Naughty children

Not Just William

Anti-social behaviour used to be more acceptable, and more fun.

In A speech last year, Tony Blair traced the origins of anti-social behaviour to the 1960s. That decade, he explained, “spawned a group of young people who were brought up without parental discipline, without proper role models and without any sense of responsibility to or for others”. It's a widely held view. But if earlier generations were paragons of good behaviour, why do so many old children's books praise naughtiness? Fiction aimed at pre-teenage boys contained especially poor role models. Among the most popular was Richmal Crompton's William, a well-meaning boy who is nonetheless drawn to trouble. William, whose adventures spanned the 1920s to the 1960s, escapes the tedium of parental control in the company of his gang, the Outlaws, with whom he schemes against the adult world. At one point he eats a neighbour's entire crop of prize peaches as well as destroying a greenhouse; at another, the Outlaws kidnap a baby and put it in a room with a bottle of paraffin — not Harry Potter's sort of thing. More dubious still are the adventures described in C. Day Lewis's 1948 book “The Otterbury Incident”. This tells the story of a gang of school children who heroically thwart a counterfeiting operation. Nothing untoward there — except that the children are, by modern standards, heavily armed. The criminal offences for which they might be prosecuted, as accurately summarised by Inspector Brook in the final scene, include “carrying lethal weapons with intent to wound, breaking and entering, intimidation, assault and battery, shooting at certain fellow citizens and discharging rockets at same”. Yet there is no suggestion that they should avoid fireworks or air guns in future.

Diane Purkiss of Oxford University believes that rowdiness on such a scale would fall foul of most editors these days. It is not that modern children's literature is devoid of outlaws; rather, rebellious behaviour is either the result of inadequate upbringing or exists safely in the realm of fantasy. “Children don't get to raid people's dustbins any more, although they do sometimes have the power to change the world.” Fictional children sometimes did both. The schoolboy heroes of Rudyard Kipling's “Stalky & Co.” are robust even by the standards of William and the Otterbury gang. Expert spitters and cat shooters, they scheme their way through school. It is excellent preparation for adult life. In the end, Stalky heads for India, where his deviousness and disregard for procedural niceties turn out to be just the trick for running the empire.

3 February 2005
http://www.economist.com/world/europe/displayStory.cfm?story_id=3630542

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