Margaret

Margaret Fuller sobre Children's Books em "Woman in the Ninteenth Century and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition and Duties, of Woman." [de certa maneira outra Clara Peeters, "Fuller's words were heavily censored or rewritten.The three editors were not concerned about accuracy; they believed public interest in Fuller was temporary and that she would not survive as a historical figure."]


"There is too much amongst us of the French way of palming off false accounts of things on children, "to do them good," and showing nature to them in a magic lantern "purified for the use of childhood," and telling stories of sweet little girls and brave little boys,--O, all so good, or so bad! and above all, so _little_, and everything about them so little! Children accustomed to move in full-sized apartments, and converse with full-grown men and women, do not need so much of this baby-house style in their literature. They like, or would like if they could get them, better things much more. They like the _Arabian Nights_, and _Pilgrim's Progress_, and _Bunyan's
Emblems_, and _Shakspeare_, and the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_,--at least, they used to like them; and if they do not now, it is because their taste has been injured by so many sugar-plums. The books that were written in the childhood of nations suit an uncorrupted childhood now.
They are simple, picturesque, robust. Their moral is not forced, nor is the truth veiled with a well-meant but sure-to-fail hypocrisy. Sometimes they are not moral at all,--only free plays of the fancy and intellect. These, also, the child needs, just as the infant needs to stretch its limbs, and grasp at objects it cannot hold. We have become so fond of the moral, that we forget the nature in which it must find its root; so fond of instruction, that we forget development.

Where ballads, legends, fairy-tales, are moral, the morality is heart-felt; if instructive, it is from the healthy common sense of mankind, and not for the convenience of nursery rule, nor the "peace of schools and families."

(...)
Children need some childish talk, some childish play, some childish books. But they also need, and need more, difficulties to overcome, and a sense of the vast mysteries which the progress of their intelligence shall aid them to unravel. This sense is naturally their delight, as it is their religion, and it must not be dulled by premature explanations or subterfuges of any kind. There has been too much of this lately."