Children’s Literature

Charlotte’s Web

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Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White

1952

Illustrated by Garth Williams

E.B.White divided his time between New York City, where he wrote for the New Yorker, and a salt water farm in Maine, where he raised chickens, geese, sheep, and pigs.  In 1948, he published an essay, “Death of a Pig”, in the Atlantic Monthly, which told a sad tale of his unsuccessful ministrations to a sick pig.  He was unsettled by the irony of the scenario: his attempt to prevent the premature demise of a pig he was raising for eventual slaughter.  He decided to write a children’s book about a pig who is saved from the seemingly inevitable butcher’s knife, and he eventually happened upon a barn spider as the instrument of salvation.

Charlotte’s Web is an intricate book that seamlessly interweaves the human story of Fern, an eight year old girl, with the animal story of young Wilbur, the pig, and Charlotte, the wise spider.  Wilbur is saved by the carefully chosen words that his friend weaves into her web: SOME PIG, TERRIFIC, RADIANT, and HUMBLE.  She is aided, sometimes accidentally, usually begrudgingly, by Templeton, the scurrilous rat, while the stuttering geese provide the comic chorus in the background.

Charlotte’s Web is arguably the best children’s book ever written.  It has all the elements: a tight storyline that naturally overlays fantasy (talking animals and a writing spider) onto a lovingly depicted barnyard world, an assortment of nuanced and evolving characters, and an honest depiction of the loneliness of death while celebrating life, friendship, and the rhythm of nature.  E.B. White was a consummate literary craftsman (he co-wrote The Elements of Style) and few have matched his ease and clarity of style, or his simple honesty.

E.B.White’s lack of pretence is apparent in his sound recording for the audiobook version of Charlotte’s Web. Dissatisfied with the reading by a professional actress, he chose to do a simple reading himself with his “famous monotone”.  “I think a book is better read the way my father used to read books to me – without drama.  He just read the words, beginning with the seductive phrase “Chapter One”, and I supplied my own dramatization.”  He recorded the book, not in a sound studio, but in a friend’s living room, and he had to pause whenever a car drove by.  He also recorded The Trumpet of the Swan, his third and final children’s book, and it is a pleasure to hear him read both stories.

Aside:  Garth Williams illustrated both Charlotte’s Web and the earlier Stuart Little.  His early renditions of Charlotte featured a woman’s face.  E.B.White, distressed, referred Williams to several arachnid natural histories.  Fortunately, White prevailed.

Peter Pan

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Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie

1911

Illustrated by John Hench and Al Dempster

Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up saw its wildly popular stage premiere in London in 1904.  The book, not published until seven years later, was something of an afterthought.  It has that feel – a careless air, a rambling casualness.  The play itself, finally brought to print in 1928, is tighter and makes for a more exhilarating read.  For  this is a story that belongs on the stage, drawn with bold theatrical strokes. It needs an audience to gasp as Peter Pan flies across the stage or to clap wildly as Peter asks for believers to bring Tinker Bell back to life.  It needs the inspired music and lyrics of the Broadway musical – with such songs as “I Won’t Grow Up” and  “Never Never Land”.  Even on film, the Disney version is a pleasure, with its extravagantly mustached pirate captain – better for his character to be deliciously and comically evil than weirdly nuanced as he is in print.

However it is experienced, the story sparkles with imaginative brilliance.  There is Peter Pan himself – cocky and conceited, but also a merry vibrant life force to be admired.  He navigates by the stars and gives his address as “Second to the right and then straight on till morning.”  He is a stickler for fairness, but is strangely amoral in other respects, especially when it comes to murder and mayhem – he is “frightfully happy” as he prepares for his fight to the death with his nemesis.  For all his bravado, he is a poignant figure, for his eternal childhood comes at the price of memory and growth and the reassuring comforts of family and home.  When Peter returns to the nursery to visit Wendy a year later, he has no recollection of either Captain Hook or Tinker Bell.  He is ready to start over at the beginning again.  And again.  And again.

J.M. Barrie, if not a polished writer, was a wizard when it came to creating memorable characters and set pieces. Who else has come up with a situation as bizarre as that of the dashing Captain Hook brought sniveling to his knees by the tick tocking crocodile (a female, as unlikely as it seems), forever in pursuit after having had a taste of him?  And how about Neverland itself, populated (excessively) with pirates, lost boys, redskins (of the Piccaninny tribe – what?), wild beasts, fairies, and mermaids?  Is it not inventive that the beautiful Indian princess is named Tiger Lily, an appellation that evokes the exotically wild and the English country garden simultaneously?  And then there is the Darling household back in Kensington Square where Nana, the Newfoundland, is nursemaid and the father, as penance, takes up residence in the doghouse. 

The book is filled with oddities.  But J.M. Barrie, himself, was odd.  A tiny (5’3”) Scottish man, married for a time but asexual by most accounts, devoted to his mother, about whom he wrote a biography, devoted also to the Llewelyn Davies boys, all five of whom he supported after their parents died in quick succession of cancer, and for whom he invented the Peter Pan story.  One can feel his own strange longing in the pages.

The Wind in the Willows

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The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame

1908

Illustrated by Ernest H. Shepard

The Wind in the Willows is one of the treasures of childhood.  Start with the memorable Toad: shamelessly boastful, maddeningly conceited, extravagantly self-indulgent while at the same time affectionate, well-intentioned, and good-natured.  Leaving the grand Toad Hall, he indulges a whim for the open road by procuring a gypsy caravan, painted canary yellow with green trim and red wheels.  When a brilliant motor-car whizzes past, spooking the horses and leaving the caravan up-ended in the ditch, Toad is disastrously smitten.  He sits in the road in a trance murmuring “Poop-poop!” and then proceeds along a magnificently self-destructive path fueled by his obsession with motor-cars.  After smashing seven and stealing another, he is sentenced to 20 years.  Aided by the gaoler’s daughter, he disguises himself as a washerwoman and makes his escape.  There follows an exhilarating train ride with the warders hot in pursuit, an interlude with a barge woman that culminates in Toad absconding with her horse, a horsetrading scene with a gypsy who offers “Shillin’ a leg”, and a last hair raising ride in a motor-car. 

The adventures of Toad, the reckless, the incorrigible, provide the excitement and the humor.  But The Wind in the Willows is really two interwoven tales, each of which is essential to the other.  Playing Penelope to Toad’s Odysseus are Rat, Mole, and Badger, who prefer to stay home – where they cultivate an Arcadian vision of home as haven of tranquility.  Enter their sanctuaries and find a fire in the hearth, armchairs before the blaze, a simple meal shared with friends, an inviting coziness.  The book is a hymn sung in praise of the English countryside and a carefree life of bucolic domesticity.  Kenneth Grahame, a child of the Industrial Revolution, sought in his writing to return to the pristine rural ideal that was the antithesis of a mechanized age.  The Victorian era saw the flourishing of a number of eccentric cults, one of which was a neopaganism devoted to Pan and a pastoral spirituality.  Hence the strange mysticism in the bizarre chapter, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn.  How audacious that Grahame could transition from a surreal scene in which Rat and Mole are bowing down before Pan on a holy island to the dungeon where Toad is histrionically indulging in self-pity and transitory remorse before effecting his escape.

The Wind in the Willows has been graced by illustrations by such famous artists as Arthur Rackham, Tasha Tudor, Michael Hague, and Michael Foreman, but the truest images are those by Ernest H. Shepard who did equal justice to Toad’s humorous escapades and Mole’s cozy burrow.

The Wheel on the School

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The Wheel on the School by Meindert DeJong

1954

Illustrated by Maurice Sendak

When Lina, a young schoolgirl in a tiny Dutch fishing village, wonders why the storks no longer nest in Shora, she and her five schoolmates (all boys) resolve to fasten a wagon wheel onto the roof of the school to tempt their return.  Gently encouraged by their teacher, the children each take one of the roads radiating like spokes from the village, in search of a wheel.  Along their meandering and intersecting journeys, they are joined by a small and eccentric cast of characters, including Janus, the misanthropic and grumpy double amputee who spends his wheelchair-bound existence protecting his cherry tree from predatory birds and children.  Lina, exploring along a dyke, discovers a wagon wheel in the most unlikely of places, under an overturned fishing boat that had been beached by a storm eighty years before.  Aided by Old Douwa, who as a boy had saved his shipwrecked father – trapped beneath this very boat, she works to retrieve the wheel, racing against the incoming flood tide and an approaching storm.  Their subsequent rescue presages the later rescue of a pair of exhausted storm-battered storks, marooned on a sand bar, threatened by the rising tide – storks who become the first to nest on the wheel on the school.

The book quietly celebrates the power of children, ever resourceful, to change the world.  The book is also a quiet celebration of the European white stork (Ciconia ciconia), which has largely disappeared from many of its traditional breeding grounds in western Europe.  The population of breeding pairs in Holland at the advent of the twentieth century was over 500: by the time DeJong was writing The Wheel on the School, the number was in the 50’s, and nests which had seen continuous occupation for hundreds of years were empty.  Most Dutch today are more likely to see a stork, symbol of fertility, deliverer of babies in a sling, on a birth announcement than in the sky overhead.  The storks still fly north to breed but they now head for eastern Europe, particularly Poland.  Theirs is a remarkable migration: in flocks of 10,000 or more, they make the journey from their wintering grounds in Africa, splitting east and west at the Mediterranean Sea to avail themselves of the warm thermals that rise from the land.  The roundtrip is over 10,000 miles.  With their stark tuxedo plumage, impressive stature, and bizarre bill clattering (they cannot sing), it is easy to imagine how their miraculous return to a rooftop year after year came to be considered an auspicious sign.

Maurice Sendak illustrated six of Meindert DeJong’s books, including The Wheel on the School.  Their shared spirit of humanity made for a harmonious marriage of talents.  They also shared the honor of each being a recipient of the Hans Christian Andersen Award, the highest international recognition for creators of children’s literature.

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

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The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain

1876

In one of the most famous scenes in American literature, Tom Sawyer is condemned to whitewashing the front fence as a Saturday morning punishment inflicted by Aunt Polly.  Taking stock of his pocket treasures, he realizes he cannot buy his way out.  Desperate for freedom, he has a sudden flash of inspiration.  Combining an acute understanding of human nature with masterful acting skills, he soon finds himself seated on a barrel in the shade eating an apple, his first booty, while his friend Ben paints away.  Tom “planned the slaughter of more innocents.  There was no lack of material…”  By the end of the afternoon, Tom has amassed a fortune (including a dead rat and a string, twelve marbles, a one-eyed kitten, and four pieces of orange-peel.)  And the fence has been whitewashed thrice over.

There is a reason that classics are classics.  The delight in discovering Mark Twain’s droll wit, pitch-perfect ear for colloquial speech, acerbic social commentary, and deft portrayal of boyhood along the Mississippi River is reason enough to read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.  There is also the imperative of reading a common literary canon.  Families are bound by shared memories, and cultures are bound by a common vocabulary of images.  Mark Twain is the quintessential American author and Tom Sawyer should be a familiar icon to all.  Every child can benefit by Tom’s epiphany that Saturday morning.  “He had discovered a great law of human action – without knowing it – namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain.”

Among literary characters, Tom is one of the greats.  He is a good-natured adventurous romantic who combines ingenuity, courage, humor, honor, and a strong penchant for mischief.  Consider the following.  Spurned by Becky Thatcher, Tom takes to the Mississippi River where he leads a pirate’s life on Jackson Island with Huck Finn and Joe Harper.  The boys watch the townsfolk search the river for their drowned bodies.  That night, Tom slips away, thinking to leave a note for his Aunt Polly to ease her anguish.  Overhearing plans for the impending memorial service, he desists, and the three runaways make their triumphant return at their own funeral.  Tom is a prankster, but a lovable one, and the feelings between the boy and his guardian aunt run deep.

There is more.  For anyone who gets hooked on Tom Sawyer, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is the incomparable sequel. The Prince and the Pauper and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court can follow.

The illustrations above are by an unknown artist from the Association of Illustrators, True Williams – the wonderfully-named illustrator for the original edition, and Richard Rogers.

Classic Poetry: An Illustrated Collection

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Classic Poetry: An Illustrated Collection selected by Michael Rosen

1998

Illustrated by Paul Howard

Many of us may be philistines when it comes to poetry, but children are not.  They delight in the musicality of meter, the humor of limericks, the wordplay of rhyme.  They are adept at memorization – poems are easily engraved in memory in the young and, once owned, are there for a lifetime.  A poem memorized in childhood can be recited on a deathbed.

There are countless anthologies, many excellent, none exhaustive.  It is good to have a number on hand.  Classic Poetry has a particularly rich selection with stylistically diverse illustrations to accompany the poems along with portraits, both visual and text, of the poets.

Some are silly, as only Edward Lear can be.

Far and few, far and few
Are the lands where the Jumblies live;
Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,
And they went to sea in a Sieve.

Some are musical, none more so than Banjo Paterson’s lyrics that were written as a bush ballad.

Once a jolly swagman camped by a billabong, 
Under the shade of a coolibah-tree, 
And he sang as he watched and waited till his billy boiled, 
‘Who’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me?....’

Some celebrate the exoticisms of language, as in John Masefield’s “Cargoes”.

Quinquireme of Ninevah from Distant Ophir
Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine
With a cargo of ivory
And apes and peacocks
Sandalwood, cedarwood, and sweet white wine.

We should never underestimate the intelligence of children. They might not know a quinquireme from a Spanish galleon on first pass, but they will figure it out.  Their ears will respond even in the presence of nonsense.  Try a poem a day.  Or sit down with an anthology and read it from start to finish. 

Big Tiger and Christian

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Big Tiger and Christian by Fritz Muhlenweg

1950

Illustrated by Rafaello Busoni

 

Out of print for many years, this is a book that happens into hands by chance. It is read in appreciation and amazement and continues to haunt the reader for decades more. It is a book that has inspired travels and changed lives. Yet it is almost completely unknown.

 

The story begins, in part, with Sven Hedin, a renowned Swedish explorer in the grand tradition, who did much to fill in the white patches on the map of Central Asia. In the 20’s and 30’s, he lead the Sino-Swedish Expedition to Mongolia, the Gobi Desert, and Xinjiang, accompanied by an international bevy of archeologists, geologists, meteorologists, geographers, astronomers, botanists, zoologists. He was honored along the way by having a glacier, a lunar crater, and a butterfly (among other things) named after him.  My Life as an Explorer is a riveting travelogue.

The story continues, in part, with Fritz Muhlenweg. He was working as a young accountant with the new German airline, Lufthansa, when he was posted to Hedin’s expedition (Lufthansa’s interest was a proposed Peking-Berlin air route). He made three trips to Mongolia before settling into a career as a painter and writer.

Muhlenweg’s reverence for Mongolian culture is palpable in the tale that was inspired by his travels, and few books provide a deeper sense of place.  There are yurts, camel caravans, dunes, tamarisk trees, roasted barley, and language (try “zook, zook” if you want your camel to kneel). This is the backdrop that gives texture and depth to an adventure story that quietly enthralls. Two 12-year old boys, one European and one Chinese, go kite-flying in Peking and end up as secret couriers for General Wu. They embark on a 1,500 mile mission to Urumchi, on the far side of the Gobi Desert, by train, truck, horse, camel, and foot.  They encounter lamas, honorable bandits, dishonorable thieves, shepherds, traders, soldiers, warlords, wild monks, a nomadic girl, and a black poodle who have names like Dog, Sevenstars, Good Fortune, Affliction, Moonlight, and Thunderbolt. There is an evil villain named Greencoat and his nemesis, an outlaw king referred to as The Venerable Chief, a kind of Mongolian Robin Hood, and there is a hidden treasure in an abandoned desert city. Apart from the villain, who is irredeemably wicked, the characters are nuanced. Muhlenweg is sympathetic to even the roughest scallywags and in his hands they tend to rise to the occasion to reveal a hidden goodness.

 

 

 

 

Grandpa Toad’s Secrets

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Grandpa Toad’s Secrets by Keiko Kasza

1995

Illustrated by Keiko Kasza

Funny picture books run the gamut: they can be zany, sly, silly, ironic, clever, joyful, nonsensical, slapstick. The responses they elicit run a comparable gamut. Surprisingly, there are relatively few great ones that elicit gleeful laugh-out-loud delight. Punch in New York, Lottie’s New Beach Towel, and Max’s Chocolate Chicken are three. A fourth is Grandpa Toad’s Secrets.

Grandpa Toad and Little Toad walk through the forest. Confronted by a hungry snake, Grandpa Toad blows himself up to balloon size and the snake, intimidated, slinks away. He then outwits a hungry snapping turtle by tempting him with the prospect of a snake feast in lieu of a measly toad snack. But when he happens upon a humongous monster, Grandpa Toad freezes and he gets snatched up for the makings of a toad sandwich. Little Toad, in a genius move, grabs red berries from a plant and pelts the brute. Looking down with horror on the red spots erupting on his legs and tail, the monster drops Grandpa Toad and runs.

This never fails: kids find this uproariously funny. There is the intrinsic delight in the child besting the monster, but the glee comes from the simplicity of the weapon – with harmless berries, Little Toad deceives the monster into believing himself mortally poisoned. Keiko Kasza’s watercolor illustrations capture Little Toad shivering with fear in his hiding place, then emboldened with outrage as he throws the berry grenades.   Toads (like chickens) are intrinsically funny so the author chose her protagonist well.

Kasza has written and illustrated almost twenty books, many of which involve a victim outwitting a foe through cleverness. My Lucky Day is one of the most inspired. A piglet arrives at the door of a fox. He enjoys a warm soapy bath (to get nice and clean), a filling meal with fresh cookies (to get fattened up), and a massage (to get tenderized). The fox, exhausted by his ministrations, falls asleep, leaving the rejuvenated piglet to skip off in eager anticipation of tricking his next carnivore.

 

The Box of Delights

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The Box of Delights or When the Wolves Were Running by John Masefield

1935

Illustrated by Judith Masefield

John Masefield’s upbringing reads like something out of Dickens. Orphaned at a young age (his mother died in childbirth, his father in an asylum), he was taken in by a domineering and despised aunt who quickly packed him off to a boarding school where he was miserable and then to a maritime school (on the HMS Conway) where he was more miserable still. After weathering (badly) a month-long ice storm of51Z5+yo35bL._AC_UL320_SR208,320_f Cape Horn, he landed in a Chilean hospital with sunstroke and a nervous breakdown before being deemed unfit and sent home. His aunt arranged for his next apprenticeship on a ship out of New York. Masefield failed to report for duty and, age 16, became a vagabond in America, determined to be a writer. The high point of his teen sailing years must have been the sighting of a lunar rainbow. Despite his traumatic experiences on ocean voyages, he is best known for his poems Sea-Fever (“I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky….”) and Cargoes (“Quinquereme of Ninevah from distant Ophir/ Rowing home to haven in Sunny Palestine.”) He was a prolific writer – of poems, novels, and plays – and was celebrated in the U.K. where he was Poet Laureate for almost forty years. Along the way, he
wrote the two Kay Harker books for children, The Midnight Folk (1927) and The Box of Delights (1935), and these are strange gems indeed.

Kay Harker, like the author, is an orphan. Returning to his home and guardian for the winter holidays, he encounters a Punch and Judy showman on a station platform. This is Cole Hawlings, who gives Kay a message to deliver (“The Wolves are Running”) and the Box of Delights for safekeeping. The Box can make Kay swift or small, as well as open doors to the past. All of which comes in handy as he grapples with the nefarious and mercurial Abner Brown and his gang – their standard disguise is in the ecclesiastical robes of seminarians, but they can also morph into wolves or pirates or dive-bombing toy airplanes. The Brotherhood scrobbles (kidnaps) the Punch and Judy man, Kay’s beloved guardian, his friends Maria and Peter, the Bishop of Tatchester, and all the cathedral staff down to the choir boys. At the denouement, as the water is rising menacingly in the dungeon cells, it is up to Kay to overcome the sinister villains. And he must do so in time for the Christmas Eve celebration at the Tatchester Cathedral to take place at midnight.

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The book is richly complex with an inspired confusion of elements. There are unicorn-drawn sleighs, stags, talking rats and mice, fairies, Roman legionnaires, jousting knights, Christmas parties, carol singers, incompetent police inspectors, and innocent diversions like building snowmen or sailing toy ships a la Christopher Columbus. It’s an unusual mix but it all combines to create an odd off-kilter universe that accommodates the real world and the fantastic. Kay is the unflappable center – good natured, matter-of-factly courageous, intrepid, honorable, decent. Masefield’s genius was to combine Magic and Crime. What other master jewel thief can you think of who could collapse his soothsaying boy assistant (his head telescoping into his chest) to punish him for insolence?

Masefield, with his poet’s eye, was a master of atmospherics. Try this.

“It was a dark, lowering afternoon, with a whine in the wind, and little dry pellets of snow blowing horizontally. In the gutters, these had begun to fall into little white layers and heaps….. Kay went on alone into the street. He thought that he had never been out in a more evil-looking afternoon. The marketplace had emptied, people had packed their booths, and wheeled away their barrows. As he went down towards Dr. Gubbinses, the carved beasts in the woodwork of the old houses seemed crouching against the weather. Darkness was already closing in. There was a kind of glare in the evil heaven. The wind moaned about the lanes. All the sky above the roofs was grim with menace, and the darkness of the afternoon gave a strangeness to the fire-light that glowed in the many windows.”

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There is an uneasy eerie undercurrent of the ominous, the sinister, the creepy that runs through the story, but there are also passages of innocent delight. When read in December, it is a book that will give the reader the fantods on a wintry evening (as Peter would say) but also be a joyful harbinger of Christmas celebrations.

The endpapers and the diminutive illustrations, provided by Masefield’s daughter, reflect this odd and original tone.

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Aside:

“Jolly good chaps, the Romans,” Kay said.

“Oh, I don’t know, said Peter. “They were rather a mouldy lot. They were lucky chaps not to have to learn Latin grammar, but to know it naturally.”

Along Came a Dog

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Along Came a Dog by Meindert Dejong

1958

Illustrated by Maurice Sendak

Along Came a Dog is the unlikely story of a man, a homeless dog, and a little red hen. On the first day of spring, the man enters the hen house and greets the red hen, a bright and adventurous creature when compared to the timid bird-brained white chickens and the unimaginative rooster. The little red hen’s toes have frozen and fallen off during the cold winter and she is left with an awkward ungainly gait that makes her the target of the flock’s nastiness. The man fashions rubber flippers and sews them onto his jacket: when he plants the hen’s knuckle bones into the socket holes, she can perch on his shoulder. A black stray dog, meek and starving, appears in the barnyard and becomes the little red hen’s protector. Twice banished by the man, he twice manages to find his way back to continue his mission as the hen’s guardian. By the end, he earns himself the gratitude of the man and the home he so craves.

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Dejong’s style appears simple, deceptively so. No breathless prose here – Dejong’s Dutch Calvinist background is evidenced by straightforward plots, methodically written. Behind the plain-spokenness, however, is an uncanny ability to convey the essence of character, whether it be the stupidity and meanness of a flock of chickens or the cringing self-effacement of a miserable dog desperate for an owner. In DeJong’s books, the overriding sense is one of honesty.

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In a long and prolific career, Meindert DeJong was repeatedly acknowledged for his unusual gift as a writer for children. He was the first American (he immigrated to Michigan from Holland at the age of eight) to be honored with the Hans Christian Andersen Award. He set a record when he was awarded one Newberry Medal and four Newberry Honors in a five year stretch. The Newberry Medal went to The Wheel on the School, a story of a group of young children in a Dutch village who wonder why the storks have disappeared and carry out a plan to attract their return. The Newberry Honors went to Shadrach, Hurry Home Candy, The House of Sixty Fathers, and Along Came a Dog. A decade later, he received the National Book Award for Journey from Peppermint Street.

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