Getting Kids to Read: Can Fairytales and Fantasy Compete with Fortnite?

The stories we encounter as children are the most important ones we ever read. They may not always be the most sophisticated or profound, but they are the ones we remember most deeply – and everything in the reading life that follows is built on them. GK Chesterton said that the children’s story The Princess and the Goblin had “made a difference to my whole existence”. Not everyone who reads The Very Hungry Caterpillar or Goodnight Moon goes on to read Gravity’s Rainbow or Middlemarch; but everyone who reads Gravity’s Rainbow started out reading children’s stories. And they only carried on reading because they did so.

It is in childhood – first through nursery rhymes, then picture books – that children learn to delight in the way the sounds and rhythms of words can be made to bounce off one another for pleasure. Childhood reading is part of the formation of a moral imagination: it helps us to imagine what it might be like to have agency, to act in the world, and what it might be like to be somebody else. In reading, we find models for ourselves.

I firmly believe that once the hook is set – whether it’s by Charlotte’s Web or Diary of a Wimpy Kid – it’s in for life

Children’s writing forges a connection between the past and the future. On one level, that is a literary and social connection. Children’s stories borrow from their predecessors; E Nesbit draws on Rudyard Kipling; Willard Price draws on GA Henty; Alan Garner and Susan Cooper draw on JRR Tolkien and Arthurian legend; Philip Pullman is in dialogue with CS Lewis; JK Rowling draws on everybody. School stories, fantasy adventures, animal stories, portal fantasies, seafaring adventures, and tales of exploration cascade through the canon, with tropes and motifs recurring across decades and centuries.

I came to believe, as I wrote a history of them, that they remain close to the aboriginal forms of storytelling that emerge from the oral tradition: folk tales, fairytales and myths. Sophisticated as they may be, they don’t shy from heroes and villains, quests and tests, fantastic beasts and magic objects; from the archetypal forms of narrative. Saints’ lives, classical mythology, Aesop’s fables, and the fairytales of Perrault and the Brothers Grimm are the mulch out of which children’s stories grow.

There’s a connection to the past at the level of families too: the canon is passed down, generation to generation. When we read to and with our children, we introduce them to our own childhood favourites – not least because of the deep joy of revisiting them. That’s one reason that children’s books of the past have more staying power than all but the most hallowed instances of literary fiction. More people read AA Milne than Arnold Bennett. Those stories mingle with new ones you discover together. The Just So Stories, Pippi Longstocking and Where the Wild Things Are are joined on the bookshelf by The Gruffalo and I Want My Hat Back.

They offer a personal, psychological connection between the past and the future. The magic of children’s stories is that they look both ways, speaking to a double audience. The child reader meets the adult writer coming the other way. For children, the stories open imaginative spaces in which they enjoy the positive liberty of freedom: agency, adventure, and the chance to safely break the rules, at least in imagination. For adult writers, it’s freedom: again and again, you encounter portals to enchanted worlds where writers escape from the trials and sorrows of adulthood, reimagining their own childhoods as happier, more adventurous, more free.

In the early 21st century, we’re at a peculiar point in the history of the genre. In the post-Harry Potter world, children’s publishing is bigger business than perhaps ever before. Yet it’s fraught with anxieties. We worry about today’s children’s books. Are celebrity cash-ins choking proper children’s writers out of the market? Is this buoyant publishing environment more about marketing and less about reading? There’s a baked-in nostalgia about children’s writing, and perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that things have never been what they used to be. In 1802, Charles Lamb lamented that “Mrs Barbauld’s stuff has banished all the old classics of the nursery”.

We worry, too, about the children’s books of the past. The books we loved as children: were they bad, actually? For most of their history in this country, children’s stories have been about and for white, middle-class children; and the treatment of non-white people has ranged from othering to outright racist. Even progressive E Nesbit has Jewish and Chinese stereotypes in her otherwise benign books. Classism, fatphobia, sexism, lookism, homophobia, lowkey endorsement of bullying and violence – you name it, you can find instances throughout the canon.

Do we need to simply turf the old stuff out wholesale? I think it’s possible to be judicious. You don’t destroy the sacred integrity of a text by snipping out the odd bit that might now be offensive; but nor do you serve literary history by categorically memory-holing everything written before about 1990. This isn’t a new problem. We’ve grappled with it for years. For instance, a whiteface subplot in the first Doctor Dolittle book has been quietly excised in reprinted editions for decades. It’s no great loss. Enid Blyton lost her golliwogs. Even Roald Dahl tweaked Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to make the Oompa-Loompas a bit less racist during his own lifetime.

Classism, fatphobia, sexism, lookism, homophobia, lowkey endorsement of bullying – you name it, it’s in the canon

It tells you something about how important children’s stories are that the arguments about their moral content – the suitability of the subject matter, their implied attitudes, and the question of who they represent and who they exclude – are so fierce. Children’s writing tells you something about what adults believe children are like or should be like. The idea that children are impressionable and that what they read will be determinative of who they turn out to be and how they conceive the social order never goes away.

Eighteenth-century puritans used storytelling to bring children to Jesus by scaring the wits out of them. The late Victorians sacralised childhood as a state of quasi-divine innocence. Enid Blyton provided a conservative model of pluck and wholesomeness in the postwar period. In the early 1980s, Judy Blume came under attack for talking to children about things – especially sex – that adults decided were inappropriate. The battles she fought with the book-banners are still ongoing.

Movere, docere, delectare: to move, to teach and to delight. Children’s stories have always done all three. Even the sternest didactic writers can’t lay down the law without providing something to sweeten the pill. John Locke recognized that “a child will learn three times as much” by learning through play than when being “dragged unwillingly to it”. Books written purely for the enjoyment of young readers also contained a strain of instruction. In stirring the heart, you teach something about what hearts can do.

Perhaps the biggest anxiety of our age is that children might stop reading altogether: that boring old books and the slow-burn pleasures of words on a page are struggling to compete with the immediate excitements of screens. That Fortnite, in other words, has fragged Winnie-the-Pooh.

There are some reasons to be encouraged, or at least not to panic. An ancestor of this anxiety attended the arrival of television. In 1954, when just one UK household in five had a TV, the Nuffield Foundation commissioned a report called Television and the Child. It found that although the bookshelf initially gave way to the screen, most children eventually returned to reading with redoubled enthusiasm. Book-reading came into its own not despite television but because of it. Television adaptations of books directed viewers to the original texts, and TV shows eventually turned into books. Nerds of my generation fondly remember the Terrance Dicks novelizations of Doctor Who.

That isn’t to say the analogy is exact. Screen-based entertainments, social media, and video games are wickedly addictive – as every parent knows. It would be complacent to treat their ubiquity the same as early television. But there’s reason to believe that they can and will – with proper encouragement – coexist and cross-fertilize with traditional children’s writing.

Peter Rabbit was a character in a book who turned into a toy; Winnie-the-Pooh was a toy who turned into a character in a book

There are things that books can do, in terms of interiority and complexity, that can’t be reproduced on screen. In an age where social media encourages self-projection, fiction encourages self-reflection. Reading a book, unlike curating an Instagram feed, is not competitive. It lets you proceed at your own pace. Once the hook is set – whether it’s by Charlotte’s Web or Diary of a Wimpy Kid – it’s in for life.

But getting that hook set isn’t necessarily straightforward. Children’s stories have an extraordinary vitality. They have always spilled out of their containers and hopped from platform to platform. In the late Victorian and Edwardian periods, they went from page to stage and back again. Peter Pan was a chapter in a novel, then it was a play, then it was a novel again. E Nesbit’s Bastable stories mention current theatrical productions of The Water Babies and Shock-Headed Peter. Children’s stories even turn into children’s games – in Nesbit’s works, children turn The Jungle Book into a game of make-believe on the lawn. Peter Rabbit was a character in a book who turned into a toy; Winnie-the-Pooh was a toy who turned into a character in a book. There has always been a free flow back and forth between playground games of pirates, explorers, knights in armour and their literary representations.

We’d do well to encourage and mimic that fluidity. If you put chapter books on a pedestal and dismiss comics or the storytelling in games or on television as illegitimate or dumbed-down, you erect a fence that need not be there. In Mary Poppins Opens the Door, a statue in the park (which comes alive, this being a Mary Poppins story) describes reading comics over the shoulders of kids on a park bench: “Best of all are the coloured comics, especially the one called Lot-o’-Fun”.

Children, like talking statues, are culturally omnivorous. They don’t make the highbrow/lowbrow distinctions adults make. Let kids fall in love with a video game mythos; let them read “trash”; let them come to pleasure first. Work with the grain rather than against it. Middlemarch will come.

• The Haunted Wood: A History of Childhood Reading by Sam Leith is published by Oneworld.

Source: The Guardian