The Era of Progress, the Death of Literature
/**This post was originally written July 16, 2018.**
Today I want to talk briefly about this cartoon: “The Era of Progress in Children’s Literature” (Puck, Volume 21, 1871) by Frederick Burr Opper.
In the preface to his popular science text Madam How and Lady Why (Bell and Daldy, 1870), novelist Charles Kingsley (1819-1875) presents the blending of amusement and instruction as a defining feature of nineteenth-century children’s literature: “When I was your age, there were no such children’s books as there are now. […] you have your choice of books without number, clear, amusing, and pretty, as well as really instructive […]” (vii). But not everyone saw the children’s literature market in this way. Some, such as Samuel Smiles, derided the “sort of mania for ‘making things pleasant’ on the road to knowledge” (Self-Help, Ward, Lock, & Co., [1859], 302) as a strategy which would weaken the student. Others saw science and the fancifulness of other children’s literature as such intrinsically opposed concepts that fostering scientific learning through children’s literature could only be accomplished through the diminishment of fairy tales and fantasy stories. As one learns in Dickens’s Hard Times (1854), in a world of “Fact, fact, fact,” “you are never to fancy.”
At first, this image seems to be squarely in the latter camp. The characters of fictional children’s stories lament that their future has been replaced by the scientific texts on the floor. Because they are given human form and the only piece of dialogue, our sympathy ostensibly lies with the fictional characters. Little Willie, Johny, and Tommy, the supposed main characters of some of the science books, are not given form to defend himself. It seems wrong that the boy is already learning how to be a stock broker.
But what I find interesting about this cartoon is that since the audience is absolutely supposed to be familiar with these staples of nineteenth-century children’s literature, there is some dramatic irony in the characters coming together. A weeping Red Riding Hood has her arm around the wolf that eats her grandmother. We are asked to feel sympathy for Struwwelpeter, whose entire character is that his hygiene repulses people, and Bluebeard, a multiple murderer. It’s hard to feel sorry for these particular personifications of the stories losing their “future.”
The scientific texts are also an odd assortment. Many are the sorts of titles which were given to many nineteenth-century children’s books: “Science for Little Readers,” “The Boy Inventor,” “The Boy Astronomers,” and “Youthful Geologists.” But other titles eschew verisimilitude in favor of parody. “Logarithms for Little Ones” is humorous because it suggests an attempt to teach a level of mathematics that would have been out of reach of even nineteenth-century children. “How Johnny Bought a Farm for $4.50” suggests an absurd level of precociousness for a child. And “How Little Willie Discovered Perpetual Motion” suggests that the line between the fantastical characters on the left and the books on the right is not as well defined as the composition of the cartoon suggests. One must imagine that “Tommy’s Adventures in Search of the North Pole” are probably just as adventure filled as Robinson Crusoe’s.
Rather than criticizing the new emphasis on science in children’s literature, the cartoon ultimately reads to me as a critique of the critique: the “Old Favorites” are those who see science and traditional children’s literature as being opposed and believe the more fantastical stories are being replaced. In reality children’s books of the type suggested by “Tommy’s Adventures in Search of the North Pole”–such as Andre’s “Cruise of the Walnut Shell” (1881) were often inspired by the fairy tales, fantasies, and adventure stories which came before them. As always the division between the scientific and the more traditionally literary is false.