Imaginary Voyages
Instruction or imagination? What should children’s literature emphasize? It’s a topic that people debated at the time many of the books in the Prelutsky Collection were being written.
Stories in which the characters go on make-believe voyages clearly favor imagination. In The Cruise of the Walnut Shell (ca. 1880), for example, a young boy and girl make a boat out of a walnut and travel around the world. “And yet all this was but a dream, / A fancy of the children’s brain, / Where pleasures in confusion reign, / And phantoms of old lessons teem. / Dream, happy children, while ye may!” The message of the book’s final verses may be that however important “old lessons” are, letting the mind run free is the most important thing of all.
Nevertheless, though it might not be spelled out, most stories featuring imaginary voyages do make some sort of gesture towards moral improvement. The Brownies, written by Canadian author Palmer Cox, was one of the bestselling children’s series of the late-nineteenth and early twentieth century. Its main characters are humorous elf-like creatures that travel around the world, getting into plenty of trouble but always trying to do good. The focus is on fun and fantasy, with only tangential and never very serious reflections on how to behave, reflecting Cox’s belief that children should “get the moral lesson without knowing that they are getting it.”
This is a sentiment that many Victorians shared regarding travel, which could be “improving” in and of itself. Thomas Cook, who founded the world’s first tour company in 1841, felt that travel helped people “o’erleap the bounds of their own narrow circle, rub off rust and prejudice by contact with others, and expand their sails and invigorate their bodies by an exploration of some of nature’s finest scenes.” In simpler terms, travel broadened one’s perspective and provided wholesome entertainment. Despite nineteenth-century advances in transportation that were making it easier to travel far from home, there was still a place for travel literature, even of the imaginary kind. Presenting the world through fiction made it more interesting to children while still nurturing curiosity and putting an idea or two in their heads.
It could also get them started on the most important voyage anyone can ever take: the voyage deep into one’s own mind and heart. What is the best way to get there? Having someone lead you by the hand? Or slowly finding the path yourself? One of the strangest books in the Prelutsky Collection is Nightmare Land (1901) by G. Orr Clark. In the book’s introduction, the author, mimicking the language of travelogues, explains that children “need not fear to enter boldly into this realm,” which is “a wholly unexplored and unchronicled continent.” Readers at the turn of the twentieth century would not have missed the allusion when Orr went on to say: “The trouble is that cook [i.e., Thomas Cook] has heretofore been allowed the prerogative of arranging the itinerary of the tours, and it has been so unsystematic and irregular that many have abandoned the journey midway, or, proceeding, have been stranded in that bourne.”
Is this Orr’s way of saying that didactic poetry and other kinds of nursery moralizing, like a generic package vacation, wasn’t the best thing for every child? Wouldn’t it be better, as Orr seems to do, to point out a destination and offer to come along, but acknowledge that adults cannot travel children’s path for them? Perhaps, in the end, it’s best to let kids use their imagination to set their own itineraries—and discover lessons of their own along the way.