Volume 32, Number 11 · June 27, 1985
Big Little Books
By Janet Adam Smith
Secret Gardens: A Study of the Golden Age of Children's Literature
by Humphrey Carpenter
Houghton Mifflin, 235 pp., $16.95
Children's books are now big business, Stories for children may not be subject to the direct censorship practiced on school textbooks in some American states; but both in America and in Britain there are subtler pressures on authors and illustrators to trim their work to make it more salable, less likely to affront susceptibilities of race, religion, sex, or class. When Huckleberry Finn has been banned by a public library on racial grounds, publishers are going to keep a sharp eye on what may offend. Humphrey Carpenter finds a nineteenth-century parallel in the Evangelicals and pioneers of the Sunday school movement, who concerned themselves with purging children's stories of all that second opposed to religion or a stable social order:
Review, 2932 words
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