Literature for Children

A historical overview of children's literature, especially fairy tales, reflects society's attitudes toward children and death. Most readers are unaware that every fairy tale has its own history, and many of them originated in the seventeenth century as oral, adult entertainment. Many featured coarse humor and sensational events. As these tales were transcribed and developed specifically for children, they were modified to contain incidents and behavior that reflected the customs of the place and period in which they were told. They contained material intended to provide moral guidance, and in the earliest versions of children's stories death was prominent because of its ubiquity and drama. Over the centuries there has been significant transformation of fairy tales, storybooks, and schoolbooks (basal readers). In the early twentieth century until the 1970s, topics considered disturbing to children, including death, were toned down and removed. Although late twentieth-century works began to reverse this trend, many children today are insulated from discussions of death in their literature.

The Evolution of Children's Literature

Schoolbooks were developed primarily to educate, teach morality, and assist in children's socialization. Books for children's education preceded the development of children's literature for pleasure. Charles Perrault and Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm wrote tales to caution children about the perils and consequences of inappropriate behavior.

Literature intended specifically for children did not develop until the mid-seventeenth century. Prior to that time children were perceived as miniature adults or as less than human, as typified by Michel de Montaigne, the sixteenth-century French humanist and essayist. In Off with Their Heads! (1992), Maria Tatar, a professor of Germanic languages and literature at Harvard University, notes that early children's literature had an unusually cruel and coercive streak. Early books were often written to frighten children into behaving as parents wished. Two approaches predominated: cautionary tales and exemplary tales. In cautionary tales the protagonist was either killed or made perpetually miserable for having disobeyed. Stories of exemplary behavior also had a strange way of ending at the deathbeds of their protagonists.

John Amos Comenius's 1658 Latin schoolbook A World of Things Obvious to the Senses Drawn in Pictures was the first picture book for children and the first to recognize that children needed their own literature. In 1744 John Newbery wrote A Little Pretty Pocket Book for children. Although other books for children had been published earlier, this book is credited as the start of English children's literature because this book was meant to entertain rather than educate. Newbery is recognized as the first serious publisher of children's literature.

Between the 1920s and the 1970s incidents of dying and death were removed or glossed over in children's reading material. Concurrently, religious material was also removed from children's schoolbooks. Only since the late 1970s and early 1980s has this tendency begun to reverse. Children's books of the twenty-first century frequently deal with feelings, divorce, sex, and death. Religion is still taboo in schoolbooks—in contrast to colonial America when ministers wrote many of the schoolbooks and the local minister often oversaw the school. The town school was considered an appropriate place for children to be taught not only their letters but also religion.

Basal Readers

Books designed to teach children to read are known as basal readers. They use material from a variety of sources. From the early 1800s until the 1920s, American children were commonly taught to read with basal readers edited by Lyman Cobb, Samuel T. Worcester, Salem Town, William Russell, William D. Swan, and William McGuffey, among others. In McGuffey's Eclectic Readers, published continuously from 1879 to 1920, the subject of many of the selections was the death of a mother or child, typically presented as a tragic but inevitable part of life. For example, McGuffey's Third Eclectic Reader (1920) contains William Wordsworth's poem "We Are Seven," in which a little girl describes her family as having seven children, even though two are dead. The experience of the death of the older sister is also described. Some of the other short stories and poems in McGuffey's Readers that deal with death as a theme are: "Old Age and Death" by Edmund Waller, "The Death of Little Nell" by Charles Dickens, "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" by Thomas Gray, and "He Giveth His Beloved Sleep" by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Unlike early basal readers, today there are no poems or stories that deal with death nor are there prayers in books used in public schools.

An anonymous selection in McGuffey's Fourth Eclectic Reader, entitled "My Mother's Grave," provides an emotional account of a young girl's experience with her dying mother. The story aims to make children polite and obedient to their parents. Through recounting the author's thoughts on revisiting her mother's grave, she remembers being unkind to her dying mother after a trying day at school. She realizes her lapse in manners later that evening and returns to her mother's room for forgiveness and finds her asleep. She vows to waken early to "tell how sorry I was for my conduct," but when she rushes into the room in the morning she finds her mother dead, with a hand so cold "it made me start" (p. 253). Even thirteen years later the author finds her remorse and pain almost over-whelming. This is not the type of subject matter and emotional content considered appropriate for twenty-first century basal readers. Commonly used basal readers rarely contain references to dying or death. If they do include a chapter from a book that deals with death, such as E. B. White's Charlotte's Web (1952), it is not the chapter in which Charlotte dies.

Storybooks

Insight into how dying and death were portrayed in the nineteenth century can be found in the still widely read storybook Little Women, written in 1869 by Louisa May Alcott. Alcott described the death of young Beth in a straightforward manner uncommon for her day. Recognizing that her depiction was at odds with the melodramatic scenes current in more romantic literature, Alcott added in the paragraph following Beth's death: "Seldom, except in books, do the dying utter memorable words, see visions, or depart with beatified countenance . . ." (Alcott 1947, p. 464).

Between 1940 and 1970 few children's books contained references to death. Two that have become classics are Margaret Wise Brown's The Dead Bird (1965) and Charlotte's Web. White's publisher initially refused to publish Charlotte's Web unless the ending was modified allowing Charlotte to live, which White refused. Critical reviewers of the era found death not "an appropriate subject for children" (Guth 1976, p. 531).

Separating children from an awareness of dying and death has diminished since the 1970s. Although Robert Fulton and Herman Feifel taught and wrote about dying and de