Writer who introduced the harsh realities of life into his stories for children
John Rowe Townsend founded the influential Guardian children's fiction prize
John Rowe Townsend, who has died aged 91, was not only a dominant figure in the academic study of children's literature, but, as the author of Gumble's Yard (1961), a seminal influence on the entire development of modern children's books. This, his first and possibly most famous, book – in print for 50 years and now available as an ebook – was written when he worked on the Manchester Guardian, and was born of his shocked awareness of the unbridgeable gap between the comfortably jolly lives of the young characters in the books he reviewed and the harsh realities faced by the children he had seen while researching a feature on the NSPCC.
Gumble's Yard, with its deliberately uncosy ending and depiction of a working-class life that sometimes skirted the law, flung open a door that before the second world war Geoffrey Trease had pushed ajar, through which eventually the sociological activists of the 80s – anti-racist, anti-sexist – could march. By then, ironically, many of them regarded Townsend as an opposing literary purist, but it is mainly due to him that their own radical aims and his radical view that children's literature is a discipline worthy of serious analysis should both be accepted today as mere conventional wisdom.
Written for Children, "an outline of English-language children's literature", appeared in 1965, ran to nine updated editions, and became the lodestar and compass of every subsequent writer on the subject. It was followed by A Sense of Story (1971, revised and retitled A Sounding of Storytellers in 1979), essays on contemporary writers with the same blend of extraordinarily extensive knowledge, provocative opinion and critical astuteness.
Gumble's Yard by John Rowe Townsend.
Gumble's Yard, with its deliberately uncosy ending and depiction of a working-class life that sometimes skirted the law, flung open a door that before the second world war Geoffrey Trease had pushed ajar, through which eventually the sociological activists of the 80s – anti-racist, anti-sexist – could march. By then, ironically, many of them regarded Townsend as an opposing literary purist, but it is mainly due to him that their own radical aims and his radical view that children's literature is a discipline worthy of serious analysis should both be accepted today as mere conventional wisdom.
Written for Children, "an outline of English-language children's literature", appeared in 1965, ran to nine updated editions, and became the lodestar and compass of every subsequent writer on the subject. It was followed by A Sense of Story (1971, revised and retitled A Sounding of Storytellers in 1979), essays on contemporary writers with the same blend of extraordinarily extensive knowledge, provocative opinion and critical astuteness.
Gumble's Yard by John Rowe Townsend.Meanwhile, his own novels – Gumble's Yard, The Intruder (1969), Noah's Castle (1975) – were being serialised on television and winning awards. The Intruder was shortlisted for the American Carnegie Medal and won the Boston Globe-Horn Book award and the Edgar award for juvenile mystery. He eventually published 36 novels, including Good-night, Prof, Love for teenagers, and, for adults, Cranford Revisited. He also edited Trade and Plumb-Cake for Ever, Huzza! (1994), on the life and works of the pioneering 18th-century publisher John Newbery.
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