by Ian McFadyen
1995
Queen’s Birthday weekend. Wandering down Burke Road Camberwell. Forlorn couples walking hand in hand, peering into the windows of closed shops. What is this holiday FOR?
I found myself wandering into a second-hand bookshop which was unusually crowded with people all looking for something, anything, to buy on this dull, unnecessary holiday. I browsed past the boxes of comics and the glass cases of antique volumes, past shelves of obscure biography and memoirs of forgotten wars, down the back to the children’s books and there they were: a whole wall, shelves to the ceiling, stacked with old children’s literature.
The first thing that strikes you about old children’s books is their sheer size. Big tomes these. I remembered many of these from my own youth. The Coral Island, Treasure Island, Swiss Family Robinson, King Solomon’s Mines - stories of adventure in the Far North, the South Seas, Darkest Africa. Easy to dismiss now as Imperial claptrap, but good solid rousing tales of adventure with values oozing from every page. Courage, kindness, truthfulness, honesty, modesty.
Those values constantly triumph over their opposites in these stories. And a fair swag of geographical knowledge gets transmitted at the same time. Looking through them I also note that, contrary modern prejudice, these adventure tales are not restricted to the boys. Heroines feature just as prominently in these books as in the domestic dramas of Little Women and Good Wives.
After a while browsing I take a short walk down the road to a large retail book shop and inspect the children’s section there. Their books are big and thin as opposed to short and thick and colour is abundant. They are all glossy and beautifully illustrated. There are pop-up books which erupt into replicas of whole cathedrals, whales breeching the surface… tabs and slides animate the pages. Words? Not many. Some books are lucky if they have a sentence a page. And the stories themselves… slight, often inconsequential. What’d you’d call clever rather than solid.
The irony is that, in reality, there is more colour and movement in the books in the second hand shop. The difference is that the colour and and movement is in the text. You have to actually read the book to experience them. The modern books give you all the sensations without having to read at all. I realise that I am staring at the basic condition of the modern world. What succeeds is what attracts the most attention. Modern kids’ books blaze with colour and movement to guarantee the child will look and say "Buy this one Mummy".
A few days later I read that someone had noted that the words tested in the Victorian LAP tests at Year 5 were the equivalent of words which Year 2 pupils were expected to know thirty years ago. The reason seems to be have been staring at me from the shelves that dull afternoon. Kids don’t need to be able to read as much any more. It suddenly occurs to me that we have lost two, probably three, generations to television - images that spring off the screen without any effort at all on behalf of the audience. Now book publishers feel they have to deliver the same easy pay-off.
You can’t judge a book by its cover? Not so. These days that’s exactly what a book will be judged by, along with everything else. The need for the immediate visual pay-off has spread from entertainment to reality. The idea that one should not judge people by their appearance is just the sort of notion espoused by those old-fashioned books. Not any more. Today the role-models for girls are not brave nurses fighting in the war, or fearless young women thwarting smugglers but the supermodels prancing on the cat-walk. Plastic surgery, breast implants, working out at the gym - external appearances are now far more important than inner qualities. No need to learn how to read people any more than to read books.
I went back to the old book store a few days later and bought a whole set of those old musty tomes. Books about pirates and sailing ships, books about explorers and adventurers. Books filled with quaint old Victorian values. I’m going to start reading them to my five year old. Perhaps it’s not too late.
Ian McFadyen
June 1995
POSTSCRIPT: Six years after this was written J.K.Rowling revived the traditional art of kids' reading with the remarkably successful series of Harry Potter books.