The BBC is 100 years old this year. Evan Davis on Radio 4’s PM Programme keeps reminding us that the actual centenary is in a few days time. Every weekday, some time between 5.00pm and 6.00pm he pauses the news and commentary to play us a little something from BBC broadcasting of 50 years ago. This is mostly something from Children’s Hour as that’s what was being broadcast at that time of day back then. It’s curious to hear the clipped tones of the presenters (clipped but still vaguely condescending - they were addressing children, after all!) and the very clear and precise English of any actual children who were interviewed.
It’s also 75 since the first publication of the little children’s book “Goodnight Moon”, one of the favourite books of all my grandchildren when they were tiny. “A series of pictures show a great green room in which a small rabbit is in bed, watched by a grownup rabbit in a rocking chair, while the captions intone goodnights – “Goodnight bears / Goodnight chairs / Goodnight kittens / And goodnight mittens”. Some adults still find them disconcerting, even creepy, (especially “Goodnight nobody”).”
It had a slow start because New York Public Library objected to it as being sentimental and lacking in an improving moral. This is a little something from 2020:
“On Monday the New York Public Library, celebrating its 125th anniversary, released a list of the 10 most-checked-out books in the library’s history. The list is headed by a children’s book - Ezra Jack Keats” masterpiece The Snowy Day — and includes five other kids’ books. The list also includes a surprising addendum: One of the most beloved children’s books of all time didn’t make the list because for 25 years it was essentially banned from the New York Public Library. Goodnight Moon, by Margaret Wise Brown, would have made the Top 10 list and might have topped it, the library notes, but for the fact that “influential New York Public Library children’s librarian Anne Carroll Moore disliked the story so much when it was published in 1947 that the Library didn’t carry it … until 1972.” Who was Anne Carroll Moore, and what was her problem with the great Goodnight Moon?”
“She was also a tastemaker whose NYPL-branded lists of recommended children’s books could make or break a book’s fortunes. “Other libraries around the country looked to the NYPL, and if she didn’t buy it, they didn’t buy it,” explains Betsy Bird, a children’s book blogger and longtime NYPL librarian who’s now at the Evanston Public Library in Illinois. “If Anne Carroll Moore didn’t like a book, she could effectively kill it.”
But even if she felt a book should have a moral message - probably why she loved the Beatrix Potter stories - she did encourage getting children to read. “Moore was appointed the NYPL’s first “superintendent of work with children” in 1906, at a time when the very idea of children even being allowed into libraries was brand-new. (Children who couldn’t read yet would gain nothing from a library, the theory went, and older children might be corrupted by all the trashy adult books.) Moore oversaw the beautiful Central Children’s Room in the library’s flagship building on Fifth Avenue. As Leonard S. Marcus writes in his biography of Margaret Wise Brown, Moore became perhaps the leading figure in popular children’s books in the first half of the century, and many of her methods seem strikingly modern. She scheduled scores of story hours for children; she encouraged any children who could sign their names to check out a book; she trained librarians drawn from a diverse range of backgrounds and then sent them out into a city of immigrant children, preaching the gospel of reading.”
I find this bit especially interesting: “ (Children who couldn’t read yet would gain nothing from a library, the theory went, and older children might be corrupted by all the trashy adult books.)” How ideas change!Our two youngest go regularly to Uppermill Library and have done so almost since they were born. Long live libraries!
As I write this news has just come in that Kwasi Kwarteng has just been sacked as Chancellor. He cut short his visit to Washington to help deal with the mini-budget fall-out only to find the PM had fallen out with him. Another u-turn might be in progress! The chaos continues!
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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