to fall occasionally on the
greatest anti-racist text in all literature, Huckleberry Finn. Twain’s ideological
This is the most conspicuous element in the ideology of children’s books, and error is to be always supremely the novelist rather than the preacher, to present
the easiest to detect. Its presence is conscious, deliberate and in some measure his felt truth uncompromisingly rather than opt for educative adjustments to it,
‘pointed’, even when as with Treece there is nothing unusual or unfamiliar in and to trust the intelligence of his readers. Perhaps the most luminous moment
the message the writer is hoping to convey. in anti-racist storytelling comes when Huck, arriving at the Phelpses’ farm and
being mistaken for Tom Sawyer, has to fabricate an excuse for late arrival by
It is at this level of intended surface ideology that fiction carries new ideas, inventing a river-boat mishap:
non-conformist or revolutionary attitudes, and efforts to change imaginative
awareness in line with contemporary social criticism. This causes difficulties ‘It warn’t the grounding—that didn’t keep us back but a little. We blowed
both for writers and critics, which can be exemplified from present-day concern out a cylinder-head.’
with the depiction of sexual roles. There are hundreds of books which passively ‘Good gracious! anybody hurt?’
borrow and reproduce the sexual stereotyping which they inherit from earlier ‘No’m. Killed a nigger.’
fiction. No one notices, except radical adult readers (and perhaps some children) ‘Well, it’s lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt…’ (Chapter 32)
who are alert to it and offended by it. On the other hand, any novel which
questions the stereotypes and sets out to reflect anti-sexist attitudes will almost This snatch of dialogue is a devasting sign of what comes naturally to Huck’s
inevitably do so conspicuously because it depicts surprising rather than mind as soon as he begins to role-play Tom, but its full effect depends on its
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late placing in the novel, in the wake of all we have seen already of Huck’s ‘There’s four sorts of people tryin’ to get to be rulers. They all want to
‘sound heart and deformed conscience’. It is a crucial point: you cannot make things better, but they want to make ‘em better in different ways.
experience the book as an anti-racist text unless you know how to read a novel. There’s Conservatives, an’ they want to make things better by keepin’
In modern children’s writing the consciously didactic text rarely displays such ‘em jus’ like what they are now. An’ there’s Liberals, an’ they want to
confidence in its readers, with the unhappy result that reformist ideological make things better by alterin’ them jus’ a bit, but not so’s anyone’d
explicitness is often achieved at the cost of imaginative depth. notice, an’ there’s Socialists, an’ they want to make things better by
takin’ everyone’s money off’em an’ there’s Communists an’ they want
The inference is clear: in literature as in life the undeserved advantage lies with to make things better by killin’ everyone but themselves’. (Crompton
passive ideology. The second category of ideological content which we must 1930: Chapter 3)
thus take into account is the individual writer’s unexamined assumptions. As
soon as these are admitted to be relevant, it becomes impossible to confine This is fun, and not to be taken solemnly, but it is not exactly even-handed fun.
ideology to a writer’s conscious intentions or articulated messages, and I do not think Miss Crompton is deliberately making propaganda, but there is
necessary to accept that all children’s literature is inescapably didactic: not much doubt where her own sympathies lie or where she tacitly assumes that
the reader’s will follow. The joke about Conservatives and Liberals is a joke
Since children’s literature is didactic it must by definition be a about our sort, and the joke about Socialists and Communists is a joke about a
repository, in a literate society almost the quintessential source, of the different sort. The interest of the example lies in the gentle, unconsidered bias
values that parents and others hope to teach to the next generation. of the humour. Behind it lies an assumption of uncontroversial familiarity. It
(Musgrave 1985:22) can be an instructive exercise to recast the joke, so that its bias dips in the
opposite direction—suppose, for example, that it began its list with ‘There’s
This is merely to accept what is surely obvious: writers for children (like Conservatives, an’ they want to make things better by makin’ rich people richer
writers for adults) cannot hide what their values are. Even if beliefs are passive an’ poor people poorer.’ It might still be funny, but it would at once acquire a
and unexamined, and no part of any conscious proselytising, the texture of shading of aggressive propagandist intention. As a character remarks in another,
language and story will reveal them and communicate them. The working of more recent and more radical children’s book, Susan Price’s From Where I
ideology at this level is not incidental or unimportant. It might seem that values Stand:
whose presence can only be convincingly demonstrated by an adult with some
training in critical skills are unlikely to carry much potency with children. More ‘Ah. It’ll be something left-wing, then, if he calls them “political” in
probably the reverse is true: the values at stake are usually those which are that voice-of-doom. The Tories aren’t political, you know. They just
taken for granted by the writer, and reflect the writer’s integration in a society are.’ (Price 1984:60)
which unthinkingly accepts them. In turn this means that children, unless they
are helped to notice what is there, will take them for granted too. Unexamined, This is a very small instance, introduced simply for illustration’s sake, of
passive values are widely shared values, and we should not underestimate the something which is present to some degree in all fiction and intrinsic to its
powers of reinforcement vested in quiescent and unconscious ideology. nature. There is no act of self-censorship by which a writer can exclude or
Again I will take a pleasant example. It occurs in Richmal Crompton’s disguise the essential self. Sometimes, moreover, the conscious surface
William the Bad. Henry is summing up the salient features of British party ideology and the passive ideology of a novel are at odds with each other, and
politics before the gang hold their elections: ‘official’ ideas contradicted by unconscious assumptions. Since this is by no
means true of fiction only, the skills of analysis applied to different levels of a
text should form part of teacher training in any society which hopes for
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adequate literacy. By teaching children how to develop an alert enjoyment of often overlook the huge commonalities of an age, and the captivity of mind we
stories, we are also equipping them to meet linguistic malpractices of more undergo by living in our own time and place and no other. A large part of any
consequential kinds. book is written not by its author but by the world its author lives in. To accept
the point one has only to recognize the rarity of occasions when a writer
To associate the ideology of children’s books with ideology in its broader manages to recolour the meaning of a single word: almost all the time we are
definitions, we need to consider the third dimension of its presence. This is the the acquiescent prisoners of other people’s meanings. As a rule, writers for
one to which developments in literary theory, by now familiar and widely children are transmitters not of themselves uniquely, but of the worlds they
accepted, have introduced us, and the one from which domestic skirmishing share.
between book people and child people has tended to distract our attention. In
order to affirm its general nature, I take a convenient summary of its position For modern children’s writing this has many implications, but I would pick
from a study not of children’s literature but of sixteenth-century poetry: out two. First, the writer’s ability to reshape his world is strictly limited. It is in
his power (and may be his duty) to recommend an improved world, reflecting
How does ideology affect literary texts? The impact of ideology upon not what it is but what he hopes it might be. But this undertaking is bound by
the writings of a particular society—or, for that matter, on the the same constraint as the literature of warning, which depicts a corrupted
conventions and strategies by which we read those writings—is no world as the author fears it truly is or might be. The starting point for each must
different from the way it influences any other cultural practice. In no be a shared understanding of the present, and an actuality which the young
case, in Macherey’s words, does the writer, as the producer of the text, reader believes in.
manufacture the materials with which he works. The power of ideology The second point is that we may live in a period when our common ideology
is inscribed within the words, the rule-systems, and codes which has many local fractures, so that children in different parts of the same national
constitute the text. Imagine ideology as a powerful force hovering over society are caught between bonding and difference. If children who are citizens
us as we read a text; as we read it reminds us of what is correct, of one country live in worlds within a world, discrete subcultures within a
commonsensical, or ‘natural’. It tries, as it were, to guide both the culture, they will need different storytelling voices to speak to them—voices
writing and our subsequent readings of a text into coherence. When a which can speak within an ideology which for them is coherent and complete.
text is written, ideology works to make some things more natural to As I hope this discussion has indicated, ideology is inseparable from language,
write; when a text is read, it works to conceal struggles and repressions, and divergences of language within a national culture point to divisions and
to force language into conveying only those meanings reinforced by the fragmentations in its shared ideology. In Britain as in other countries there is
dominant forces of our society. (Waller 1986:10) indeed a common language, but when that is said it must be qualified. Britain is
also a country of many languages, many Englishes, and the children who speak
If this is true, as I believe it is, we must think in terms which include but also them ideally need both a common national literature and local literatures which
transcend the idea of individual authorship, and reappraise the relationship speak to and for themselves. Robert Leeson makes this point in his case for
between the author and the reader. In the case of children’s literature, our ‘alternative’ publishing for children. He begins by referring specifically to the
thinking may be affected by an oversimplified stereotype of possible authority spoken language and to dialect.
and influence. The individual writer is likely, as we have seen, to make The very richness of non-standard English is in itself a challenge to the whole
conscious choices about the explicit ideology of his work, while the uniqueness system of education and literature, but a challenge that must be met. London
of imaginative achievements rests on the private, unrepeatable configurations schools at the moment are grappling (or not grappling) with new streams of
which writers make at subconscious level from the common stock of their language like Creole. (Leeson 1985:179)
experience. Our habit is so much to cherish individualism, however, that we
 8

He goes on to argue that ‘alternative’ publications need not be subject to the response of [their] readers’. Interestingly he then goes on to make two
orthodox scrutiny of critics ‘provided [they] can meet the critical response of significant conflations of ideas:
[their] readers’. Interestingly he then goes on to make two significant
conflations of ideas: acquiescent prisoners of other people’s meanings. As a first, he associates linguistic and literary subcultures with the literature of
rule, writers for children are transmitters not of themselves uniquely, but of the ‘progressive’ values, and second, he associates alternative publishing of books
worlds they share. for children with publishing of books by children.

For modern children’s writing this has many implications, but I would pick So far the alternative publishers have not made great inroads into the
out two. First, the writer’s ability to reshape his world is strictly limited. It is in field of fiction for the young. There have been some feminist stories for
his power (and may be his duty) to recommend an improved world, reflecting small children, some teenage writings, original and re-told folk stories
not what it is but what he hopes it might be. But this undertaking is bound by from ethnic minorities. These are modest beginnings. (Leeson
the same constraint as the literature of warning, which depicts a corrupted 1985:189)
world as the author fears it truly is or might be. The starting point for each must
be a shared understanding of the present, and an actuality which the young The point which is half made here can be fully understood in its general
reader believes in. implications if we define ‘ideology’ largely and precisely enough. The two
The second point is that we may live in a period when our common ideology points are crucial: subcultures of language are inseparable from the climate of
has many local fractures, so that children in different parts of the same national ideas and values which are at work in them, and children inhabiting a
society are caught between bonding and difference. If children who are citizens subculture need to create a literature of their own, not merely be supplied with
of one country live in worlds within a world, discrete subcultures within a one. Leeson’s ideas on this point are important and helpful but unnecessarily
culture, they will need different storytelling voices to speak to them—voices restricted in their scope. Like many other commentators, he is in practice most
which can speak within an ideology which for them is coherent and complete. concerned with the London community of ethnic minorities and progressive
As I hope this discussion has indicated, ideology is inseparable from language, groups. Such critics tend to write as if other places, other social groupings,
and divergences of language within a national culture point to divisions and other sites of active dialects, other schemes of ethical values did not exist, or
fragmentations in its shared ideology. In Britain as in other countries there is had no comparable needs. If our thinking about ideology is clear enough, it is
indeed a common language, but when that is said it must be qualified. Britain is apparent that the same considerations apply to all children in any part of society
also a country of many languages, many Englishes, and the children who speak (and in practice this probably means all parts of society) where there is tension
them ideally need both a common national literature and local literatures which between a common ideology and local circumstances. To appreciate the
speak to and for themselves. Robert Leeson makes this point in his case for implications for children’s literature demands acceptance that we do indeed
‘alternative’ publishing for children. He begins by referring specifically to the inhabit a fragmented society, where each of the fragments needs and deserves
spoken language and to dialect. to feel a confident sense of its value. As Leeson argues—but with a wider
inference than he draws from it—we need a national children’s literature (not to
The very richness of non-standard English is in itself a challenge to the mention an international one) but also local literatures for particular racial or
whole system of education and literature, but a challenge that must be regional or social or (why not?) sexual groups, and also a literature made by the
met. London schools at the moment are grappling (or not grappling) children themselves. Only when we have a coherent definition of ideology does
with new streams of language like Creole. (Leeson 1985:179) this become adequately clear.
He goes on to argue that ‘alternative’ publications need not be subject
to the orthodox scrutiny of critics ‘provided [they] can meet the critical
 9

The reader as ideologist Bangladeshi teenager, Kamla, is interviewed by the headmistress of her
Above all, it emerges from this argument that ideology is not something which comprehensive school about an anti-racist pamphlet she has helped to compose.
is transferred to children as if they were empty receptacles. It is something The headmistress tries to reason with her:
which they already possess, having drawn it from a mass of experiences far
more powerful than literature. ‘You are going to tell me that Asian and black children are often teased
In literature, as in life, we have to start from where the children are, and with and bullied by white children in this school. This isn’t news to me, you
their own (often inarticulate) ideology. This offends some commentators, who know. I am quite aware of it. Whenever I can, I intervene, I punish
prefer the literature to begin where they wish the children were, or assume that children who are caught bullying or robbing others—but I punish them
easy transformations can be made by humanely open-minded critical inquiry, for bullying, for blackmail, for theft, not for racism. You see, it isn’t
whether based in classrooms or elsewhere. Rob Grunsell, describing his always wise to tackle these things head on, my dear; I wonder if you
experiences in running an alternative school for chronic truants in London, can understand that? These attitudes are entrenched. Unfortunately,
reports the discomfiting consequences of moving too rationally and openly many of the children here have parents who are racist in their views. In
beyond a pre-existent teenage ideology: that case, if you attack the opinion, then you attack the parents, and you
are telling the children that their parents are bad people—now, that
At lunch they had opinions in plenty, particularly about the blacks and doesn’t help. It only antagonizes them, reinforces their beliefs… And
the Pakis. It seemed to me such an obvious place to start, so I planned they are only children, Kamla.’ (Price 1984:119)
out a lesson on racial attitudes—a straight survey of what they thought,
with no judgements and no ‘right’ answers. They designed the Susan Price’s story telling is very skilfully organized to discredit the
questionnaire with me, enjoying filling in their answers. From that headmistress by presenting her as one who is at best evasive and negligent in
point on it was a disaster. The answers weren’t the same. ‘Was Jimmy her efforts to subdue racist behaviour, and at worst has racist sympathies herself.
right?’, why were they wrong? I couldn’t convince them, because they The speech quoted above is thus placed in a context designed to undermine it.
couldn’t listen, that there were no right answers. Here, in a lesson, Readers are intended to conclude that the reasons for inaction given in the last
hating Pakis because they’re ‘dim’ and ‘chicken’ was obviously wrong. sentences—reasons which are put forward often by real teachers in the real
They sensed what I thought, even though I hadn’t said it. They had lost, world—are merely disreputable rationalizations of unprincipled tolerance, if
as usual, and more hopelessly than usual since they could do nothing not something worse, with the implication that such reasons usually are. Susan
about it. My prize-winning lesson in open-ended exploratory learning Price is using literary skills to checkmate her opponents in an ideological chess
produced five miserable, depressed people. (Grunsell 1978:50) game. But in the imperfect world these are genuine problems for teachers who
try to educate children in anti-racist morality. It is unfortunately true that well-
A similar result is produced by much over-confident surface didacticism in disposed ideological enthusiasm can be counter-productive in school
modern children’s books, as it is by much persuasive rationality in classroom classrooms; and it can be likewise in stories. So the likely effect of Susan
discussion. Where the ideology is explicit, it does not matter how morally Price’s storytelling is to deepen children’s entrenched attitudes, good and bad
unanswerable the substance is if it speaks persuasively only to those who are alike. If it were not so, the stresses on our social fabric would be a great deal
persuaded already, leaving others with their own divergent ideology intensified easier to deal with.
by resentful bemusement. Susan Price’s From Where I Stand, which I referred
to earlier, is a passionately anti-racist story which operates very much at the
level of conscious authorial intention. At one point a highly intelligent
 10

Locating the ideology of individual books 2. Consider the denouements of some books, and the happy (or unhappy)
I have argued, therefore, that we should accept both the omnipresence of ending. Does the happy ending of a novel amount to a ‘contract of
ideology and the realities of fragmentation, divergence, passivity, inertia, reaffirmation’ of questionable values which have earlier seemed to be on trial?
conservatism, invisibility, unreasoningness, in much of its expression and Is the conclusion imaginatively coherent, or does it depend on implicit
reception by the author and the child. Although it is easiest to illustrate the assumptions which are at odds with the surface ideology? Are there any loose
ideological process from the repertoire of active ideology in progressive ends (not so much of plot but of thought and feeling)? (Although it is not a
modern fiction, that is only because didactic content is more obtrusive there, children’s book, students may find a particularly interesting example in the
not because it is present on a larger scale than it is in traditional fiction. On all closing paragraphs of Richard Hughes’s A High Wind in Jamaica.) If some
sides, in numerous commentaries on children’s fiction (not to mention many ‘happy endings’ reconverge on the dominant ideology, is it also true that an
novels themselves) a customary error is to make the wrong implicit analogy, by unhappy ending is a device for denying such reconvergence, and hence for
treating ideology as if it were a political policy, when in fact it is a climate of reinforcing a blend of ideological and emotional protest? (Students might
belief. The first can be changed, and itemized, and imposed, and legislated into consider the brilliantly effective unhappy endings of Susan Price’s Twopence a
reality and (though not always!) vindicated by pure reason. The second is vague, Tub and Jan Mark’s Divide and Rule.)
and holistic, and pliant, and stable, and can only evolve.
The first priority is to understand how the ideology of any given book can be 3. Are the values of a novel shown as a ‘package’ in which separate items
located. Above all, such an understanding is important for teachers, especially appear to interlock? For example, does one story condemn racial prejudice and
primary school teachers and English specialists. Their task is to teach children social class prejudice as if they were automatically interdependent, and does
how to read, so that to the limits of each child’s capacity that child will not be another in the same way celebrate a seemingly inseparable threesome made up
at the mercy of what she reads. I shall conclude, then, with some examples of of patriotism, courage and personal loyalty? (Biggles books are a good source
the kind of question which teachers in training might usefully be taught to ask of study on ‘packaging’ of various kinds.) Are these groups of virtues or vices
about children’s books, in order to clarify the ideology which is working in necessarily or logically connected with each other? Are they being grouped
them. They are mostly questions which adults generally might find interesting together in order to articulate some larger, aggregated virtue or vice, such as
in order to test their own recreational fiction, and which can easily be modified ‘white Britishness’? Students may find it interesting to bring this exercise to
for use in classrooms. The purpose, as I have tried to indicate throughout, is a bear comparatively on the work of W.E.Johns and some current socially
modest one: not to evaluate, discredit or applaud a writer’s ideology, but simply progressive fiction. Is it in fact a mark of quality in a book that it differentiates
to see what it is. its values rather than fusing them in composite and (perhaps fraudulently)
The questions are only examples, and teachers and others will readily be able homogeneous groups?
to augment them.
4. Is it a noticeable feature of some major ‘classic’ children’s books that they
test and undermine some of the values which they superficially appear to be
1. What happens if the components of a text are transposed or reversed (as I
celebrating? (I think it is. Students may find it interesting to perform this
suggested might be done with Richmal Crompton’s political joke in William the
experimental inquiry on Treasure Island, The Wind in the Willows, and Stalky
Bad)? Does examination of the negative, so to speak, show unsuspected blights
and Co, as well as Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.) Are there any modern
in the published picture? In particular, do we observe that a book which seems
children’s books which seem to work in similar ways? Readers may find, for
to be asserting a principle is only attacking a symptom? Is this ‘anti-sexist
example, that the novels of John Christopher (notably Fireball) and Peter
novel’ in fact sexist itself, and merely anti-male? Does this war story attack the
Dickinson (notably Healer) are more complex than they seem.
Germans for atrocities which are approved when the British inflict them?
 11

There is an important general point here. As recent studies based in modern 8. Last and most important in this selection is the question of omission and
critical theory have convincingly shown, many major works will sustain more invisibility. Who are the people who ‘do not exist’ in a given story? This may
radical and subversive readings than we are accustomed to. Critiques of mean people who are present but humanly downgraded, as if inscribed above
children’s literature which concentrate on surface ideology tend to ignore such the writer’s desk were the words ‘All human beings are human, but some are
possibilities. They observe only the external conservative values detectable in more human than others.’ Downgraded groups include servants, but may also in
some major children’s books, and overlook the radical questioning to which the a given case include teachers, or even parents. More seriously, they may
text exposes them. The fallacy (as I have earlier suggested in the case of include criminals and policemen. More seriously still, they may include
Huckleberry Finn) often lies in treating the novel as if it were some other kind foreigners, soldiers, girls, women and blacks. These last groups are more
of writing, and so ignoring narrative procedures which are basic to its meanings. serious invisibilities because they do not plausibly represent mere story
If critics can make such mistakes, so can children: they need our help in conventions, but curtailments of humanity embedded in an ideology. Omission
learning how to read. But that is no excuse for suppressing or reclassifying the takes many forms: for example, the performance of important life-supporting
books. tasks for children without any reference to the workers (such as mothers) who
carry them out. Invisibility may take many forms, for example, the denial of
5. Are desirable values associated with niceness of character, and vice versa? names, the identification of people by what they do rather than what they are,
Is it really true that a given attractive philosophy or action could not believably and the absorption of individuals into social and racial groups. It can be helpful
be held or performed by someone whose character was in other ways again to take an ‘adult’ text before considering children’s books with students,
unpleasant? How much allowance is there (and how much should there be in a and the most rewarding one I know to introduce this inquiry is Conrad’s Heart
children’s book) for inconsistency, or for dissonance between ideology and of Darkness.
temperament? How far is a book’s ideology conveyed by ‘moral symmetry’ in Taken together, questions such as these may serve effectively to lift ideology
character delineation? ‘off the page’ and bring it from obscure and unexpected places into the light,
but it need not and should not suppress the uniqueness of individual stories, or
6. Does anyone in a story have to make a difficult choice—of behaviour, convert them into cadavers for pedagogic dissection or for classroom autopsy.
loyalties, values, etc.—in which there is more than one defensible course of What we call ‘ideology’, as I have tried to argue, is a living thing, and
action? Or does the plot hinge merely on a predetermined choice, and interest something we need to know as we need to know ourselves. Very much like that,
depend on whether or not it is successfully carried out? because it is a part of us.

7. Is any character shown as performing a mixture of roles, especially roles The source of this article is from a collection edited by Peter Hunt. To find the
with sharply differentiated contexts of friendship, safety or prestige? Does any complete book on line, follow this link on any computer linked to the SCU
character belong as an accepted member in more than one subculture or group, library system. http://lib.myilibrary.com/browse/open.asp?id=3271&loc=
and move without stress between them? If any character does so, is one such
group presented by the author as deserving higher value than another? The
groups may be as simple as school (both staff and peer group) and family. They
may, on the other hand, extend to differences of race, culture, religion, political
affiliation and social custom, as they do for example in Kim. Kim is an excellent
text for students to consider, because it exposes the need for caution in using
the vocabulary of political judgement, in this case ‘racist’, as a generalizing
critical terminology.