The New Student's Reference Work/Literature for Children

​Lit′erature for Children. In recent yearsthere has grown up a large demand for booksand general literature suitable for children.A great variety of such books has beenproduced and would be sufficient, if broughttogether, to make a good-sized library. Therehas thus developed a distinct body ofliterature, belonging to the various stages ofchildhood and youth and somewhatdefinitely marked off from the literaturedesigned for adult minds. Many of thesebooks are poor and trifling, others are choicein thought and style and are highly educativein their effect. It requires considerablespecial knowledge and experience toselect the books of most value and bestadapted to children from this great mass andvariety of materials. Parents especiallyfind it difficult to keep track of the choicebooks, and even teachers, with their largerexperiences in literature, history and science,often are unqualified to make a good selectionfor children.

We will first briefly summarize and classifythe principal kinds of books.

The books of early childhood include suchas the Mother Goose stories, Stevenson'spoems of early childhood, Eugene Field'spoems and other illustrated poems and tales.Fairy-tales and folk-lore, including Grimm'sand Andersen's, follow closely, and then thewhole series of myths from Hiawatha andother Indian tales back to the Norse andGreek myths. Old English story is rich inballads and songs of delight to children.The legendary stories of early Romanhistory, Siegfried, Roland and many early andmedieval tales from the history of Germany,France and Italy, William Tell, the accountsof King Arthur and the Round Table knights,the patriarchal stories from the Bible andlegendary stories of French, German andEnglish kings furnish a rich variety ofinteresting narratives for the young. FrederickBarbarossa, King Alfred, Charlemagne, RobertBruce and Sir William Wallace and manyother stories may be cited. Some of thestandard books dealing with these stories areGrimm's Fairy Tales, Andersen's FairyTales, Hawthorne's Wonder-Book andTanglewood Tales, Kingsley's Greek Heroes,King Arthur and His Court (Greene), OldTestament Stories in Scriptural Language,Peabody's Old Greek Folk-Stories, the EugeneField Book, Stevenson's Book of Poems,Norse Stories (Mabie), Myths of NorthernLands, Hiawatha, Lays of Ancient Rome(Macaulay), Tales from English History,Heroic Ballads, Stories from Herodotus, Jason'sQuest (Lowell), Tales of Chivalry (Rolfe), TheBoy's King Arthur (Lanier), The Story ofSiegfried (Baldwin), The Story of Troy, TheStory of Roland (Baldwin) and Church'sstories of The Iliad and The Odyssey.

The best of these legends and stories areselected from the early history and literatureof modern European countries and fromGreek, Roman and Hebrew civilization.Many have been translated or adapted formodern use from the old literatures. Belongingalso to the earlier and middle period ofchildhood, from 10 to 12, are such stories asGulliver's Travels (Swift), The Arabian Nights, ​The Nürnberg Stove (Ramée), Alice's Adventuresin Wonderland and Through the LookingGlass (Carroll), Black Beauty, Little LordFauntleroy (Burnett), Being a Boy (Warner),The Story of a Bad Boy (Aldrich), The RobinHood Stories (Pyle), Tales of a Traveller(Irving), King of the Golden River (Ruskin),The Water-Babies (Kingsley), The Pied Piperof Hamlin (Browning), Ten Boys on the Roadfrom Long Ago (Andrews) and The Story ofthe English (Guerber).

From 11 on, some of the simple biographiesare interesting to children, as of John Smith,Boone, Miles Standish, Lincoln, Washington,La Salle, William Penn, BenjaminFranklin, Peter the Great, King Alfred,Cæsar, Cromwell and others.

During the grammar-school period childrenbecome interested in such books asTales from Shakespeare (Lamb), Irving'sStories, Vicar of Wakefield, Pilgrim'sProgress, Swiss Family Robinson, Last of theMohicans, Evangeline, Tales of a Grandfather,Plutarch's Lives, Silas Marner, Tom Brown'sSchool-Days, Franklin's Autobiography,Uncle Tom's Cabin, Merchant of Venice, Rogerde Coverly, Lady of the Lake, Don Quixote,Rob Roy, Treasure Island, Peasant andPrince, Scudder's Life of Washington, TheTalisman, Ivanhoe and The Deserted Village.

Then comes a large series of books of traveland adventure, geographical descriptionsand excursions, stories of hunting and fishing,voyages of exploration and discovery, whichmake a good share of a library for boys andgirls. Such are Livingstone's and Stanley'sexperiences in Africa, the ocean-explorers, asColumbus, Da Gama, Magellan, Sir FrancisDrake and Captain Cook; Arctic explorers,as Nansen; pioneer explorers in America, asChamplain, De Soto, Lewis and Clark andFremont.

More recently there has come into use abody of nature-stories and science-bookswhich are of much importance, as Burrough'sBirds and Bees, Squirrels and OtherFur-Bearing Animals, Bird Land (Keyser), Kragand Johnny Bear (Seton), The Foot-PathWay (Torey), Three Outdoor Papers (Higginson),Stories of Bird Life (Pearson), The FirstBook of Birds and Birds Through an OperaGlass (Olive Thorne Miller), Nestlings in Forestand Marsh (Wheelock), Town Geology andMadame How and Lady Why (Kingsley),Star land (Ball), Natural History of Selborne(White), Secrets of the Woods (Long) andFamiliar Flowers of Field and Garden (Mathews).

In addition may be mentioned humorousstories, as How I Killed a Bear (Warner),Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn (Twain),The Rose and the Ring (Thackeray), TheStory of a Bad Boy (Aldrich), The Adventuresof Robin Hood (Pyle) and Little Masterpiecesof American Wit and Humor (Masson).

Intelligent parents are becoming awareof the importance of selecting the best books for children and of not only putting thesebooks where children may find them but ofreading to the children. Mothers, fathers,older brothers and sisters or aunts cannotentertain and benefit the children so much inany other way as by reading the best storiesto them. This should begin before childrenare old enough to go to school. Betweenfour and six is the choice time, in manyrespects, to introduce children to the beststories and ballads. Their minds are remarkablyreceptive to good stories at this period,and the thought and language of children canbe thus early shaped and directed into thebest channels. Thoughtful mothers whocan get time for this delightful study withtheir children find it most valuable to allconcerned and a real pleasure.

As children grow a little older, the readingof good books in the family circle, where oldand young alike may enjoy them together,is perhaps the best way of developing theright family spirit and at the same timecultivating and enriching the minds of youngand old. For this reason a well-selected familylibrary is very helpful. Some of our cityand town libraries now provide a children'sroom where a full set of children's books issupplied. In some cases a lady is employedto read to classes of boys and girls, introducingthem in an interesting way to the betterclass of books.

In common schools the entire method oftreating books and literature has undergonea great change in recent years. The oraltreatment of stories in primary grades hasdeveloped into an elaborate plan ofintroducing the best stories and literary productsto children, in order thus to give them anearly and vivid acquaintance with authorsand their works. Primary teachers havebeen developing the art of storytelling,including clear and attractive narrative,impersonation of characters, dramatic actionof a simple kind, question, answer and discussionand, finally, careful reproduction ofstories by the children. This kind of workhas vitalized primary instruction, awakenedthe interests and thought activity ofchildren, and exerted excellent influence inimproving the language and composition ofpupils. It has laid the foundation in primarygrades for a real educative acquaintance withseveral standard classes of literature whichmay grow and develop later. This oralacquaintance with firstclass stories and mythsalso has a close relation to the labor oflearning to read in primary schools. Itplants in the children the desire to learn theart of reading, and it lends enthusiasm andnatural expression to all later oral reading.The mechanical formalism and monotonyso common among children in learning toread are due largely to the lack of thoughtand interest in what they are reading; inshort to a deficiency of such stimulatingideas as children appropriate richly throughoral story and work.

​As soon as children have learned to read inprimary grades and have acquired a stronginterest and preference for suitable books,the later reading in schools, from the fourthgrade on, is designed to cultivate and developthis lively interest in the best standard worksin literature still further. Instead of theseries of regular readers, many of the schoolsare in the habit of requiring the reading ofgood English classics in the intermediateand grammar grades. Such series ofunabbreviated English classics are now publishedfor school use by most of the large publishingcompanies, including such books asLongfellow's Evangeline and Courtship of MilesStandish, Irving's Rip Van Winkle andSleepy Hollow, Whittier's Snowbound,Lowell's Vision of Sir Launfal, Matthew Arnold'sSohrab and Rustum, Scott's Marmion andLady of the Lake, Shakespeare's Merchant ofVenice and Julius Cæsar, Lamb's Tales fromShakespeare, Webster's Speech at BunkerHill, Motley's Essay on Peter the Great,Schurz's Essay on Lincoln and Hawthorne'sTales of the White Hills.

The study of masterpieces as units ofthought has introduced into the commonschool a new and improved method of readingand interpreting literature. Reading ingrammar grades is no longer a mere drill inenunciation, pronunciation and rhetoricalexpression. It has become a fruitful andmany-sided thought-study, an awakening ofdeep and lasting interest in the works ofgreat writers and in the great writersthemselves as leaders of thought. The very methodsof instruction have changed. Theteacher herself needs to have an appreciativeand sympathetic acquaintance with classicworks and an enthusiasm for the study ofthem. Boys and girls have their attentiondirected first of all to the growth of a strongidea in a masterpiece and to the author'sstyle and power in expressing it. Thecharacters depicted by the author are workedout in their proper setting and relation toenvironment. Great moral principles cometo light, and ideals of personal conduct areset up, or contrasts are shown between rightand wrong action. In other words, itbecomes a deep and interesting study of humanlife as revealed by great writers. Such aninspiring study may then well lead to naturaland expressive reading.

It is not unusual to dramatize some of thesuitable works and present them on theschool-stage, especially those which alreadyare in the dramatic form, as Shakespeare'sJulius Cæsar, The Courtship of Miles Standishand others.

Another field to which it is the business ofthe school and home to introduce childrenis that which belongs to periodicalmagazines, newspapers and the current literatureof periodicals. Children need, on the part ofelders, first of all, a wise choice of the best ofthese productions and, second, a considerateencouragement to read those which deserveattention.

The home has the best opportunity ofdirecting the tastes of children by reading withthem. The school can call attention to thebest magazines, furnishing them in theschool-library, and in the discussion ofcurrent events directing the attention of pupilsto those periodicals which give a simple andinteresting discussion of political, scientific,social and practical topics. Even the dailynewspapers require attention; young peopleshould be shown how to read and judgethem, and should then be led to appreciatethe better class of dailies.

One of the peculiar characteristics of ourcivilization is this increasing importance ofliterature in the education of the young. Ithas grown to large proportions in the last 30years. Side by side with good and wholesomeliterature is a great mass of false andvicious books and periodicals which panderto a depraved taste and to vicious thoughtsand impulses. It is the duty of the schooland home to forestall these bad influencesby the steady forces of education, begunearly and kept up continuously through allthe years of youth.

Some of the books dealing with this problemare Literature in Schools (Scudder); Howto Teach Reading (Clark); Counsel upon theReading of Books (Van Dyke); The Study andTeaching of English (Chubb); TheStory-Teller's Art (Dye); Books and Reading(Lowell); Special Method in Primary Readingand Oral Work with Stories (McMurry);Special Method in the Reading of English Classics(McMurry); The Book-Lover (Baldwin);Place of the Story in Early Education (Wiltse)and The Listening Child (Thacher).