T he absolute core of the children's canon — the classic classics, if you like, such as The Railway Children, The Wind in the Willows, The Jungle Book, The Secret Garden, Alice in Wonderland, Winnie the Pooh, etc — tend to be more than a century old, the product of "the golden age" of children's literature, covering roughly the late Victorian era to the end of the Edwardian age.
Before that, you had to pity the poor juvenile bookworm. Or The History of the Fairchild Family , a series of moralistic stories emphasising the likelihood of hell and damnation for non-believers.
What they wouldn't have given for a whiff of Badger, Ratty or Mole, let alone a page of Harry Potter. The proliferation of tales less exclusively concerned with the salvation of the nursery-dweller's immortal soul came about through a confluence of happy circumstances. Chiefly, these were apart from the gradual lessening of religious zealotry's grip on the land were the introduction of compulsory education for children and the invention of mass manufacturing.
Suddenly there was a market of 3 million newly literate, story-hungry children and the means to provide them with the relatively cheap books they needed. They have such a secure berth in the collective heart frequently aided, admittedly, by film and TV adaptations that survival until their own centenaries seems assured.
And surrounding them are a smattering of books now considered classics published during my own lifetime. Eoin Colfer's Artemis Fowl was added as part of Puffin's 70th birthday celebrations last year.
So what makes a classic? It can't just be that it's old. A classic must have something else, something that has either caused it to endure or has, in the case of modern classics, inspired the faith that it will do so. A classic is a work which relegates the noise of the present to a background hum, which at the same time the classics cannot exist without.
A classic is a work which persists as a background noise even when a present that is totally incompatible with it holds sway. Complement with Calvino on civil rights , the two types of writers , photography and the art of presence , and how to assert yourself and live with integrity. The Marginalian participates in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn commissions by linking to Amazon.
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Privacy policy. TLDR: You're safe — there are no nefarious "third parties" lurking on my watch or shedding crumbs of the "cookies" the rest of the internet uses. A classic is a work which persists as a background noise even when a present that is totally incompatible with it holds sway. Perhaps most poetic is Calvino's 11th definition, bespeaking the idea that there is room for subjectivity even in a term as deterministically universal as a "classic," and offering a witty answer to the nitpicky reader: "'Your' classic is a book to which you cannot remain indifferent, and which helps you define yourself in relation or even in opposition to it.
This post also appears on Brain Pickings , an Atlantic partner site. Skip to content Site Navigation The Atlantic. Popular Latest. The Atlantic Crossword. Sign In Subscribe. The classics are those books about which you usually hear people saying: 'I'm rereading
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