I do love children's books. Even before my husband and I considered creating a smaller version of ourselves we had a large and growing collection of children's books, including those from our own childhood and new ones we had purchased simply for the love of the artwork or stories. And lately I've been looking for vintage and antique books of children's stories and especially children's verse to add to our collection of picture books and chapter books.
As a child I enjoyed reading the verses and stories in two of my parents' college texts. Both of my parents majored in education in college, but when they graduated teaching jobs were scarce and they never did teach. But they both kept their anthologies of children's verse. I'm so glad they did. I spent many, many hours flipping through nursery rhymes, morality tales, and nonsense verse of many lands.
One of the most wonderful things about old books of children's verse are the charming illustrations. Many are so very enchanting that they stick with a child far more tenaciously than the verse or story. One illustrator whose pictures I remember from my father's treasury of children's verse happens to be
Kate Greenaway whose work was extremely popular in the 1880s and 1890s.
I ran into a book of hers at an antique shop this winter, not knowing that I knew and enjoyed some of her other work as a young girl. The verse often leaves something to be desired but the illustrations make you feel the soft spring breeze and hear the rustling of dresses and wind through the trees. It wasn't until I was flipping through my father's old textbook that I realized many of her poems and pictures were part of my childhood.
Another recent find (the same day, in fact, as the Greenaway book) was a thin volume by
Walter de la Mare called
A Child's Day.
The whole book is one long poem about a little girl named Elizabeth Ann who does things any child would do: gets up, eats breakfast, plays outside, gets into mischief, takes a bath, etc. Not only are the illustrations utterly lovely . . .
. . . the poetry is actually really good despite being made up of rhyming couplets (which can sort of feel plodding after a while). Every other page contains a few lines of some of the most quotable poetry I've read in a while. De la Mare truly captures the feeling of wonder and possibility and simplicity that we feel as children and long to recapture in our adult existence.
But not all the children's stories of the past are charming and sweet. Many of them are bizarre, confusing, or downright frightening. I haven't read the story that goes with this next illustration, but the caption is hilarious.
This may be just a silly story, but other stories could keep you up at night as a little girl or little boy. Even the ones we've sanitized and made less scary become more sinister with the right illustrator. The story of Red Riding Hood is actually pretty gruesome (as were
many of the tales we make cutesy movies of today). To people in earlier times, the woods and the creatures in it (wolves) were not simply scary because they were shadowy and dangerous, they were physical representations of evil. This illustration does not capture that:
This one certainly does.
*shudder*
Today, of course, we don't believe wolves or snakes or creepy crawly things are inherently evil (or at least
I don't) and we don't teach our children that demonic forces are at work in the woods. But the story of Little Red Riding Hood is still seriously scary. Modern retellings might even omit the part about the wolf eating the grandmother.
We ended up with a modern Weeble Wobble version of Goldilocks and the Three Bears that came with a toy I got for my son at a garage sale. In this version, the bowls are filled with mac and cheese (c'mon, who eats porridge these days?) and Goldilocks doesn't break any chairs and when the bears come home they aren't angry at all. Instead they invite someone who invaded their home and stole from them to come have
more mac and cheese with them, smiles all around. Needless to say, we didn't read this sanitized version to our son and the book has "disappeared" somewhere (like the trash can).
Some of these scary fairy tales we will eventually tell our son. They generally teach good lessons (don't steal, respect others, don't take candy from a creepy old crone in the woods, etc.) and they are a foundation of learning to love literature. But for now we'll skip any scary stories and focus on the fun stuff. Maybe tonight, in addition to his books about cars and trucks, I'll read a little bit of verse from the books I cherished as a small child.
Read more...
