| The following are extracts from reviews that first appeared in Inis: The Magazine for Children’s Books in Ireland, which have been kindly sent to us for reproduction on this page. Many thanks to editor Paddy O’Doherty Reading Lessons from the Eighteenth Century: Pied Piper Publishing 2006; 240pp This book is the result of research into the 18th century hand-made nursery library of Jane Johnson (1706-1759) of Buckinghamshire, which is held in the Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington. It is concerned with the education of children at home in middle class families and in particular with the teaching of reading by mothers in the nursery. The Johnson collection consists of 438 pieces, including alphabet cards, lesson cards and story cards, along with printed illustrations of people, birds, animals and objects. Johnson herself wrote a full-length exemplary children's story, entitled 'A Very Pretty Story' (1744), which reveals the balance sought in such texts between its didactic purpose and the entertainment of the young. In the 18th century boys were often sent to school but the girls remained at home and were educated by their mothers or governesses. Johnson was influenced in her teaching methods by the ideas of John Locke (1632-1704), that children, having mastered the alphabet, should be encouraged 'to read for pleasure', so, while the texts contained a high moral content, illustrative material also was widely used. The book contains many illustrations, including some in colour, of these teaching materials. The authors, who are experts in field of children's literature, have been excited and inspired by the finding of this rare collection. Susan M. Parkes Children’s Literature Global and Local: Edited by Emer O’Sullivan, Kimberley Reynolds and Rolf Romøren. Novus Press, 2005 (Oslo) (pbk) This volume contains twenty essays whose range mimics the concerns of its title, some encompassing universal concepts of genre and methodology, others working locally with a text to extrapolate universality from epitome. Notions of space, self, belonging and otherness reinform each other neatly and repeatedly throughout this rich, timely and extremely intelligent collection. Essays on geographical and linguistic translation from Canadian to German texts, and on the postcolonial Taiwanese children’s book market examine ‘the geography of the mind’ and ‘the precarious balance between local and global publishing’ respectively, while a fascinating account of the tension between east and west as evidenced in seventeenth-century Slavonic primers shows that the issue of globalisation is as old as the founding of nations itself. A twenty-first century retelling of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Travelling Companion is used to show how a modern retelling can preserve and develop a culture simultaneously; ‘children’s literature being influential in creating national identity’ is made plain in an extended examination of literary interaction between England and its former colonies. One essay creates a new methodological framework for examining how texts travel globally among many media but nonetheless remain connected to the traditional idea of the grand narrative, while another investigates ‘cultural habits connected to the contemporary situation’ with an account of how children respond to web-based texts. Omniscient narrators and anthropomorphised figures, staples of children’s books, are shown to lend authority and force to three texts celebrating the move away from Fascism in post-war Italy, while provision for young readers in early and mid-twentieth century Ireland is shown to have informed national political and aesthetic debates simultaneously. South African award -winning novel Skyline is celebrated for its multisensory account of a nation stepping proudly clear of its postcolonial phase; Lasky’s Night Journey for its conjuring of history mediated by geography and generation. And the account of home, homelessness and liminal space, which speaks of the ‘home-away’ axis being a ‘generic narrative’ in children’s literature, is quite simply the most intelligent, articulate and exciting piece I’ve read all year. Amanda Piesse From the Dairyman’s daughter to Worrals of the WAAF: Edited by Dennis Butts and Pat Garrett Lutterworth Press 2006 This collection of essays constitutes the papers read at a conference held in 1999 to mark the 200th anniversary of the foundation of the Religious Tract Society. In spite of the delay in publication, the volume is to be welcomed, being full of informative pieces on the publishing history of the Society. For readers unfamiliar with the publications of the RTS, Aileen Fyfe gives a short history of the Society, followed by Ann Thwaite asking (and answering to my satisfaction) the necessary question, ‘What is a tract?’ These two introductory essays are nicely balanced at the end of the book by an article by the current Managing Director of the Lutterworth Press, successor to the RTS and publisher of this volume, on the more recent history and state of the Press, and by a piece by Brian Alderson on ‘The universality of tracts’. Between these essays at the beginning and end of the volume is the real meat: ten absorbing articles on different writers and types of writing published by the RTS. Dee Carter’s essay on Hannah More, Mrs. Sherwood and Mrs. Cameron (the latter’s sister) reveals the progression in the writing of tracts from More to the two sisters, including a useful descriptive listing of the themes common to the latter two writers as well as to many other tract writers of the 19th century. Other women writers who were the ‘staples’ of the RTS are dealt with in detail in other essays: the immensely popular but now forgotten Hesba Stretton, Mrs. O.F. Walton, and several 20th-century writers for girls whose work is described in an entertaining way by Hilary Clare and Sue Sims. Boys’ school stories are skilfully handled by Robert J. Kirkpatrick, who appends a useful checklist, while Dennis Butts, one of the editors of this volume, writes about the development of the Boy’s Own Paper, the Society’s best-known publication. Mary Cadogan does a similar exercise on the Girl’s Own Paper. There is not space here to comment on each article but overall this book contains much of importance to students of children’s writing. It is a pity, then, that the production of the volume does not do justice to the content. The paper cover is very thin, the printing of the text blurred in places, and the illustrations, though well chosen, are too small and not sharp enough. In this instance, the Lutterworth Press has not lived up to the standards of its former RTS incarnation. It is to be hoped that this book, or the conference on which it is based, will inspire someone to undertake research on a full-length history of the Religious Tract Society. A bibliography of it publications would also be very useful. Lydia Ferguson Religion, Children’s Literature and Edited by Jan De Maeyer; Hans-Heino Ewers, Rita Ghesquière, Michel Manson, Pat Pinsent & Patricia Quaghebeur Leuven University Press 2005 (hbk) This is an ambitious and invaluable book: it contains an informative, measured introductory essay attributed to the editors and 28 dense articles that tease out the relationship between religion and children’s literature, beginning in the Enlightenment period when the concept of childhood identity broadly took on the ‘modern’ outlines we recognise today. The book has its roots in a research project on the Flemish publishing house, Averbode, and like Topsy, it just growed, to include diverse papers on religion and the genres of children’s literature, literary theory, debates, systems of inspection, publishing and distribution. It is an exemplary model of a comparative study, and it reveals much hitherto little known, and emphasises the need for more scholarly work in this very area. The book underlines how existing religious institutions, Catholic, Protestant and Jewish, adapted to the increasing literacy of their flocks – and their ensuing democratisation – in the 250 years covered, and how they used their authority and resources to influence children’s reading. It also sketches the emergence of aesthetic as opposed to purely didactic values, culminating in a celebration of the humanistic and non-redemptive. In this regard, Hans-Heino Ewers’ account of Wolgast’s controversial German 19th-century denunciation of didacticism in favour of aesthetic autonomy is especially illuminating. So far has the needle swung now that Peter Hunt believes religion is feared or misunderstood, or a mere cultural gesture, evacuated of other meaning. Valerie Coghlan’s probing article points out the paucity of information in the Irish context on children’s reading matter over much of the period covered, and we have much to learn also from the methods and approaches in western Europe. There are two excellent, parallel survey essays by Pat Pinsent on British Protestant and Catholic fiction. As a good book should, this volume raises as many questions as it answers. We Irish note that prohibition and censorship were the hallmarks of children’s publishing in Catholic European countries. We might speculate as to what degree the ‘moderate anti-modernity’ of Italian Catholicism, so strong a cultural force here, for instance, influenced the attitudes to Irish children’s reading and publishing in the early twentieth century. By and large, this book overcomes the problems of writing in a non-native language, and in making the intricacies of each unique national experience accessible and comprehensible to its readers. We look forward to a future volume that might continue the work here, and which will relate more of the experience of non-conformist and, indeed, non-Christian religions’ attitudes to children’s literature. Mary Shine Thompson |