Silly Books

Here’s something I wrote to a Facebook group in response to a question about Charlotte Mason’s view of children reading silly books, and specifically whether silly books, since they aren’t what Mason called “living books,” are therefore what she called “twaddle” that children shouldn’t read:

No, silly books are not (necessarily) twaddle, even though they are probably not living books.

One big misconception some have is the idea that any and every book is either a living book or it is twaddle, one or the other. But that’s not at all the case.

In fact, Charlotte Mason writes about silly books:

Books of “comicalities” cultivate no power but the sense of the incongruous; and though life is the more amusing for the possession of such a sense, when cultivated to excess it is apt to show itself a flippant habit. Diogenes and the Naughty Boys of Troy is irresistible, but it is not the sort of thing the children will live over and over, and “play at” by the hour, as we have all played at Robinson Crusoe finding the footprints. They must have “funny books,” but do not give the children too much nonsense reading (Home Education, 151-152).

She does not say that these books are twaddle. She does not say that these books ought to be prohibited for our children.

She does warn that too much of such books can result in flippant attitudes, as you see with the person who has “too much” of a “sense of humor” and, through weakness of will, can’t be serious when he ought to be, is always joking around, turns everything you say into a joke, can’t watch a movie with you without making wisecracks about the characters and “wouldn’t it be funny if” and cracking up even in the saddest scenes, etc.

There is a time to laugh and there is a time to be serious, and so Mason is cautioning against raising a child who treats everything as a joke. Silliness is fun, but it shouldn’t be the steady diet, she says.

But twaddle is not silliness. It’s not light fiction. It’s not fun reading. It’s not genre fiction, like mysteries or fantasy novels. It’s not series fiction. It’s not immoral fiction (as if morally good vs. morally bad corresponds to living books vs. twaddle).

Usually, when people say, “I’m okay with my child reading some twaddle,” I suspect what they mean is “I’m okay with my child reading light fiction” or “reading something fun.” But that’s a misunderstanding of what twaddle is.

When Mason talks about twaddle, she talks about it being condescending, about “goody-goody story books,” about how children don’t like twaddle because they don’t like being talked down to (“All who know children know that they do not talk twaddle and do not like it, and prefer that which appeals to their understanding”), about “reading-made-easy” history books that dumb everything down instead of being written with “literary power,” about teachers presenting “little pills of knowledge in the form of a weak and copious diluent” (i.e., diluted with so much extra talk), about “a single grain of pure knowledge” drowned in a “worthless flood” of talk (e.g., “Now children, we’re going to talk about butterflies. Have you ever seen a little butterfly, boys and girls? Look at the picture! Look, look! See the little butterfly’s wings? How many wings does he have? Two! The butterfly has two wings! Do you have two wings? No! No, you don’t. That’s because you’re a boy or a girl and not a butterfly. But the butterfly has two wings. They’re like little fairies, aren’t they? And maybe when you aren’t looking, they turn into fairies? Isn’t that a fun idea? Aren’t they beautiful? God must love butterflies very much, don’t you think, to dress them in such beautiful wings. Let’s all take our crayons and draw pictures of butterfly wings, and then we’re going to flap them and sing a little song about being a butterfly”).

But even though Mason does say that a child should never read twaddle, she says elsewhere that maybe it does us good when we’re weary:

We need not ask what the girl or boy likes. She very often likes the twaddle of goody-goody story books, he likes condiments, highly-spiced tales of adventure. We are all capable of liking mental food of a poor quality and a titillating nature; and possibly such food is good for us when our minds are in need of an elbow-chair; but our spiritual life is sustained on other stuff, whether we be boys or girls, men or women (School Education, 168).

Notice, too, that here she distinguishes “twaddle” (“goody-goody story books”) from what she calls “condiments” (“highly-spiced tales of adventure”). She doesn’t want a steady diet of the latter any more than she does of silly books. If all you read are adventure stories, you aren’t being nourished either. But she doesn’t see adventure stories as being “twaddle,” probably because adventure stories don’t talk down to you. Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys might fall into the “condiments” category, if we were to treat these as technical categories, but they aren’t, in CM’s usage, “twaddle.”