Rosemary Goring previews an upcoming Scottish conference on forgotten children’s books opf the pastL

Eager to resurrect as many lost texts as possible, Bold and Dunnigan are also keen to see if they can trace a distinctive Scottish character in children’s writing from these centuries. Dunnigan, who began her career as a Scottish medievalist, is particularly interested in the fairytale tradition. “I began to wonder when children’s literature in Scotland began,” she says, over a coffee in Edinburgh. “The idea of the hidden history and the hidden voices of Scotland’s past.”

The project was too big for her to tackle herself, and she spoke to Bold, with whom she had discovered a shared interest in children’s literature. The outcome is a unique two-day conference in Dumfries, next weekend, to discuss various aspects of children’s literature. The Scottish Children’s Literature Symposium is open to the public, and promises not only to be fascinating, but to act as an impetus for the academic fraternity to discover more about the “missing link” in children’s literature.

As Bold says, “I don’t think J K Rowling comes out of nowhere, and there’s a genealogy that needs to be more specifically identified… We need to get to the source of where this burgeoning of fantastic writers, like Jacqueline Wilson, comes from. Even if they’re not aware of it.” For Dunnigan, quite simply “It’s about recovering Scotland’s lost heritage of children’s storytelling, which is a vital part of our culture.”

Although most of us have heard of the giants of 19th-century Scottish children’s fiction – George Macdonald, Robert Louis Stevenson and J M Barrie – other writers of books for younger readers, such as the Victorian poet Violet Jacob and Shetland folklorist Jessie Saxby, are either largely forgotten or ignored. Jacob gathered and retold fairy stories after the death of her eight-year-old son, while Saxby was unusual for drawing on Viking history for her adventure stories for boys, and for setting her stories on the “cultural margins”, on remote islands. A further question, about the nature of the north in children’s literature, is raised by Saxby’s work, among others, suggesting fruitful fields of inquiry for decades to come.

Since many of the writers and illustrators of children’s books were women, the problem of neglect appears to have been compounded. Dunnigan believes there is a deep gulf of lost material between these writers and those of today. “Peter Pan,” she says, “is the one text that’s the lynchpin, that holds it together… Even so, Barrie himself tended to be seen as an isolated figure.”

How appropriate, then, that the first day of the conference will take place at Moat Brae, in Dumfries. A beautiful Georgian town house, it has been dubbed “the birthplace of Peter Pan”, because this was where J M Barrie played with his school friends Stewart and Hal Gordon. As the playwright later wrote, “these escapades in a certain Dumfries garden, which is enchanted land to me, were certainly the genesis of that nefarious work – Peter Pan.” The house’s restoration will not be complete for another two years, but it is still accessible for limited use before its official opening in the summer of 2017 as a National Centre for Children’s Literature and Storytelling.

The second day will be held at the Crichton campus, and topics discussed will range from Maureen Farrell on The Beginnings Of Scottish Children’s Literature and Linden Bicket discussing “Seals, witches, truants [and] sailors”: George Mackay Brown’s Orcadian Tales For Children, to Rob Dunbar on Scottish Gaelic Children’s Literature Of The 19th Century and Rhona Brown on Educating The Female Child: Debates From The Scottish Periodical Press, 1750-1800. Not to mention Bold on children’s chapbook literature and Dunnigan on fairy tales and women writers.

via Time to put lost Scottish children’s books back on the shelf | Herald Scotland.

Scottish Children’s Literature: Forgotten Histories, New Perspectives and J M Barrie, Friday June 26 and Saturday June 27 in Dumfries. For details contact on katie.nairn@glasgow.ac.uk or 01387 345 371