Deborah Stevenson - Sentiment and Significance: The Impossibility of Recovery in the Children's Literature Canon, or The Drowning of The

Water Babies - The Li...

The Lion and the Unicorn 21.1 (1997) 112-130

Sentiment and Significance:

The Impossibility of Recovery in the Children's Literature Canon or,
The Drowning of The Water-Babies

Deborah Stevenson

Recovery of a forgotten author always sounds like a wonderful idea; one takes a writer whose work, like a dropped
stitch, fell out of its place, and knits it back into its row in the canonical garment. I use "recovery" here to mean not
just a return to print but a return to broad awareness of a book as indispensable, as, in short, a children's literature
classic to be passed on to ensuing generations. A hypothetical version of recovery works something like this: a critic
writes a brilliant new book on Charles Kingsley's The Water-Babies (1863), causing people to reassess its importance.
The book is favorably reviewed not only in academic journals, but in "gatekeeper" periodicals such as the New York
Times Book Review and the New York Review of Books. Other scholars find this work relevant to their own, and
Water-Babies articles begin to appear in PMLA, contesting, restructuring, and expanding on the original pivotal
volume. At the same time, non-academics who have read the monograph's reviews and seen the author on the Today
show exhibit heightened interest in The Water-Babies itself, buying it in greater numbers for their children. Soon,
Spielberg's plans for a new live-action movie are announced, the book is repackaged with a flashy film tie-in (while
the Norton edition steadily infiltrates universities), and the children and scholars of the 1990s rediscover the magic
and/or import of Mrs. Doasyouwouldbedoneby and Mrs. Bedonebyasyoudid and then pass them onto the next
generations as treasures of their own childhood.

It is an appealing picture, but it is not going to happen. Children's literature depends upon a canon of sentiment, and
such canons are proof against attempts at academic recovery; the academic curriculum, which is [End Page 112]
based on a canon of significance, may rediscover the historical significance of a children's author but can never truly
recover it to the literature's dominant popular canon.

Canons are an increasingly problematized notion in our time; children's literature, with its conflicting and often
polarized formative currents, offers a particularly complex response to the issue. In common academic discourse, we
employ "canon" to refer to that list of works we consider requisite for understanding a part of literature; that, in short,
is what we must teach if we wish students to comprehend a subject. While there is heated debate about how such texts
should be chosen and perpetuated, or even what they mean, there have been some excellent analyses, both from those
who approve of the process and those who do not, of how canon formation operates. Yet the academic canon
formation described by Richard Ohmann as taking place "in the interaction between large audiences and gatekeeper
intellectuals," is not the process that creates lasting classics in children's literature ("Shaping" 383).

Canon formation is largely a concern of literary scholarship, which has, as opposed to the disciplines of library science
and education, lately turned its attention to the genre of children's literature; only recently have academic rankings of
significance for the books within the genre begun to appear. While children's literature does not yet offer academic
anthologies of the same weight and importance as the Heath or the Norton collections, which operate as arbiters or
thermostats of canonical status, other works such as Charles Frey and John Griffith's Classics of Children's Literature
(which offers a similar compendium flavor and paperback textbook format and which just appeared in its fourth
edition) seem to want to emulate them. If academic criticism of children's literature continues to burgeon, doubtless
such books will gain in popularity and number.

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Deborah Stevenson - Sentiment and Significance: The Impossibility of Recovery in the Children's Literature Canon, or The Drowning of The Water Babies - The Li...

As Brian McCrea discusses in Addison and Steele Are Dead (1990), academic canons exist to fill a variety of needs,
both artistic and professional; scholars are likelier to discuss books about which they have something to say. The long
academic silence on children's literature seems likely to stem from the absence of its critical cachet as well as a lack of
critical tools for its analysis. Now that criticism of the genre is increasing, this tendency to lionize what is useful to the
critic exists in the study of and response to children's literature. Some authorities of children's literature note the
existence of "critics' books," or "reviewers' books," texts that appeal strongly to the adults who, after encountering
scores of formula novels, appreciate the originality of a technical innovation without being distanced, as its child
audience might be, by its sophistication (Gerhardt 122). Similarly, scholarly interest in text recovery [End Page 113] is
a well-established phenomenon in all walks of literature; scholars of children's literature, too, are interested in the
merit of works whose reputation may have dimmed over the decades.

As a teaching canon, children's literature feels a need to document its history; the canon is not, however, closed to
change, particularly as many contemporary books provide yet more interesting theoretical challenges. Despite the
genre's conservatism, it is not closed to the new: Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are (1963) is canonical; Jon
Scieszka's The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales (1992) has made an impressive attempt on the
academic canon in four short years. The community of the genre's scholars, too, is expanding as children's literature
gets taught as literature in college, high school, and lower schools.

These academic readers, however, are not the significant audience of children's literature. A canonical work such as
Hamlet is read almost exclusively by members of the community of scholars, which includes high-school students as
well as professors of literature. Purely popular incarnations or readings of the play, without awareness of its academic
role, do not exist. Where the Wild Things Are's popular role exists alongside its academic role; in fact, its popular
significance overshadows its academic impact. Children's literature scholarship is by no means invalid; it sheds much
light on literature as a whole as well as the genre it discusses. But its power to affect the literature it studies is slight
compared to the effect of criticism on other contemporary genres, and its judgment over the literature is not supreme.
Ultimately, popular judgments of sentimental regard, not academic lists of significance, create and control the canon of
children's literature.

Literary critics are not the only professionals with authority over children's literature: educators and librarians have
studied and distributed the genre for years. Yet while curricular use of titles enhances their sales figures, a reader's
association with such a text is controlled by its mandatory nature, so that scholastic use of a title rarely affects its
uncoerced status. The impact of librarians has been much more significant; in addition to being for decades the genre's
most noted scholars, they influence distribution, marketing, and readership. But they too have professional
considerations that influence their choices, and it is the non-professional canon, the judgments of amateurs--in both
that word's original meaning of "one who does it only for love" and in its contemporary sense--which figures most
prominently in popular conception of the literature. There is, however, one common characteristic between those non-
academic adult categories: none of the adults who deal directly with children's reading--parents, teachers, librarians,
"practitioners" (Peter [End Page 114] Hunt's term)--has much occasion for recovering the truly forgotten (6). They,
not literary critics (although they may take that role at times), determine which books are passed on to children, and
they hand down the familiar and beloved, not the merely historically significant or the forgotten.

"Popular canon" may initially seem an oxymoronic concept, but children's books have never depended on the academy
for the creation of classic status. Ohmann notes that "lay" readers generally valued literature "where they discovered
the values in which they believed or where they found needed moral guidance when shaken in their own beliefs"
(Politics 70), and the popular canon seems to reflect such values. While no canon, springing as it does from a variety
of social and economic forces, can truly be termed "natural," the canon of sentiment is less self-conscious than
academic rankings or anthologies. As an accidental canon, it takes one book at a time with little thought to overall
effect. Unlike the canon of significance, it makes no attempt at breadth, considers no issues of representation (in fact, is
wildly non-representative in many ways), and suffers from few exigencies of time and space. It ultimately defines
children's literature in the popular understanding of the term. Whereas the academic canon of significance exists to
justify, document, chronicle, or explain, the canon of sentiment exists to preserve--to preserve the childhood of those
adults who create that canon and to preserve the affection those adults feel for the books within it. Instead of Norton
anthologies, it has the manifold treasuries, both mass-market and elegantly produced keepsakes, of children's literature.

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Like the academic canon, the popular canon is problematically conceived and misleadingly weighted; it too selects its
entries based on shifting and arguable notions of what fills a need and what is valuable. It reflects the taste and
intentions of those adults empowered to affect the purchase of books, which has in the past excluded and continues to
exclude large groups of people who have lacked the opportunity and economic capability to enforce any textual
choices they might make. Though there are signs that the patterns of influence may be changing (although the greater
interest in multicultural literature does not always relate directly to the interests of people from a given culture, as
Thelma Seto points out [169-74]), the disproportion seems merely to shift rather than to disappear. The combination of
unevenly concentrated power and the retroactive nature of the genre means that the standards employed in judging
these canon entries are rooted in the Great Books tradition (which, of course, is shaped by the books already in the
canon). The fact of a book's moving millions does matter to the popular canon. Moving [End Page 115] which
millions, however, and moving them in what way, is an important consideration. The kitschy chic of an old Nancy
Drew title cannot popularly compete with Alice in Wonderland (1865). The sentimental canon has its own belletristic
standards, despite its different criteria for what makes a text "belle."

The sentimental canon, then, is formed largely on custom: it favors books that comfort over books that challenge,
books that reinforce the status quo over books that attempt to change it; it renders all books safe by their very inclusion
therein. Therefore the canon of sentiment, even more than the academic canon, is following Frederick Crews'
description of the conservative idea of academia as "a pantheon for the preservation of great works and great ideas,"
which follows a "'transfusion' model of education, whereby the stored-up wisdom of the classics is considered a kind
of plasma that will drip beneficially into our veins if we only stay sufficiently passive in its presence" (xiv). We talk
about viewing classics afresh with each new generation, but we do not wish to evade the viewpoint of those older
generations entirely; the point is to add layers of contemplation, not to replace the previous layers.

Other popular literatures, too, have their rankings. While few canons are as dependent on the popular viewpoint as that
of children's literature, it is instructive to consider those that have a similar duality of audience and purpose. The
discernment shown by the dedicated romance readers featured in Janice Radway's Reading the Romance (1984) differs
from the scholarly differentiation a critic might make; Janice Radway is not her subject readers. 1 The Victorianist
writing on M. E. Braddon or E.D.E.N. Southworth does not consider his or her subject in the same light as a pleasure
reader would, and that scholar cannot consider those authors as their contemporaries might have.

Both of those Victorians have been subject to modest academic recovery efforts, but the recovery of Lady Audley's
Secret (1862) into a graduate English classroom is not a return to its original status. A melodrama that pounds no
pulses is not recovered but taxidermized: Braddon academically recovered is not resurrected; there is still no life in the
corpse. Lady Audley's Secret, to be truly recovered in the modern world, needs to be sold in airport bookstalls and
converted to made-for-TV dramas. There has been no such occurrence; the text has not been recovered to its initial
place or read in its initial sense. Braddon does not rub shoulders with Mary Higgins Clark in the popular canon.

Reading as the original readers is always a problem. The challenge of returning into the past is one that scholars face,
and fail, constantly. Even if one does accept the idea that the Victorian self was in some ways a child [End Page 116]
of the contemporary self, that merely peeling off layers permits one to understand the Victorian point of view, one
cannot un-know what one knows. There is a similarity between one adulthood and another, however, that there is not
between adulthood and childhood. Lady Audley's Secret is not favored contemporary reading, but some of those adults
who do peruse Braddon's work today have found the reading pleasurable for, apparently, many of the same reasons
their Victorian counterparts did: the spirit of the popular audience remains. Scholarship not being proof against
suspense, there is a possibility of similarity between Braddon's nineteenth-century readers and twentieth-century
Braddon scholars that does not exist for a children's book such as The Water-Babies.

The canon cannot, then, dispense entirely with children, but neither is there any independent, adult-free canon of
children's literature. Children's literature must, at least nominally, speak to a state in which the readers of power no
longer participate. Librarians have a professional awareness of what books are popular among children, but their own
standards and financial restraints affect their selections. Educators choose books to suit their pedagogic purposes.
Parents too choose books for their children based not only on their knowledge of their children's preferences but their
desire for their children's growth. Yet this separation from the putative audience may well be the point of the canon
and indeed the literature, as readers find an excuse for what Virgil Nemoianu, discussing the popular regard for Evelyn

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Waugh, terms "contrasting imaginative relief . . . from prevailing social discourses" (231).

It is instructive to examine some pragmatic considerations in connection with the issue of canonical status. Other
popular literatures, for instance, are largely purchased by their actual audience; most children's books are not. They are
purchased by librarians, by parents--in short, by adults. Librarians purchase books for libraries that will allow many
non-purchasers to read the book; library purchases were, in the 1960s and 1970s, ninety percent of children's book
sales. Private purchasing having grown and public funding having shrunk, that share has dwindled to approximately
fifty percent--but the non-library purchases are hardly dominated by children's direct purchasing. While occasionally
adults will buy children's books for their own enjoyment or their own research, generally someone other than the buyer
is the intended reader. Purchasers of adult books are much likelier to be their readers as well as their buyers.

Children do purchase books, of course; the Goosebumps phenomenon, like the Stratemeyer syndicate before it, is
almost entirely driven by a direct child market, and Stine's series is even more successful than its mass-market
forerunners. Yet adults do not offer the same respect to [End Page 117] totally child-driven successes--the awareness
of the lower status of a book keeps it from entering the sentimental canon no matter how much it makes it into
sentimental recollection. There are standards of perceived quality even in this popular canon and even within this
popular literature. The sentimental canon contains books that one must be able to pass on with approval, not just
cherish for oneself; the child an adult once was has some power, but the adult that is wields more.

Hardback editions of a text, for instance, are proof of an adult market. A profitable survival of a hardback edition
indicates a sufficiency of adult audience. Reillustrated hardback classics appear on the shelves of every children's
section in a bookstore; adults who purchase such books are not likely to be librarians or educators, who have access to
versions more likely to be appealing to children, but non-professional adults giving literary symbols of childhood to
children; they are books so redolent of treasure that adults will spend twenty dollars on them in order to give a
keepsake rather than seven or eight merely to give a title.

Comparatively few children's backlist books remain in hardback printing. Those that do, however, are in print as
hardback because they are in somebody's canon. "If you are a dead author and not in the canon," Marilyn Butler
observes about adult literature, "you are probably not in print," and a similar relationship exists in children's literature
(70). Many canonical works have passed into the public domain and made reprinting even easier and more profitable.
Often these hardback editions coexist with a lower-priced paperback edition, or even several: Little Women (1868) has
its academic versions, its hardback children's versions, and its paperback children's versions (some abridged, some not,
and some with stills from the recent movie on the cover), and even The Wind in the Willows (1908) has several
different illustrated versions in hardback in addition to plainer and less expensive paperbacks. Such production does
not seem to encourage the recovery of the lost but the perpetuation of the already successful.

Children, practically speaking, have two effects on their literature: they buy books and they cause books to be bought,
whether by importuning relatives or by wearing out library copies. The first of these effects, however, is slight
compared to adult market influence; it is the second, and often the illusion of the second, that molds the genre. Though
this literature nominally belongs to children, their role in the formation of these various canons is a vexed one.
Children's literature cannot exist without adults, but neither the genre nor its canon can exist without children. As
Jacqueline Rose has pointed out, children's literature's apparent embrace of the child is deceptive, but the genre does
demand a [End Page 118] continual awareness of children (2). The constraints upon child readers, however, limit their
ability to shape the canon directly.

While practitioners note that different children have different tastes, we tend to treat child readers more egalitarianly--
and more homogeneously--than adult readers: in the absence of a recognized, linked child intelligentsia, the
gatekeepers of which Richard Ohmann speaks, the opinion of one child bears no more weight than that of any other.
There is no limited child coterie whose known approval, even should it fail to extend beyond the bounds of the group,
can make a book's reputation. As a result, audience numbers in child readership become more important to status than
they do for adult literature, where only a few of the "right" readers count as much as hundreds or thousands of the
wrong. Smart or precocious child readers merely move to a different reading level; they often slot themselves or are
slotted according to that level, rather than their age, which means that they have comparatively lost status, in this
mythical peer audience, because they are younger than the others reading that level of book. Sometimes they simply

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move up to adult literature, which removes them from the children's literature reading pool entirely. The best child
readers rise longitudinally rather than exerting power latitudinally, which means that there are no child gatekeepers of
the canon.

Children are culturally and financially powerless; more specifically, child readers are judged and categorized in a way
that precludes their contribution to an academic canon. Children's literature practitioners are fairly conscious of the
tendency of children's literature to please adults rather than children; as a result, however, a book ostensibly aimed at,
say, sixth graders that contains a complexity that most sixth graders will not have dealt with is viewed with suspicion.
Yet even if most sixth-graders cannot or will not take in this hypothetical title, it seems likely that there will be some--
perhaps only a few hundred more or less--who will read and profit from this text. This number is too few to carry the
book forward to the next generation, or perhaps even to the next printing, without adult support, and adult support will
be in spite of, not because of, the child readership; too small a child readership suggests to adults that the book is
either a bad children's book or an adult book. While highly specialized subject matter receives a tolerant
acknowledgment of a narrow but deserving audience, a similarly specialized level of sophistication arouses wariness.

The sentimental canon may appear to connect more closely to the child audience than the academy, but it too
essentially excludes them from its formation. Childish affection for a text exerts some influence on a text's [End Page
119] status, but a far more important influence is the affection of the children today's adults once were, the affection
demonstrated when that fond child grows up and arrives at a position of transmission--s/he becomes a librarian, or a
parent, or an editor, or a teacher. The sentimental canon of children's literature depends upon a text's ability to call up
a connection with childhood even more than a connection with children.

It is ultimately unclear just how long a text can persist in the canon without the readership of actual children, or how
large a readership that must be. The sentimental canon demands popularity at some level with children, but it does not
require that popularity to remain for canonicity. The difficulty of obtaining reader statistics and audience information
makes it nearly impossible to state just how many contemporary children have read The Water-Babies, or, for that
matter, The Wind in the Willows or Alice in Wonderland. The latter two texts have had their positions bolstered by
other media versions, many of which children encounter in lieu of the books but which contribute to the awareness of
the original texts (and hence the retention in, though not a recovery to, the sentimental canon). Alice is part of the
culture, and it is part of the culture as a children's book. It will never change categories; adults who read it today still
read it as a children's book, because that is what it is. It depends on that identity. 2

A text's usefulness to children is relevant; more important is its connection to childhood. There are both old and new
children's books that are more significant to adult readers than children; Alice, with its Martin Gardner annotations and
its adult culthood, is a good example of that phenomenon. These books still depend on their linkage with childhood for
success, for significance, and for their place in the world. Adults enjoy hip children's books not merely because the
books are so adult, but because they are children's books; the sense of slipping into an entitlement of the past provides
their appeal. 3 The undercutting and usage of the children's genre is the basis of adult affection for such books; were
they to be understood as entirely adult works they would have no place or power.

A text need not be popular with a multitude of contemporary children in order to be a classic. It must, however, speak
of childhood, not just of literature, to adults. The halo of affection around classic children's literature texts is more
important than the texts themselves. Despite periodic argument, for instance, that Alice in Wonderland is really an
adult book (and probably more adults than children read the text these days), Alice is read as a cherished children's
book in a way that The Water-Babies is ceasing to be. And The Wind in the Willows has diminished in actual
readership but has yet to disappear from the canon of sentiment. At [End Page 120] a recent conference panel devoted
to Grahame's book, surprisingly few academics present had read this book in their childhood (and we had been bookish
children). All of us had been aware of it in our childhoods, however, and had perhaps coexisted with a copy that we
simply had refused to open. Even unread, The Wind in the Willows was associated with our childhoods in a way that
The Water-Babies was not. Even if we never read it as children, we knew it belonged to us, and that it was a beloved
classic.

The most successful books in the canon of sentiment are those such as C. S. Lewis' Narnia books (1950-56), which
call forth affection both from the adult recalling a childhood reading (and sometimes a more recent reading) and from

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the child reading these books for the first time. The affection of the contemporary child enriches the adult's experience
of transmission, and the affection of the adult enhances the child's experience by branding the books as classic and
previously beloved. This process is the sort of self-reinvigorating chain lionized by books extolling the virtues of
sharing literature with children.

That word "beloved" is crucial to the canon of sentiment. Several adult books over the last century, ranging from
classics such as Lillian Smith's The Unreluctant Years (1953) to recent additions such as Regina Higgins' Magic
Kingdoms: Discovering the Joys of Childhood Classics with Your Child (1992), emphasize the joy of sharing loved
books with children; Higgins says, "When parents ask me which books they should read to their children for
enjoyment . . . I begin by asking them about the books they enjoyed when they were growing up" (14). Love, as much
as literature, is being canonized. In The History in Literature, Herbert Lindenberger suggests that the discourse of
literary criticism approximates not the discourse of science or history, but that of love; we persuade ourselves and
others that this one person, this particular book, matters more than others and for all time, when both lovers and
literary critics know that such persuasions are prone to alteration (157). In regard to a genre of popular literature such
as children's literature, the allusion to love ceases to be an analogy and becomes an analysis.

Herbert Lindenberger links canonization with love; Lillian R. Furst looks at the converse, pointing out that "to dislike
the canon is therefore taken automatically as a sign of boorishness, without much inquiry into what is subsumed into
the idea of an adequate explanation or a proper grasp, let alone a discerning reading" and that "the orthodox belief has
been, as illustrated in those exam questions, that a failure to like the accepted canon could only be attributed to a
deficiency in education" (39). In the canon of sentiment, a disliked classic is an oxymoron; if books [End Page 121]
are largely disliked they do not belong in the canon and do not stay there. More important than the text itself is the idea
of the text; people who have never read Alice have an affectionate regard for the book that they do not extend to The
Water-Babies. 4

Although, as Lindenberger suggests, academic canon formation too is about love, adult literary criticism rarely
discusses the issue while criticism of children's literature embraces it. The goal of teaching the love of literature has
been a commonly stated aim of libraries and library associations for years; children's literature criticism, which for
years came almost entirely from library science, speaks with similar enthusiasm of the love of individual books and of
literature. The assumption of the necessity of such love is so great that the reasons for it are never explained; it is never
clear why a love of literature or reading is necessary in order to profit from the activity. No other crucial activity or
cornerstone of society is couched in terms of affection: we do not attempt to instill a love of law, a love of eating
right, a love of exercise, a love of regular dental checkups. We do not even try to instill, or publicly exhort trying to
instill, a love of thinking. This insistence on love suggests the possibility that the other rewards of reading are not
sufficiently clear to make the practice regular. One need not love the law in order to observe it; the rewards of doing
so and consequences of failing are assumed (often incorrectly) to speak for themselves. The emphasis on love, when it
comes to reading, suggests that the non-emotional benefits may not suffice. True, if one develops a love of something
readily available then a certain amount of pleasure is guaranteed through life, but if a reliable source of pleasure were
the only goal then something even simpler and easier, such as breathing, might well have been a better choice on
which to center a lifelong affection. The practice of reading is a commonly lauded goal in American society. But why
do we demand not only competence in reading but also love? Are those who read capably without loving the activity
really less successful or less worthy?

Children are the main targets of this intention to instill love. One does not instill a love of reading in an adult; it is
tacitly admitted to be too late. Either adults are readers or they are not (we seem to balance our tabula rasa view of
youth with a view of immutable adulthood). Reading is not only worthy of affection, it is praiseworthy; a child's
developed affection for reading will presumably keep him or her in the habit of reading throughout life, so affection
has become a reward for desirable behavior. The fact that this literature belongs to children further increases the
relevance of the subject of love; it is difficult to discuss children without talking about love. How and in what ways we
must love our children is a [End Page 122] topic fraught with controversy, but that we must love them seems to be
generally agreed upon. Perhaps in a world where the fear of loving children wrongly seems to be increasing, the safety
of loving literature and loving children through literature is increasingly appealing.

The canon of sentiment approves of this emphasis on love. Carey Kaplan and Ellen Rose refer to Gertrude

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Himmelfarb's dichotomy of culture into "academic" and "society" (44); the sentimental canon knows it is not an
academic-based canon, and is proud of that fact. The differences between academic and sentimental criteria are
obvious, and the transmission of children's literature in the popular sphere depends on the latter. Just as the cry goes
out to "let children be children," to refrain from frightening them with the more unpleasant truths of the world, so
many people seek to protect children's literature from what is in their eyes the adultification--or adulteration--of
analysis. Affection for individual books and indeed the entire genre is considered desirable and laudable; most scholars
of children's literature can relate the eagerness with which people respond to the announcement of their profession,
which contrasts considerably with the response engendered by an announcement of any other kind of literary
scholarship. The idea of this literature and of the books within it prompt affection.

Sometimes, however, affection takes a different turn. Some of the closest approximations of revival involve affection
for a different version of a text. Filmed or televised literary adaptations can enhance the audience numbers of a lesser-
known text or shore up a book's place in the canon, and reillustrations and readaptations can allow for new recognition
of folktales. It is worth considering both the scope and limitations of such reinvigorations.

Film and television adaptations are the one form of literary reinvigoration to which children do have access. The last
few years have seen several critically acclaimed films with connections to children's books: The Secret Garden (1994),
The Little Princess (1995), Jumanji (1995), Babe (1995); this summer brings us James and the Giant Peach, Harriet
the Spy, and Matilda, and the fall promises a live-action 101 Dalmatians. Animated tales based on books have, over
the years, included 101 Dalmatians (1961), The Rescuers (1977), and The Secret of NIMH (1982); I would also argue
that films based upon folk and fairytales such as Snow White (1937), Sleeping Beauty (1959), The Little Mermaid
(1989), and Beauty and the Beast (1991) should be considered in this category, because their source material is now
considered nearly exclusively the domain of child readers and was chosen as an animated subject for that very reason.
[End Page 123]

The existence of other versions can work to the advantage of a book's popularity; Dodie Smith's 101 Dalmatians
(1956) is not, at least in the U.S., canonical, and its place in American culture stems from its film version, not its print
version. The movie may well be what keeps the book in print when other excellent books of its era have long since
fallen off backlists. The watchers of a re-released 101 Dalmatians movie seem uninclined to consider the film a
stepping-stone to the text; indeed, they seem no likelier to find or to purchase copies of Dodie Smith's original book
than they do mass-market movie-spinoff coloring books and retellings, which receive a stronger marketing push. Nor
is there any indication that the original book receives more sustained attention than theme drinking glasses or
nightshirts.

Katherine Paterson's Bridge to Terabithia (1977) made an affecting Wonderworks television movie; so did Lois
Lowry's Taking Care of Terrific (1985). Bridge to Terabithia was already well on its way to sentimental canonicity,
whereas Terrific was not; the video versions do not seem to have changed these directions. People who saw Babe and
loved it, then read the book, will probably be likelier to take the next generation to the re-release of the movie, or to
watch it on tape, than they will to pass on the book. The possibility of film "ownership" in the form of video means
that the audience need not resort to the book in order to enjoy the possibility of endless repetitions of the story. The
primacy effect is extremely important--the version one encounters first, be it parodic or filmic, is the real version, and
the real version is the one to be transmitted. Attention-catchers such as films may temporarily increase a response to
the print text, but increased availability does not necessarily imply canonicity. Nor does a resurgence of popularity,
even of a canonical book, necessarily extend to an author's work in toto; teen fans of the recent Little Women film may
have been inspired to read the book and its continuations, but it is doubtful any of them went on to read Alcott's
Moods (1865). Canonicity does not translate between film and literary versions. While a watchable version of a text
can affect a book's standing and popularity, it has yet to demonstrate an ability to restore a forgotten text to the
sentimental canon.

The movie transmits its own experience, not the experience of the book. A film version may enhance book sales, but
the resultant text passed on from generation to generation is filmic rather than literary. A text not already canonical
benefits slightly from a movie version but will not thereby be propelled into the pantheon; a text already canonical
may find such film versions helpful in maintaining its state, because the idea of the story will remain in popular
consciousness. [End Page 124]

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Movies may function as parody does, wherein the derivation often eclipses the original in fame. A good example is
Isaac Watts' fate compared to his parodies in Alice in Wonderland: Watts was an unquestionably significant figure in
the sentimental canon for some time, but Carroll's memorable Watts parodies, appearing, as Watts grew less
remembered, in a book itself poised for sentimental canonization, have supplanted Watts. If the book has no strong
audience recognition at the time its derivation appears, the derivation may well replace it rather than reinstate it.

For books that receive no boost from other media, the opportunities for recovery are few. The possibility that seems
least implausible is the recovery not of a book but of a tale or a character; the picturebook tradition of creating
completely new books from readaptations and reillustrations of older works means that a story that has been in
existence for decades or centuries may appear anew. Folktales seem a particularly attractive candidate for this sort of
revitalization; it will be interesting to see, for instance, whether the picturebook popularity of Coyote, the American
Indian trickster figure, continues not only to remain strong but to rise into something more enduring in the next twenty
years, in which case one might consider Coyote as a figure recovered to the canon. 5 As yet, however, there are no
instances of this kind of revival. It is too early to say whether the plethora of newly treated folktales will leave a
lasting impression on another generation; nor is this form of recovery quite what academics have in mind by the term,
since these readaptations involve the lionizing of a figure or tale not previously sovereign in this particular genre.
Currently they cannot challenge the place of the Perrault tales in enduring popular affection.

While some texts that initially receive such affection fade away, several have not: not every book is doomed to slide
downwards in and disappear from the sentimental canon over time. Old books such as Little Women and Alice are still
firmly entrenched. The genre is young, but it loves to preserve, depending on retrospection in a way that other genres
do not. There will undoubtedly be a paring down of older books, as some sink like The Water-Babies while newer
books rise. This tendency towards weeding down does not mean that all books, over time, are doomed to slide
downwards in the sentimental canon, simply because fewer and fewer people remember them. The Perrault tales are
still strongly canonical and show no sign of flagging; Little Women is still going strong. For a popular genre, children's
literature has in fact been unusually gifted with lasting potential; adults do not hand down E.D.E.N. Southworth, or
even Dickens, in the same way as they do Alcott. [End Page 125]

Eventually, a children's literature classic masters being beloved without actually being read, with a sufficiently
protective affection to keep the book enshrined in the sentimental canon despite its not being read. Eventually, just as
Shakespeare becomes "Shakespeare," Alice becomes "Alice." Kaplan and Rose note that "you do not have to believe in
Hamlet; you will simply be deemed culturally illiterate if you have not read it" (85). Similarly, you do not have to have
read Alice, but you will be deemed culturally illiterate should you not acknowledge it as a children's literature classic.

Even beloved books, however, can eventually fall out of favor and memory. It is difficult to imagine indifference to a
book one loves, and people tend to think if a text has made it past one generation it will be beloved forever. Statements
such as Richard Ohmann's that "The Catcher in the Rye arrived to stay; it is older than most of its audience were when
they read it for the first time" (Politics 45) suggest a rather limited judgment of staying power and fails to
acknowledge the shifts in that book's audience. There have already been books whose star has risen, hovered, and then
fallen again, despite the tacit assumption that a book whose popularity has survived to the adulthood of its audience
will survive forever. The Water-Babies achieved that goal, but it is slipping from memory nonetheless. An adult
seeking a book to give to a child picks up Kingsley's fantasy thinking not with nostalgia of a childhood memory
worthy of sharing, but rather, "I think I've heard of this"--if s/he picks it up at all, or can find a copy to pick up.
Academics note the text's historical significance, but Kingsley's book no longer has a place in the sentimental canon;
the chain of affection has been broken. At some point, for reasons of taste, or marketing, or competition, or fashion,
"Mother loved this" failed to become "I loved this" and "I want my children to love this."

That failure is the loss of canonicity. Children's literature needs the generational chain of evidence, the handing down,
to be canonical. Candidates for recovery, fallen as they are from this chain, can never be reinstated to it. Regina
Higgins dedicates her book "to your child and to the child in you" (7); it is that curious nexus of contemporary children
and the children contemporary adults used to be that forms the popular canon. Children have no significant
independent access to forgotten authors and the adults have nothing to gain from recovering them. The new and
exciting can be discovered together and the old and familiar will be handed down with affection, but the old and
unfamiliar offers no such extraliterary benefits to adult or child. Adults who complain about the loss of old books in

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libraries invariably bemoan the loss of old books they [End Page 126] knew--they are not concerned with old books
they never read. They offer their children Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) or The Wind in the Willows because these books
carry the captured childhood of those adults within them in a way that The Water-Babies, for all its historical
significance, no longer does; the critic who seeks to popularize the latter, thinking it a perfect book for contemporary
children, will find little audience enthusiasm and few mechanisms for doing so. The imprimatur of popular
canonization on a children's book comes from the hand of a previous generation handing it down; academic attempts to
reestablish a text's significance cannot confer this mark and are thereby doomed to failure.

In the popular canon, and in its abettor, the library, the status of "forgotten" is not reversible. That status does not
mean anything inherent about a book, necessarily, a fact utilized by small determined bands of adults attempting to
keep beloved books from permanent obscurity, accurately remarking that there is no particular reason for other books
to survive while their favorites disappear from memory as well as print. In fact, fans of an author often over-dramatize
the obscurity of their darling's fate. Some fans of Maud Hart Lovelace's Betsy-Tacy series consider these books
forgotten, yet the on-line library consortium lists a plethora of copies of all aspects of the series, with printings in every
decade from the forties. Perhaps these books do not achieve the sine qua non status of canonical literature; they are not
accorded the respect that, say, Little Women is, but their prevalence in libraries--if not in the academic canon--suggests
that they are secure in their popular status. The efforts of adult Lovelace followers to enhance their favorites' status
suggests that it is not, in fact, popular regard but academic standing they seek to enhance. The desire of many adults
similarly may not just be to pass literature on but to make adults acknowledge the merits of their childhood favorites.

A recovery only in academics denies the genre's raison d'être, its popular audience. Librarians see no need to recover.
The example of the Betsy-Tacy books, where adults who have been obsessed with them manage to keep a small
popular interest, remains the closest thing to popular recovery. Yet a small group's forceful refusal to permit a book's
consignment to obscurity does not constitute recovery and will not result in it. A publishing source (herself a Lovelace
fan) discussing paperback backlist books suggests that attempts by the list-buyer to inflict personal preferences in the
face of general taste are doomed to failure--in other words, mere market availability will not succeed in restoring
forgotten authors without audience desire as well (Sharyn November, interview); the attempts of small coteries of
adults are similarly unlikely to succeed outside of their circle. [End Page 127]

Belletristic adult literature can effect a recovery through academia alone; it can also rediscover readers beyond the
university through print reviews or on-air publicity, following paths similar to those Richard Ohmann outlines for
initial entry into the canon. The children's literature audience is beyond the reach of most traditional means of
recovery: children do not attend college classes, follow public-television talk shows, or peruse The New York Times
Book Review. Children have neither access to nor interest in literary forms of reinvigoration, and most adults find the
old and unfamiliar irrelevant to their desires for children's literature (nor are most other popular literatures swayed by
academic rediscovery of old texts). If academic interest in children's literature continues to increase, its interest in
canon formation will probably increase as well, in ways with which we are all familiar. It seems likely that over the
years the academic canon of significance will become more firmly established, and the divide between it and the canon
of sentiment will widen as their intentions and desires continue to diverge. While such a canon of significance can
contain books of great merit and worth that might otherwise be overlooked, a text's recovery to that canon will never
translate to the canon of sentiment, which insists a book meet more amorphous and often stricter standards of love and
evocation of childhood. Within The Water-Babies, Tom found redemption and new life, but he must content himself
with that internal promise; no matter what efforts scholars may make to rescue it, the book itself is sliding irrevocably
below the waves.

Deborah Stevenson is the assistant editor of the Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, located at the University
of Illinois Graduate School of Library and Information Science.

Notes
1. The writers of romances having often sprung from--and retaining a place in--the ranks of the readers, there is a
further cohesion of reader and writer that children's literature can never achieve.

2. While an excessively sophisticated children's book may please adults, I know of no instance where a book originally

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considered children's literature has completely shed that appellation--texts may move chronologically down to the
children's category, but they seem unable to move up from it.

3.I am indebted to my colleague Roger Sutton for his insight in this and other matters concerning this topic.

4.Christa Kamenetsky, in Children's Literature, describes the victory of affection over ideology in the Nazis'
incongruous defense of the politically undesirable adventure stories of Karl May, which Goebbels and Goering had
greatly enjoyed.

5.I note the recent appearance of two high-powered but politically tamed revisions of Helen Bannerman's problematic
Little Black Sambo (The Story of Little Babaji and Julius Lester's Sam and the Tigers); it will be interesting to see if
these can repair the status of the tale, if not the book.

Works Cited
Butler, Marilyn. "Repossessing the Past: The Case of an Open Literary History." Rethinking Historicism: Critical
Readings in Romantic History. Ed. Marjorie Levinson et al. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989. 64-84.

Crews, Frederick. The Critics Bear It Away: American Fiction and the Academy. New York: Random House, 1992.

Furst, Lillian R. "Reading 'Nasty' Great Books." The Hospitable Canon: Essays on Literary Play, Scholarly Choice,
and Popular Pressures. Ed. Virgil Nemoianu and Robert Royal. Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing, 1991. 39-
51.

Gerhardt, Lillian. "Principles in Print." Interview. School Library Journal 41.9 (September 1995): 118-22.

Higgins, Regina. Magic Kingdoms: Discovering the Joys of Childhood Classics with Your Child. New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1992.

Hunt, Peter. Children's Literature: The Development of Criticism. London: Routledge, 1990.

Kamenetsky, Christa. Children's Literature in Hitler's Germany: The Cultural Policy of National Socialism. Athens,
OH: Ohio UP, 1984.

Kaplan, Carey and Ellen Cronan Rose. The Canon and the Common Reader. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1990.

Lindenberger, Herbert. The History in Literature: On Value, Genre, Institutions. New York: Columbia UP, 1990.

McCrea, Brian, Addison and Steele Are Dead: The English Department, Its Canon, and the Professionalization of
Literary Criticism. Newark: U of Delaware P, 1990.

Nemoianu, Virgil. "Literary Canons and Social Value Options." The Hospitable Canon: Essays on Literary Play,
Scholarly Choice, and Popular Pressures. Ed. Virgil Nemoianu and Robert Royal. Philadelphia: John Benjamins
Publishing Co., 1991. 215-47.

November, Sharyn. Personal conversation. June 25, 1995.

Ohmann, Richard. Politics of Letters. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 1987.

------. "The Shaping of a Canon: U.S. Fiction, 1960-1975." Canons. Ed. Robert von Hallberg. Chicago: U of Chicago
P, 1984. 377-401.

Rose, Jacqueline. The Case of Peter Pan, or the Impossibility of Children's Fiction. London: Macmillan, 1984.

Seto, Thelma. "Multiculturalism Is Not Halloween." The Horn Book Magazine 71:2 (March/April 1995): 169-74.

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