{"id":22584,"date":"2025-09-15T10:59:08","date_gmt":"2025-09-15T10:59:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/22584\/"},"modified":"2025-09-15T10:59:08","modified_gmt":"2025-09-15T10:59:08","slug":"youth-fiction-was-so-much-better-a-century-ago","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/22584\/","title":{"rendered":"Youth fiction was so much better a century ago"},"content":{"rendered":"

I follow some aspiring novel authors on X.com (#writers), and they talk about the struggle to sell stories.<\/p>\n

They discuss who has found an agent. Who has sent a pitch to a publisher. Who has written how many words today on a WIP (work in progress.) And many deal in YA (young adult) fantasy and its sub-branches, romantasy and horromance.<\/p>\n

The results are often rehashed Tolkien: story after story about elves, dark wizards, dragon-gods, sacred crystals and always in YA a strong and virtuous youngster, the type of kid Tom Sawyer would have tossed into the frog pond. Often some environmental theme. Art from a bad tattoo. I see all this in bookstores when I shop for young relatives.<\/p>\n

But some writers of youth fiction a century and more ago did it so much better. Their characters were sassier, more alive and often conniving.<\/p>\n

An easy example is Huck Finn, who meets two con men, a king and a duke. The king tells him: \u201cYes, my friend, it is too true \u2014 your eyes is lookin\u2019 at this very moment on the pore disappeared Dauphin, Looy the Seventeen, son of Looy the Sixteen and Marry Antonette \u2026\u00a0 the wanderin\u2019, exiled, trampled-on, and sufferin\u2019 rightful King of France.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then recently I rediscovered Forest-Land<\/a>, a treasure from 1905 in which two children discover talking forest creatures.<\/p>\n

Peter and Geraldine on their own are bland, but the trees and animals they find are quick-tempered, snooty, rude and delightful. (Geraldine has a briefly vicious moment when she threatens to bring an axe to deal with two squabbling trees, but that doesn\u2019t last.)<\/p>\n

Take the spider they meet, for instance, which imitates a flower and then traps flies. Peter tells him this is unfair until the spider asks him about sticky flypaper in the family\u2019s stable.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s wasteful, too,\u201d says the spider, because the children don\u2019t eat flies. \u201d \u2018But I do,\u2019 continued the flower-spider, quietly biting off the fly\u2019s wings and beginning luncheon.\u201d<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a trio of beetles that are always erupting in anger and biting anything within reach. A bumble-bee that uses slang, which the children are forbidden to do.<\/p>\n

An ant is sarcastic and angry.<\/p>\n

\u201cDo you eat eggs?\u201d he asks.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhy yes, we eat eggs,\u201d one of the children says.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnts\u2019 eggs?\u201d shrieked the ant in a fury.<\/p>\n

\u201cNonsense,\u201d said Peter with a shudder. \u201cWe only eat birds\u2019 eggs.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s what I always thought,\u201d the ant says, with a sneer. \u201cIndoor folks are a sort of snake.\u201d<\/p>\n

You won\u2019t find that in YA.<\/p>\n

One happily scornful creature snaps at the children: \u201cAs the prig is bent, so is the freak inclined!\u201d (Look it up, but substitute \u201ctwig\u201d and \u201ctree\u201d to get the original. Could you write that for children today?)<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a woodcock, a small game bird, proud that if a hunter catches him he will go out in style, served on toast.<\/p>\n

But the best is the fox, killing farm hens and covering himself with a flood of lies. He\u2019s not evil; he\u2019s hilarious. Also Trumpian, as the fox blames the hen for attacking him. She \u201cseized me in her terrible beak and ran off to the woods with me.\u201d Exit hen.<\/p>\n

\u201cCan\u2019t you tell the truth?\u201d Geraldine asks.<\/p>\n

\u201cHow is it done, children? How does one tell the truth?\u201d<\/p>\n

They answer and he replies: \u201cThat does not sound attractive. If a thing is so, why repeat it? That would be tiresome.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s much more interesting to say a thing that isn\u2019t so.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another writer from the same period (a satirist who wrote under the name Saki and was killed at the Somme in 1916) reminds us that preachy and formulaic children\u2019s stories were as unappealing then as now.<\/p>\n

In his short story The Toys of Peace<\/a>, two moralizing Brits replace their children\u2019s toy soldiers with toy civilians: prime ministers, Florence Nightingale and the like.<\/p>\n

The kids, however, transform them into invading French soldiers, splashing red ink for blood. \u201cThe soldiers rush in and avenge his death with the utmost savagery. A hundred girls are killed \u2014 here Bertie emptied the remainder of the red ink over the building and the surviving five hundred are dragged off to the French ships. \u2018I have lost a Marshal,\u2019 says Louis, \u2018but I do not go back empty-handed.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n

Forest-Land, by Robert W. Chambers, is rare and expensive but still available online, and there\u2019s not a cheap moral in it. It shows us that our ancestors had clearer vision than we give them credit for. And not a single elf lord or magic crystal in sight.<\/p>\n

Tom Spears is a longtime Ottawa news reporter.<\/p>\n

Related<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I follow some aspiring novel authors on X.com (#writers), and they talk about the struggle to sell stories.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":22585,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[288,93,19647,19648,61,60,19645,19644,19646],"class_list":["post-22584","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-books","tag-books","tag-entertainment","tag-forest-land","tag-geraldine","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-tom-sawyer","tag-tom-spears","tag-writer-tom-spears"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22584","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22584"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22584\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22585"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22584"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22584"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22584"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}