[In the following review, Illick finds shortcomings in Lurie's generalized view of children's literature and lack of historical perspective in Don't Tell the Grown-Ups.]

The most intriguing book on children's literature is Bruno Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment (1976). Arguing that an acquaintanceship with literature can give meaning to children's lives—not just any literature, not myths of superhuman feats or moralistic fables, but fairy tales that capture human development in symbolic terms—Bettelheim conveys the message evident throughout his writings: Life is a struggle (in the case of the child, a struggle to organize the chaotic unconscious) that can be won. For a youngster, who must win victory at the unconscious level without parental intrusion, fairy tales provide a means of gaining mastery over emotional turmoil and growing toward the achievement of rational decision-making.

The notion that fairy tales have a universal quality was challenged by historian Robert Darnton. He faulted Bettelheim for not grounding the tales he talked about in a particular time and place, specifically 17th-century rural France. Their characters, Darnton observed, exhibit the traits of cunning necessary for survival among peasants in that culture. Without forsaking my respect for Bettelheim, I would agree that it is necessary to consider the milieu in which tales were created, told and recorded.

In Don't Tell the Grown-Ups Alison Lurie pays no attention to such particulars. She assumes that fairy tales have a universal relevance. Analyzing Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden (1911), she tells us that it “is the story of two unhappy, sickly, overcivilized children who achieve health and happiness through a combination of communal gardening, mystical faith, daily exercises, encounter-group type confrontation, and a health-food diet.” This is the favorite book of the students enrolled in Lurie's course on children's literature at Cornell, who have made Burnett's late Victorian world their own.

It is possible (though Lurie does not present the possibility) that “children” at Ivy League schools tend to represent a subculture within contemporary American childhood similar to that of the Victorian, urban, middle-class kiddies. But it is hard to know what age groups we should be comparing, at least partly because Lurie does not make clear what age group(s) she is discussing. Some of her subjects deal with themes that cross age boundaries: the joys of disobedience (Beatrix Potter); adult timidity and hypocrisy (James M. Barrie); adult authority (A. A. Milne); even feminism (E. Nesbitt). Other themes point to an adolescent audience: upper-class pretensions (Mrs. Clifford); capitalist greed (E. Nesbitt); tolerance for evil (J. R. R. Tolkien, T. H. White); ecological danger (Richard Adams).

About these messages Lurie asserts: “Opinions and attitudes that are not currently in style in the adult world often find expression in children's books of the time,” and the situation upsets adults because they expect children to confide everything, including their discontent. That presumes the adult world (excepting the authors of subversive children's literature and Lurie herself) is monolithic and separate from the children's world, also monolithic. Lurie refers to the “universality and antiquity of children's folklore” as evidence that childhood has always formed a separate culture in our midst.

History tells a different story. At least until the 17th-century, child and adult society could not be differentiated; folklore was the shared province of both. The expression of subversive attitudes in children's books came hundreds of years later. Yet even considering only the relatively brief period that this has been true, relations between parents and children have changed so dramatically as to make generalizations precarious.

The change in relations, in turn, brings into question the concept of monolithic and separate worlds of adulthood and childhood. Certainly I was not unusual as a parent when I read my son that most subversive of kids' volumes, Uncle Shelby's ABZ Book, or when together we composed and recorded tales of disobedient creatures who acted out his own desires. Together we laughed through Mad magazine, too. So I was hardly surprised when my son formed his high school's Charles Dodgson Society (Lewis Carroll is another of Lurie's subjects), though I was taken aback when at 16 and just graduated he turned down a prestigious scholarship to strike out on his own for Europe. Still, in the manner of many of my peers, I did not stand in the way of this autonomous—and in another generation, subversive—behavior.

If Lurie's book fails as a historically-informed account of children's literature, it often succeeds in its descriptions of the authors of these books. Her portrait of prurient John Ruskin prodding prudish Kate Greenaway to undress the little girls in her illustrations makes for entertaining reading—and lecturing no doubt. Don't Tell the Grown-Ups creates a cosmos of adults with childlike frailties, amusing and probably reassuring to college adolescents on the verge of entering a still-mysterious mature society. As such it fulfills one of our professorial tasks.