ABSTRACT
Writing from Moscow in 1935 Geoffrey Trease (1909-1998), then a young author who had recently begun writing for children, set out what is effectively a manifesto for a new kind of British children’s literature. On the grounds that children’s books were “rooted in the pre-1914 assumptions that serious adult literature had abandoned” (Trease, 1985: 178) he determined to transform and replace both the established body of children’s literature and the conventions and assumptions that underpinned it with works that were suitable for the “future citizen[s] of the world” (Trease, 1937c: n.pag.). In other words, he proposed to create an alternative canon of children’s literature and, indeed, to radicalize the whole sphere of publishing for children in Britain during the 1930s. Trease’s ‘manifesto’ took the form of a lengthy letter titled “Revolutionary Literature for the Young” (1935) which appeared in the journal International Literature: Organ of the International Union of Revolutionary Writers. In this letter Trease declares:
This is what we have to do, then. To build up alongside the growing revolutionary literature of the adults a corresponding body of literature for the young […] We must create our own juvenile writers, who choose this genre seriously as their special craft, and make a study of the technique with which they can successfully approach the child. Our editors and publishers […] must set their faces resolutely against anything which falls below a certain standard. And above all they must guard against the type of material which, while ideologically excellent, lacks the interest essential to the child’s enjoyment […]. (1935: 101)
Trease’s project has long been forgotten, but as this chapter will show, its pervasive legacy informs many of the values and attitudes of contemporary British children’s literature and has helped reshape the British juvenile canon in significant ways.
