Which children's books sum up the decade they were published?
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Version 0 of 1. You may have seen a BBC2 TV programme that my family and I appear in, Back in Time for Dinner. In it, we live life first as a 1950s family, wearing 1950s clothes and eating 1950s food in a 1950s house – and then the following week we’re in the 1960s, and the week after that the 1970s, and so it goes up until the start of the 21st century. It was a wonderful experience for us, and it brought home just how much food and lifestyles have changed within living memory. It got me thinking about how children’s books have changed over that period, too. Could I have written my new book The Big Wish in previous decades? Probably not. Each time has its own style and its own tastes, and writers find themselves fitting into that, perhaps without even knowing they are doing it. I’ve chosen one children’s book for each of the decades from the 1950s up until 2010, each of which seems to sum up some of the main trends of what was going on in fiction at that time. If you don’t know some of the earlier ones, it would certainly be worth going back and discovering them. Styles change, but good books remain good books! 1950s The period from the end of the second world war up until around the early 1970s has been called the second golden age of children’s literature (the first golden age was from Victorian times up until the first world war, including classics such as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Peter Pan). In this second golden age we find lots of very well-written, very thoughtful children’s books which often use fantasy to tackle big themes. My book of choice for this decade would be Tom’s Midnight Garden, by Philippa Pearce, first published in 1958. It’s the story of an 11-year-old boy, Tom, who is sent away to his well-meaning but boring aunt and uncle’s house, as there is illness is in his own family. Temporarily orphaned, lonely, bored and cross, he discovers that at night there is a beautiful garden just outside the back door that he can get into. But it isn’t there in the daytime. In the garden he meets Harriet, a Victorian child about his own age, and makes friends with her. It’s a lovely, lyrical story which makes you think about the passing of time, and aging, and history: and the ending even now brings a tear to my eye! 1960s There was serious literature for children around in the 1960s but there was also a lot of fun stuff, and there’s no better example than the crazy, anarchic, unpredictable books of Roald Dahl. For this decade, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is my choice. You can tell it’s going to be fun as soon as your hear the title. Charlie Bucket and all his family (including four ancient grandparents who never get out of bed) are as poor as poor can be. Until one day Charlie finds a Golden Ticket in a Willy Wonka chocolate bar, and wins the prize of a day inside Wonka’s wondrous chocolate factory... The great appeal of Roald Dahl is that he thinks and writes like a child. His writing is full of words like “amazing”, “fantastic”, “brilliant”, and “horrible”, “disgusting”, ‘nasty’. There is loads of dialogue, fast-moving scenes, unpredictable plots and exclamation marks all over the place – all enlivened by Quentin Blake’s fantastically mad and spiky illustrations, of course. Related: Top 10 characters that didn't make Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory 1970s Now we’re going to get serious again. In the 1970s, books for older readers, tackling big issues, started to become more widely read. The book I’ve chosen is Roll of Thunder, Hear my Cry, by the American author Mildred D Taylor, published in 1976. Taylor was recalling her own childhood as a black girl growing up in the southern states of America in the 1930s. Slavery had been abolished only around 70 years earlier, and racism from whites was still widespread, and could be vicious. The narrator, a young girl named Cassie, recounts her daily struggles at school and in the town; life is tough, but she’s always buoyed up by the love of her family. There is some shocking violence, and you probably need to be twelve or over to feel comfortable with this book. But it’s not a slog to read; the tale is told with warmth and sometimes humour, and the dialogue is amazingly good. 1980s Some say that children’s writing went off the boil a bit in the 1980s, and it’s true that I can’t think of a vast number of truly great children’s books from this period. In fact probably the best-loved and most successful book for young readers of this decade was an early example of a crossover book ; Sue Townsend’s The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 ¾, published by Methuen in 1982, appealed as much to adults as children. Adrian is a self-styled intellectual who tries to read Jane Austen but doesn’t get on well with it; he thinks she “should write more modern books”. In his bright, naïve, and unintentionally funny style he gives his views of the politics and world issues of the day, and recounts his parents’ marriage difficulties and his own unrequited infatuation for the beautiful Pandora. It’s the first-person voice that makes this book so successful. You find yourself sympathising with Adrian’s troubles as if he’s a real person. Sue Townsend re-animated the diary form with this book, and established a character beloved by kids and grown-ups alike, who went on to star in a whole series of books, a TV show and a stage musical. 1990s It’s quite obvious what book I’m going to choose for the 90s. You don’t even have to guess, do you? It has to be Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, although it wasn’t published until the end of the decade! JK Rowling in a way didn’t do anything new: the boarding-school story had long been a familiar genre, and so had stories about wizards. She just put them together. Yet very few children’s novels have changed the game so successfully. It wasn’t just the best-selling children’s novel of the decade, but the best-loved and most influential. It ushered in what has been called the third golden age of children’s fiction (and we’re still in it now! Aren’t we lucky?). One thing that made it so successful was Rowling’s combination of predictable characters and unpredictable plots. You knew the characters would be much the same every time they appeared: Harry would always be plucky, loyal and fair-minded; Ron would aways be comically gloomy, Hermione would always be the class brainbox, and they’d both always be Harry’s staunch friends; Draco Malfoy would always be sneering and snobbish, Snape harsh and unfair, Dumbledore wise and saintly. They came to seem like old, reliable friends. But the plots, on the other hand, were far harder to predict; you never knew quite was going to happen. (This same combination of predicable characters and unpredictable plots had made a good living for Charles Dickens 150 years earlier.) The other thing that made Harry Potter stand out was the sheer energy of it. Everything is alive, nothing stands still. The staircases move, even the pictures move, while the whomping willow whomps away in the school grounds and ghosts flit down the school corridors. 2000s Jeff Kinney’s Diary of a Wimpy Kid represents the new trend towards multimedia in children’s fiction. Actually it wasn’t entirely new, as children’s books had for a long time inspired films and plays and toys. But in the 21st century this trend goes much further. There are simply more media around. Diary of a Wimpy Kid didn’t make its debut as a book: it was first published on a website in 2004 – an entirely new possibility. The website proved so popular that the character got his own book in 2007, leading to a whole series of books and a string of films. And the online version still flourishes. I love Diary of a Wimpy Kid. The appeal is that he’s just an ordinary kid, with the same weaknesses as the rest of us: not a hero, not magic, not especially talented, just a likeable, funny kid for whom life is a daily struggle. And the brilliantly simple but expressive drawings capture this perfectly. Jeff Kinney is one of those writers who has not forgotten what it was like to be a kid himself (and in fact the Wimpy Kid’s name, Greg Heffley, carries an echo of the author’s own name). It’s often difficult to understand a period when you are actually living through it, and it may take a few years before we can appreciate what children’s fiction was like, overall, in the second decade of the 21st century. What do you think? Brandon Robshaw’s The Big Wish is available at the Guardian bookshop. Tell us the children’s books you think represent the decades, and predict which book may come to symbolise the 2010s on email childrens.books@theguardian.com or on Twitter @GdnChildrenBk |