The Twentieth-Century Voice

Abstract

With Kipling and Grahame, and with Barrie, the period in which children’s books were written almost as much for adults as they were for children ended, although it is true that some later writers such as Milne, C. S. Lewis and Tolkien still used what might be termed a nineteenth-century narrative manner. In the period to come, what had formerly been a literature in which adults and children were each, so to say, assigned roles as readers, a literature in which adult readers might identify with adult tellers and become teller-surrogates, while child readers identified with child narratees, became much more clearly a literature for children, a literature in which the adult voice lost its identity and pre-eminence, and children, not children and adults, became the true addressees. This change had been prefigured in some of the writers already discussed, in the work of Molesworth, for instance, when she adopted the role of elderly first-person narrator, or in the work of Jefferies, who was so totally committed to his child characters. The change took place only slowly; a transition period first allowed new attitudes on the part of writers to develop. When it was concluded, however, children’s literature was different. The adult teller with whom adult readers had comfortably identified had disappeared and a teller committed to pleasing child readers regardless of what other adults might think had emerged instead.