Children's Literature Association Quarterly

In 1838, reformer and educator Elizabeth Peabody asked her future brother-in-law Horace Mann what he thought of Twice-Told Tales, just published by another soon-to-be brother-in-law, Nathaniel Hawthorne. "I have read several of the 'Twice-Told Tales,'" Mann replied. "They are written beautifully. . . . But we want something nearer home to duty & business. I look upon the great mass of our popular literature as a popular curse" (see Ronda 198 n 1).

Mann's response suggests the pervasive attitude of many Americans in the first decades of the nineteenth century that works of the imagination were tolerable in their place, but that their place was secondary to the major work of instilling useful notions of duty and productivity. This simultaneous acknowledgment and dismissal of imaginative writing harrowed writers who addressed adult audiences and even more sharply defined the parameters of writing for children.

It sometimes seems that this same somber attitude has affected students of nineteenth-century American children's literature, especially of the antebellum years. Apparently agreeing with cultural leaders such as Mann who saw duty as the only excuse for pleasure, many critics and historians read these texts [End Page 191] as documents for cultural and social history. The literature always seems to point somewhere else, to specific social behavior or long-term cultural patterns. Even the most astute historian of antebellum American children's fiction, Anne Scott MacLeod, accepts the claim that this material is interesting only because it reveals the fears and anxieties of adults caught up in a rapidly changing society (11, 14).

Scholarship on later nineteenth- and twentieth-century American fiction for children abounds, with powerful individual treatments of Louisa May Alcott, Mary Mapes Dodge, Mark Twain, Frances Hodgson Burnett, and L. Frank Baum, among the many memorable writers of that period. But whereas the fiction of the antebellum years has prompted critics to explore the ways in which the writing imitates the culture, criticism of postwar texts seems, with a few notable exceptions, narrowly focused on specific texts and authors. The history and criticism of American children's literature is still, shall we say, in its infancy, with few efforts to rival the numerous broadly synthetic and richly interpretive treatments of English children's literature.

So when Jerry Griswold's Audacious Kids appeared, it promised to "begin that enterprise," a study of American children's fiction and the American conception of the child (x). Based on psychological and mythic readings of twelve post-Civil War texts, Griswold's book addresses the enduring popularity of these fictions. He seeks to ground his work in the postwar cultural context, looking particularly at the ways in which the child functions symbolically in the nation's self-understanding. Had it fully lived up to its own goals, this book might indeed have been an outstanding contribution to the comprehensive historical and critical understanding of American children's fiction so much needed. As it stands, Audacious Kids offers general readers a lively survey of familiar novels from the "Golden Age of Children's Books" (viii). Nonspecialists will appreciate Griswold's efforts to weave together the works, the circumstances of their production, and the larger cultural trends. For the hard-pressed instructor in American children's literature, the book constitutes a reading list and interpretive strategy. Above all, Griswold's enthusiasm for these novels is abundantly clear and is in many ways the book's most appealing feature. But despite useful comments on individual novels, Audacious Kids is built on too slight a critical foundation and too weak an historical understanding to fill the need for a broader synthesis.

Observing the continuing popularity of the twelve books he chose to study, Griswold inquires into the reasons for that popularity. All these books tell essentially the same story, he proposes: "that of a child who 'overthrows' its parents and becomes independent" (xi). In his introduction, Griswold develops his notion of the American ur-story, a movement from the child...