Children's literature is the only literary type defined not by any special features of its won, but by its audience.  The designation is inaccurate in at least two obvious ways: "children's literature" is read and enjoyed by many who are no longer children, and many books--such as Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719), Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726), and Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)--were not written "for" children, although they have been read and enjoyed by children.  No one can say just what is, or is not, children's literature.  Many authors of works designated as being for children have said such a literary category does not exist, or at least they wish it did not: only in recent years have works of literary merit designated as "children's literature" received serious critical attention.

At the very least, to have a literature for children there must be children--not just people younger than a certain age, but people recognized as belonging to their own special phase of life.  The category children--that is, a group having identifiable needs in clothing, diet, sleep, education, music, and literature--is a phenomenon created by a middle class, and it came into existence in the West as the middle class grew large and strong enough to know its needs and to created markets to supply them.  To judge from pictures of young people in groupings of the Seven Ages of Man, or in portraits of the families of nobility in pre-17th-century Europe, people the age of "children" look like small adults, and no doubt that is the way they were perceived.  At the age of about seven, they joined the human community at large.  If they worked less, or less hard, because they were smaller or not as strong as others, their games, music, and stories were nevertheless the games, music, and stories of everyone.  Thus fairy tales, which for two centuries have been thought of as a fundamental part of children's literature, in fact had a long previous existence as an oral communal literature.

FAIRY TALES

One book often cited as the first work for children is Charles Perrault's Histoires ou Contes de temps passe (1697;  Histories or Stories of Past Times), often known by its subtitle, Contes de ma mere l'oie, or Mother Goose Tales, as the title read in its first English translation (1729).  Most of Perrault's stories were well known, however, and in one version or another, many were familiar throughout Europe.  Some had already appeared in earlier collections of tales, such as those by the Italians Giovanni Straparola and Giambattista Basile.

At the time Perrault wrote, others were also publishing tales, often of great complication and sophisticated surface polish, which--they often noted--they had first head from a nanny or servant.  These were the latter days of orally transmitted tales in the parts of Europe where the middle class was emerging.  (Elsewhere especially in Africa and Asia where folk traditions lasted longer, a written children's literature developed much later, and when it did, it consisted often of Western children's books in translation.)

Perrault's collection included such familiar tales as "Little Red Riding Hood," "Cinderella," "The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood," "Puss in Boots," and "Hop o' My Thumb." What makes his Contes a children's book is really only his effort to keep the tales short.  Otherwise, their wit and sophistication imply--for later readers, at least--adult listeners:  his sleeping beauty awakens and asks why the prince has taken so long.  Perrault was in no way a folklorist as were later collectors of the tales of a nation or region, like the brothers Grimm in Germany or Peter Asbjornsen and Jorgen Moe in Norway;  his manner is so decidedly French, however, that later folkloristic collectors of French tales have never excluded Perrault's stories, even though they are not exclusively French in origin and despite their having been artfully written, rather than straightforwardly "told." (See also \Tfairy tale\t.)

BEGINNINGS OF A CHILDREN'S LITERATURE IN ENGLISH

The first concerted effort to create a separate literature for children came in England, beginning about 50 years after Perrault.  England had developed a burgeoning and prosperous middle class earlier than other European countries, and these people wanted to educate their young and needed books to help them.  The pride of place as the first children's book in England probably goes to Mary Cooper's Tommy Thumb's Pretty Song Book (for all little Masters and Misses;  to be sung to them by their Nurses 'till they can sing themselves), the earliest (1744) known collection of \Tnursery rhymes\t.  The second collection, whose name was taken from the Perrault tales, was Mother Goose's Melody (1760), probably published by the bookseller John Newbery, who was the first to discover and exploit the market for children's books.

Newbery, who published many more books for adults than he did for children, understood that there was a whole class of adults who themselves were new to literacy, and for whom poems, stories, histories, and aids to prayer and piety had already been published.  These could quite easily be shortened, simplified, and illustrated for children, in books small enough for them to handle easily.  Newbery's most famous book, Goody Two-Shoes (1765), which was probably written for him by Oliver Goldsmith, is now so little read that many misname it a "moral tale." It is that, but not in a solemn or a preaching way; mostly, it offers a Goldsmithian view of English country life, its pages filled with such characters as Margery Meanwell, Farmer Graspall, and Sir Timothy Gripe.

The following 100 years--which produced little still read today except Grimm's Fairy Tales (1812-15;  first Eng.  trans., 1823)--are notable mostly for their "moral tales." These were written in part as a reaction against the popularity of fairy-tale collections--which were condemned as simply fanciful or the product of superstitious ignorance--and in part to teach.  First written in the 18th century, by the early 1800s they had become the most popular type of children's book in England.  (They were also widely read in Germany, and in France, where many books of moral tales were translations from the English.) As the 19th century wore on, the genre became more heavily didactic.  In its use of extreme situations to carry moral lessons (in Mrs.  Sherwood's Fairchild Family, 1818, for example, a father delivers his moral to his children by showing them a hanged murderer in a forest), the moral tale came to resemble the somewhat more primitive cautionary tale, a story of gory happenings meant to deliver a warning.  (Hilaire Belloc parodied the genre in his Cautionary Tales for Children, 1907, which was about "Matilda, who told Lies, and was Burned to Death," and other unfortunate juveniles.)

THE GOLDEN AGE

It was not until the 1860s that a still-vital children's literature really begins, with Charles Kingsley's Water Babies (1863), Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market (1862), and--most famous of all--Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass (1872).

William Blake had written his Songs of Innocence, in which he consciously imitates a child's delight in being young, in 1789. Wordsworth's great poetic explorations of childhood were written mostly in the first decade of the 19th century, and Charles Dickens wrote Oliver Twist in the 1830s.  Some of the great heirs to Wordsworth's children, and to Oliver, David Copperfield, Jane Eyre, and Catherine Earnshaw are to be found decades later in George Macdonald's At the Back of the North Wind (1871) and the Princess books (1872, 1883), Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island (1882) and Kidnapped (1886), Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Books (1894-95) and Just-So Stories (1902), Andrew Lang's fairy-tale collections (1889-1907), E. Nesbit's Bastable books (1899-1910), Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden (1912), Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows (1908), and Beatrix Potter's matchless array of small books about animals (1900-12).

Little in what is known of the period can explain an outpouring of such excellence.  Victorian England, rich, powerful, and hugely energetic, produced many people who in their personal lives suffered an arrestedness--an inability easily to join the rich, powerful, and energetic--which may have led them to write books that usually are labeled "for children," but that clearly express their author's personal imaginations and needs.  Alice Liddell may have loved the Alice books (though she should have been embarrassed by the poem that opens Through the Looking Glass, published when she was 19), but Lewis Carroll never wrote a line "for" Alice, though he wrote many that express his quirky and beleaguered love of her.  Kenneth Grahame wrote that The Wind in the Willows is "perhaps chiefly for youth," as though he were not sure, since it was written chiefly for himself.  Beatrix Potter had no interest in children, and perhaps wrote and painted as she did because she had spent much of her life as children spend their childhoods, in restricted circumstances imposed by adults.  No idea of childhood, and no "theme" or "trend," dominates the Golden Age.

CHILDREN'S BOOK ILLUSTRATORS

In what might be called the official view of illustration, the great names are those of Walter Crane, Kate Greenaway, Ralph Caldecott, and Arthur Rackham in England, Maurice Boutet de Bonvel in France, and Ernest Kreidolf in Germany.  Although these people all made some beautiful books, the illustrators who now seem irreplaceable worked primarily in the service of their texts, and, like the authors of the books they were illustrating, without any governing aesthetic or idea of childhood.  John Tenniel's drawings for the Alice books and Beatrix Potter's sad and funny watercolors belong inextricably to the books and shape our vision of them.  Equally important to the texts they illustrated were W.W.  Denslow and John R. Neill for the Oz books (1900-20);  N.C.  Wyeth's Stevenson illustrations;  Attilio Mussino's impish drawings for C. Collodi's Pinocchio (1924);  and E.H.  Shepard's drawings for A.A.  Milne's books of Christopher Robin and Winnie-the-Pooh (1924-28), and for The Wind in the Willows (1933).  Of these, only Potter and Wyeth had claims to being "serious artists" (and the influential American librarian Anne Carroll Moore could therefore write that Denslow's Mother Goose illustrations "should be banished from the sight of impressionable small children").  The illustrations that seem to last are those which are personally expressive, even funny or eccentric, and invite a reader to see by asking questions.

For example, Peter Rabbit "was so tired that he flopped down upon the nice soft sand on the floor of the rabbit-hole and shut his eyes.  His mother was busy cooking;  she wondered what he had done with his clothes." In the accompanying picture, Peter looks dead.  His sisters stare at him from outside the hole:  is he so impressive, or so awful, that they dare not come in?  Is Mrs.  Rabbit, looking at Peter but not turning from her cooking or running to help, more worried about Peter, his clothes, or supper?  Is she used to scenes like this? Since turnips and celery are prominent in the foreground, is Mrs.  Rabbit contemplating making a rabbit stew?  Some of the questions have clear answers--Mrs.  Rabbit is not going to make a rabbit stew;  but most great illustrators work by getting the reader to ask.

CHILDREN'S LITERATURE IN THE 20TH CENTURY

Increasingly in the last 50 years, and especially in the United States, the most striking fact about children's books has been the vast increase in their number.  In any given year during the period 1975-85, for example, more books--over 2,000 per year--have been offered by the juvenile divisions of American publishers than were published in two decades a century ago. The same flourishing children's book industry can be found whenever a thriving middle class seeks ways to educate and influence its children.

Perhaps the most positive development accompanying this large output has been the growing awareness on the part of many young readers of the possibilities of life in other countries. Translations from foreign literature accompanied most of the great national collections of fairy and folk tales;  Andrew Lang's famed collections (The Blue Fairy Book, 1889 and its successors) ranged over the Eurasian continent for their materials and the Italian Pinocchio first appeared in English in 1892.  It was when children's books began to be published on a mass scale however, that English-speaking children could read about Bambi (Eng.  trans., 1928) by the Austrian Felix Salten; The Wonderful Adventures of Nils of Selma Lagerlof (Eng. trans., 1907) and Astrid Lindgren's Pippi Longstocking (Eng. trans., 1950), both Swedish;  the Swiss Heidi, by Johanna Spyri (Eng.  trans., 1884);  the Hungarian Good Master, written in English in 1935 by Kate Seredy;  the Nigerian Chinua Achebe's Chike (1966);  the Dutch novels of Meindert De Jong (the 1950s, and '60s);  and, perhaps the greatest of all illustrated books, the Babar series by Jean de Brunhoff, translated from the French beginning in 1933.

A much more conspicuous accompaniment to the massive numbers of children's books has been the influence over them exerted by people who developed a professional expertise concerning children:  teachers, librarians, psychologists and psychoanalysts, and editors of children's books.  Inevitably, this influence has established rules for what is "suitable" for children at large as well as for children of particular ages: "suitable" can include a prohibition of what children should not know, as well as an insistence on the presence of what they should.  Another result of this influence has been the production of books that gear vocabulary, their illustrations, and their narrative density to a precisely calculated, narrow notion of what children of a given age can be expected to know, understand, or be interested in.  In addition, the recognition that books may have an intellectual, emotional, or imaginative effect on the children who read them--that is, that children's books are, in an important sense, "serious"--has led various adult groups to object to many books because they do not conform to the morality of those groups, which label them "elitist," "racist," "sexist," "communist," "dirty," or sometimes, just "stupid."

The real power of these groups and these influences is not over extraordinary writers, or even very good ones.  Rather, with so many books being published, it is in the standard fare of any given year that one sees fashions in the field obediently followed, vocabularies calibrated, and moral or political ideas enforced.

Thus, for at least two generations in the United States, children's literature was strongly characterized by an image of America that was rural and peaceful, innocent even in its wisdom, practical even in its approach to the magical, optimistic and nostalgic.  Inevitably, in these books adult writers presumed to understand children and to believe that adult society was a place that children would wish to inhabit when they grew up.  An ordinary writer like Lucy Fitch Perkins went so far as to adapt and transpose this America and these values in a series of books ostensibly about children from other countries (The Dutch Twins, 1911, and many others). Nevertheless, within this milieu, however unrealistic, many good books appeared:  the Freddy books of Walter R.  Brooks (1930s-1950s), Robert McCloskey's Make Way for Ducklings (1941) and Homer Price (1943), Laura Ingalls Wilder's realistic saga about her pioneer family, The Little House series (1932-43), Virginia Lee Burton's Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel (1938), E.B.  White's Charlotte's Web (1952).  Small children learned to read from the pages of Dr.  Seuss (beginning with And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, 1939), whose whacky verses and pictures are open, easy, hearty, upbeat and ineffably American.

Similarly, during the same period, English children's literature often seemed dominated by an image equally unrealistic:  a large house, a group of brothers and sisters, adults who understand little, and encounters with magic.  E. Nesbit's Bastable books and Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden may be said to have inaugurated this tradition, but it has insistently persisted so that--even after such houses have all but disappeared from England--M.L.  Travers in her books about Mary Poppins (1934-82), and Mary Norton in hers about The Borrowers (1952-82), created stories that equal or surpass Nesbit's and Burnett's.

In America, when the reaction against images of safe children in a safe country came, it predictably came very powerfully. In the 1960s and '70s the emphasis turned to grim realism, to "problems," to minorities:  children from broken homes, autistic and retarded children, children adventuring into sex and drug addiction.  These books often conveyed the sense that childhood was not safe, and that the passage to adulthood must be marked by danger and violence.  Yet it would seem once again that however revealing these new emphases are about adult perceptions of children--or about childhood itself--the books written under their influence may not be read after these perceptions change.

The great figures in these years seem almost untouched by any of these concerns.  The two major influences have been, on both sides of the Atlantic, J.R.R.  Tolkien and the American Maurice Sendak.  Tolkien, an English scholar of ancient language and lore, and in temperament quite withdrawn from the 20th century, nonetheless in the Hobbit (1938) and The Lord of the Rings (1953-55) created possibilities for adventure, for danger, for the relation of the magical to the natural, that have left a generation of addicted readers and an influence on fantasy literature, designed for adults as well as children, as great as any in the century.

The case of Sendak is also unlikely and extraordinary.  As has gradually become clear, he is the first great author and illustrator of books for children who is also a great connoisseur about children's literature and, though technically only an amateur, a great knower about children.  Unlike Tolkien and unlike most of the writers and illustrators of the Golden Age, Sendak clearly thinks about children, and enjoys being around them and painting and drawing for them.  Where the Wild Things Are (1965), In the Night Kitchen (1970), and Outside over There (1981) are Sendak's three great original picture books.  Higglety Pigglety Pop!  (1967) bears a closer resemblance to a book-with-pictures, as it narrates the adventures of Jennie, the Sealyham terrier who leaves home because "there must be more to life." Sendak is as happy illustrating the works of others as creating his own tales, and his output is therefore immense;  yet the Sendak style is so adaptive and changing that his imitators are often hard put to discover which style is truly "his." \TRoger\t SALE

Bibliography:  Aries, Philippe, Centuries of Childhood:  A Social History of Family Life (1965);  Bader Barbara, American Picture Books from Noah's Ark to the Beast Within (1976); Carpenter, Humphrey, Secret Gardens:  The Golden Age of Children's Literature (1985);  Carpenter, Humphrey, and Prichard, Mari, The Oxford Companion to Children's Literature (1984);  Cott, Jonathan, Pipers at the Gates of Dawn (1983); Darton, F.J.  Harvey, Children's Books in England (1958); Hazard, Paul, Books, Children, and Men, 5th ed.  (1983); Hurlimann, Bettina, Three Centuries of Children's Books in Europe (1967);  Sale, Roger, Fairy Tales and After (1978); Savater, Fernando Childhood Regained (1984).

See also:  separate articles on most of the authors and illustrators mentioned.