Charles Finger and the Fight Against Modernizing Children's Literature

This week I traveled to the archives at the University of Arkansas to read the correspondence of Charles J. Finger.

Finger was an early twentieth-century man of letters. He made his career writing and editing a lot of material: books for children, works of Arkansas history, volumes of popular knowledge for the "Little Blue Book" series. He even edited his own periodical. He is best remembered for Tales from Silver Lands, which won the Newberry in 1925.

My interest in Finger stems from his involvement with the Bellows-Reeve company which published.
Journeys through Bookland .

Journeys is a home library that was first published in 1909 and was edited by Charles H. Sylvester. The metaphor of Bookland fascinates me: the idea that books and reading make up some kind of geographical space and the reader is a traveler, mapper, discoverer. It is scattered throughout discussions of literature from the 1890s on, and eventually becomes particularly common in discussions of childhood reading.That is what first drew me to Sylvester's book set.

From 1933 to 1940, Finger had the role of managing editor at Bellows-Reeve. He helped update the supplemental reading lists for Journeys and wrote some newsletters that were used in-house and sent to subscribers. (The library was sold by subscription.)

I mostly read Finger's correspondence with James Keddie, who was vice-presidents of Bellows-Reeve. Their relationship was sparked by Finger's article "Some Notes ON Children's Books" from the Saturday Review in November 1930.

In it, Finger says "Time makes no difference in juvenile taste."  Neither does space.
Finger claims, "I have know the young of many peoples, Fuegian and Patagonia, Apache and Celt, Manx as well as those of forty or more of these states; and as result of that knowledge, I hold that what is entertainment for one juvenile is entertainment for another."

This is the child as cosmopolitan -- an unchanging figure across time and space.  And if children do not change then it goes to reason that children's book should not change, either. Keddie agreed with Finger's position on childhood reading and felt it coincided with the vision promoted by Journeys.  Both men believed a child reader did not need stories about airplanes, radios, or other modern fiddle faddle. Keddie wrote to ask Finger if he could share the article with the company's sales staff.  From there their correspondence grew until Keddie began to offer Finger jobs to do in support of the book set.

Reading these letters gives lots of insight into their goals for childhood read and some of the nitty-gritty of selling a children's home library.  Anyone who has read Dear Genius: The Letters of Ursula Nordstrom knows here is much to be learned about the art and business of children's literature from reading an editor's letters. While I wouldn't claim the Finger-Keddie letters are as illuminating or entertaining as Nordstrom's, they are still pretty interesting. Both men were pretty passionate about children's literature and committed to the cause of helping children discover the value of literature.  It's worth noting neither Finger nor Keddie were born in the United States. Finger was originally from England and Keddie was a Scotsman.

I don't know if Finger's books for children are still worth reading. Without his Newberry win, he may have sunk into even deeper obscurity.  But during the 1920s and 30s,  he was very active in the realm of children's literature. He wrote and reviewed children's books, lectured to women's clubs and library groups, and through his work for Journeys was able to promote certain kinds of reading materials. He and Keddie give voice to certain beliefs about childhood reading that are worth understanding, in part, because I think they did not prevail.