Toward a Reappraisal of the Views of Early American Children's Authors Concerning Fantasy Literature
- Toward a Reappraisal of the Views of Early American Children’s Authors concerning Fantasy Literature
Until recently, historians of children’s literature have assumed that very few Americans wrote fantasy literature for children before the late nineteenth century. For example, when Cornelia Meigs, Anne Thaxter Eaton, Elizabeth Nesbit, and Ruth Hill Viguers first brought out their now-famous A Critical History of Children’s Literature in 1953, they mentioned only a few nineteenth-century American writers of fantasy literature for children, and they thought that just one of these writers—Howard Pyle—merited more than one paragraph (299–311). The validity of this position largely went unquestioned until the publication of Brian Attebery’s The Fantasy Tradition in America Literature in 1980. In a chapter entitled “Fantasy for American Children,” Attebery argues that there was, in fact, a significant body of fantasy stories for children written by Americans before the release of L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in 1900.
Intrigued by Attebery’s argument, I began researching this subject and published some of my findings in my 1989 collection, Before Oz: Juvenile Fantasy Stories from Nineteenth-Century America. Since then, a number of other collections of nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century American fantasy stories for children have been published, including Jack Zipes’s Fairy Tales of Frank Stockton (1990), Daniel Shealy’s Louisa May Alcott’s Fairy Tales and Fantasy Stories (1992), Greta D. Little and Joel Myerson’s Three Children’s Novels by Christopher Pearse Cranch (1993), my A Wondrous Menagerie: Animal Fantasy Stories from American Children’s Literature (1994), and Neil Philip’s American Fairy Tales (1996).
These fantasy stories are also beginning to be discussed in general works about the history of American children’s literature. Gillian Avery, for example, devotes most of a chapter to these stories in Behold the [End Page 141] Child: American Children and Their Books, 1621–1922 (1994). Avery maintains that fantasy stories were an important part of American children’s literature during the second half of the nineteenth century and that these stories enjoyed considerable support among the nation’s educated “elite with literary tastes” (123).
On the other hand, Avery argues, Americans were not nearly so supportive of fantasy literature during the first half of the nineteenth century. On this point, Avery is in general agreement with most historians of American children’s literature; she supports the position by citing evidence that the two leading American children’s authors from this period—Samuel Goodrich and Jacob Abbott—disapproved of fantasy literature (2). As Avery points out, Goodrich condemns European fairy tales in several passages of his autobiography, Recollections of a Lifetime (Avery 61–62). Goodrich includes a digressive footnote, for example, in which he claims that fairy tales harm children:
These tales were calculated to familiarize the mind with things shocking and monstrous; to cultivate a taste for tales of bloodshed and violence; to teach the young to use coarse language, and cherish vulgar ideas; to erase from the young heart tender and gentle feelings, and substitute for them fierce and bloody thoughts and sentiments; to turn the youthful mind from the contemplation of the real loveliness of nature, and to fill it with horrors of a debased and debauched fancy
(320).
This particular passage has been cited by many historians as evidence that Goodrich disapproved of fantasy literature (Meigs 142; MacLeod 24; Townsend 31; Hearn xviii). Avery also refers to a passage from one of Abbott’s Rollo books in which Rollo’s father criticizes the fairy tale about Aladdin’s lamp (Rollo Learning to Read 2). The evidence that Avery and other historians have assembled and presented strongly supports the position that Goodrich and Abbot disliked fairy tales, but the findings of my research suggest that it would be a mistake to assume that Goodrich’s and Abbott’s disapproval of fairy tales carried over to all forms of fantasy literature for children.
Goodrich and Abbott both rose to fame during the 1830s. Goodrich, who wrote under the pen name of Peter Parley, began his career as a children’s author in 1827 with the publication of The Tales...
