Peter Costello
The World of Books
by the Books Editor
Literacy for both young and adult is an essential of social life. So these days teachers, politicians and booksellers are all agreed on the need to encourage reading. Easy enough with girls, it seems, but boys need more encouragement.
So at Christmas all the deluge of new books aimed at readers between birth and sixteen that face parents at this time of the year (in normal times at least). But I often wonder if new books, as such, are really a help in promoting true literacy.
What results, it seems to me, is the generation of today who think that ‘history’ is what happened so long ago as a decade. When one considers the millions-year-old story of mankind one wonders what they would call that period of time.
I suspect the answer may lie with the parents rather than the teachers. Mothers and fathers should introduce their children to the books they enjoyed as children – if they can get them. This rather goes against the current cult of relevancy, and it opens children to the horrid possibility of reading the actual language of yesterday which is not always as tidied-up or ‘woke’ as the cultural supervisors of our day would like.
But these books of old can still be found and reveal important things about the world and the people in it who once lived in it.
Timeless Classics
My best example is Robinson Crusoe. There came down to me a Victorian edition of Defoe with illustration from 1840 by the French artist Jean-Jacques Grandville. These images imprinted on my imagination the ‘correct’ image of the castaway forever. This text included parts one and two, completing the further adventures of Crusoe, including the image of the death of Man Friday in a fracas in Siberia.
Crusoe’s running away to sea, his misadventures, which included a clash with Muslim pirates of the coast of Morocco, and his time as a white slave on the estate of a Portuguese colonist in what Defoe calls ‘the Brazils’. The story is far more than just the desert island, it is a world adventure, and Man Friday something more than the token man of colour.
Another Christmas I was given Richard Jefferies Bevis (1882) – pronoucedbev-ess, not bee-vis. This was in a modern edition illustrated by another genius, E. H. Shephard (of Winnie-the-Pooh fame). By some unnoticed sleight of narration he manages to crowd several years of real life, from seven to 14, into a hectic Wiltshire summer or two.
But Jefferies was a naturalist; he introduced a new kind of nature writing into the English language. Some later writers, such as Henry Williamson, author of Tarka the Otter, regarded him as some sort of lay saint.
But more than that, Jefferies was one of that handful of writers over the last few centuries that gave rise to the ecological movement of today.
Then there was the nature lore that fills the pages of Captain Marryat’s Children of the New Forest…But enough! You get the point. New books , whatever their qualities, do not fill the place of older book that deepen a real knowledge of the past and of the human adventure over time. This knowledge is also a part of literacy – perhaps the most important part. The young readers can not only learn about the past from the past, but enjoy it.
So, to adapt the words of the old Walton’s Music slogan: “if you must read a book, read an old book”. And not just at Christmas, but all the year round. A generation from now young parents will be glad they passed on today the books their parents enjoyed when they were small, which were perhaps the books their parents enjoyed.
Once upon a time this was called ‘culture’, and you can read all about it in St John Henry Newman’s discourse on a liberal education. He is an example of the benefits of wide reading.