David Rudd

The word ‘chum’ is, according to the OED, frequently linked with ‘chamber’; that is, a chum is someone with whom one might share sleeping quarters. Certainly, for many adventurous Blyton heroes, this is the case: the Famous Five, the four Adventure series children, the Adventurous four, the Secret Island four and other Blytoneers all share caves, cellars and other locked rooms, let alone trees and camp-fires. However, one also finds, included in these spaces, those who, superficially, would not seem to qualify. Thus, in The Secret Mountain (set in Africa), we find Mafumu, a ‘black boy,’ ‘snuggled down beside Jack, who did not even wake when the black boy lay almost on top of him’ (92); or Ragamuffin Jo, a gypsy waif, sharing the Famous Five’s sleeping quarters. In this chapter, these unlikely bedfellows will be considered alongside other foreigners in Blyton’s work; for, more than most writers, she has been accused of xenophobia and outright racism — accusations that, I will suggest, are based on rather uninformed and selective readings of her work.

This chapter argues for a less technologically driven notion of “virtual reality,” suggesting that our own on-board computers, our brains, are already engaged in a process of simulating the world around us, rather than being “naturally” immersed within it. Thus we are always at one remove from what Lacan calls the Real; hence the phrase “virtual reality” verges on the tautological. From a Lacanian perspective, humans are unique in their dislocation from the Real, taking up a position in the Symbolic, an order of signs. The rest of the chapter explores how works of art, and literature in particular, can easily be seen to function as “virtual” (immersive and interactive) worlds. The chapter concludes by noting that fantasy literature, in particular, despite its less than realistic appearance, often aspires to go beyond the “virtual,” to lay claim to accessing a world both “Real” and “virtuous.”

Children’s literature, as a discrete entity, is commonly traced back to the eighteenth century in England, to a time when the new middle classes began to carve out a protected space for their progeny. Distinct commodities were developed, including games, furniture and clothing — and, of course, books, seen as perfect vehicles to instruct and entertain the future citizenry. The Romantics rounded out and mythologised this new being, the child, as innocent, pure and, therefore, unsullied by adult society. By the end of the Victorian period, the ‘cult of the child’, as it became known, was at its height, with the desirability of remaining a child, a Peter Pan, in the cultural ascendant. However, a century on from the fin de siècle, at the fin de millennium, this image had been severely questioned. The ‘century of the child’, as Ellen Kay (1900/1909) then termed it, had ended, and with it, a growing number of voices proclaimed a new century that foresaw the child’s disappearance, or death, even (Winn 1984; Postman 1994; Buckingham 2000). This chapter explores how this crisis over the child manifests itself in the era of Thatcher’s grandchildren. On the one hand, there are writers who celebrate a new freedom to discuss issues more candidly with children — whether about war, the Holocaust, homelessness, the family, racism, abuse, drugs, ecology, or sex and sexuality — whereas others fear that this very openness is destroying childhood, formerly defined in terms of protection, of relative innocence.

'Before there could be children's books, there had to be children', wrote John Rowe Townsend (1990, p. 3) at the very beginning of what was, for many years, the standard popular history of English children's literature. It is a key statement, but one that also encodes the heart of the area's problems. 'Haven't there always been children?' is an obvious response. Townsend elaborates by saying that, while children there were, they weren't recognized in the same way, being seen rather as 'miniature men and women' (Townsend, 1990, p. 3). This, though, doesn't necessarily take the issue much further, for the next question is, how, then, did children come to be recognized? And the answer, of course, is that this could occur only by these miniature beings having increased representation in society's key discourses (e.g. church, education, family), through cultural forms like paintings and literary works, and in various non-discursive ways, too, such as by being given separate spaces (in schools, bedrooms, nurseries), distinctive clothing and other artefacts. With the Industrial Revolution and the growth of capitalism, the child would become a niche market with its own products, including books, illustrations, toys and games. But we then come to a decisive phrase in Townsend's work, one that separates him and other humanists from poststructuralist thinkers. He states that these specialized books were to serve the child's 'own particular needs and interests' (Townsend, 1990, p. 3), whereas later critics would ask, 'In what sense were these "needs" the child's own?' Surely it is predominantly adult depictions that we have of what children require and, not unsurprisingly, these have changed over time (from a need to be saved and instructed to being amused and educated). So, returning to Townsend's opening statement, we might now suggest that it could be reversed, to claim that children's texts helped produce the very beings that we now recognize as children (beings seen as innocent, natural, helpless, pure and so on).

The association of animal and child in children's books is so common that it is easy to forget the figurative nature of this alliance - the way we have penned the animals in - whether it be Kermit the Frog, Rupert Bear, Bugs Bunny, the Cat in the Hat, Peter Rabbit or Toad of Toad Hall. In this chapter I want to explore this relationship, showing how it has been used in children's literature both to support the dominant order, and also to subvert it. There are wider issues to explore too, for the word 'animal' has its etymological roots in 'breath' and 'soul', which link it to that which is 'animate', and this is exactly the transformation that writers and illustrators so readily perform, making animals live in all manner of anthropomorphic ways. And not only animals, for other 'things' are just as easily animated: from puppets and dolls (Pinocchio, Winnie-the-Pooh, Woody in Toy Story) to more everyday objects such as coins, peg-tops and looking-glasses.So, first of all, we need to ask why there is such a close association between animals and children in narratives for children. Perry Nodelman suggests that, in terms of 'humanized animals', the association happened 'more or less by accident', in so far as Aesop's fables provided a suitable early example of didactic literature for children, which was then emulated by others. Karín Lesnik-Oberstein, on the other hand, sees the key association being forged by the Romantics, where the child is linked to nature, existing outside culture and language in some Edenic space.