A Garland from the Golden Age: An Anthology of Children's Literature from 1950-1900

Roderick McGillis was Associate Professor of English at the University of Calgary, Alberta.

A Garland from the Golden Age begins where From Instruction to Delight (Demers and Moyles, eds.; Oxford University Press, 1982) leaves off, at 1850, and it ends just after the turn of the century. Like its companion volume, A Garland provides a useful introduction to material long out of print and little known. Unlike the recent Masterworks of Children’s Literature in eight volumes (Main Line Books, 1983-85), this volume is both short enough and inexpensive enough to be considered as a classroom text.

The book has eleven chapters that cover the range of Victorian imaginative literature for children: the fairy tale, the allegoric narrative, evangelical writing, the domestic novel and its companion, the nursery story, the school story, the adventure story, the penny dreadful, the animal story, the magazine story, and poetry. Many of the selections are excerpts from longer novels, but there are several stories, such as Edward Knatchbull-Hugessen’s “Ernest” (1869) and Maria Louisa Charlesworth’s “The Story of Little Patience.” Many of the excerpts are self-contained (e.g., “A Party in the Land of Nowhere” from Christina Rossetti’s Speaking Likenesses), but others are not, and the editor does not clearly establish the context for such excerpts (e.g., the one from The Water Babies).

Although we should be grateful to have examples from the work of such obscure writers as Norman MacLeod, Margaret Murray Robertson, Flora Louisa Shaw, and Angela Brazil, we might wonder why an anthology such as this should reprint familiar and accessible material such as “The King of the Golden River,” “The Happy Prince,” or poems from A Child’s Garden of Verses. Many of the works Demers selects are still in print: At the Back of the North Wind, Mopsa the Fairy, Five Children and It, Tom Brown’s Schooldays, Black Beauty, Sing-Song, Lear’s Nonsense poems, and others. Why omit other important writers, such as Mary de Morgan, Laurence Housman, William Brighty Rands, and L.T. Meade? The editor states that she decided to “exclude readily available texts” and to “concentrate instead on the lesser-known works.” She has not concentrated as hard as she might have.

On the whole, however, A Garland is a welcome addition to available children’s literature anthologies: The editor’s choices may be debated, but her prefatory remarks to each selection and to each chapter, and her bibliography, are judicious and for the most part accurate. This volume will prove useful to both teachers and scholars of nineteenth century children’s literature.