The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren (Book Review)

[Reviewed as part of the Spotlight Series tour of the New York Review Books Classics]

I was expecting this book to give more editorial commentary. I was expecting an essay on children’s language and children’s lore. Instead, Iona & Peter Opie’s The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren is a taxonomy of the lore itself; collected from girls and boys in Great Britain in the 1950s, all of the verses, phrases & practices within have either been invented by or primarily passed along by children.

The content is grouped in chapters like “Guile”, “Topical Rhymes”, “Riddles”, “Nicknames and Epithets”, and “Pranks.” I skimmed some of the material (pages of barely distinguishable versions of the same rhyme) while some of it had me laughing. For example, the innocent blasphemies of children as they celebrate Good Friday:

Good Friday was when Jesus Christ was crucified and we have hot cross buns (248)

and

At the first sign of daylight in the . . . South End of Liverpool, children of all ages troop out into the streets, each bearing an effigy called ‘Judas’, which has been carefully prepared, with comic mask for a face, and dressed in an old suit of clothes. As the sun rises the leader of a group hoists the Judas on a pole and knocks on bedroom windows while the rest of the children chant in chorus ‘Judas is a penny short of his breakfast’, and they give the householders no peace until some pennies have been thrown out to them. (248)

Other items made me laugh, or at least to scratch my head, such as the long paragraphs containing lists of nicknames for fat children (“back end of a bus, balloon, barrage balloon, barrel. . .” (168). The chapters containing “wit and repartee” and “guile” were particularly hilarious.

There is a lot of content, mainly the lore itself, sprinkled here and there with the odd, often wry or gleeful comment from the Opies. Few conclusions are drawn. In their introduction, they write that the “scraps of lore” they’ve collected here are “not intended for adult ears. In fact part of their fun is the thought, usually correct, that adults know nothing about them” (1). The Opies seem to delight in the ways the children take popular verses and corrupt them (“Mary had a little lamb,/She fed it castor oil,/And everywhere the lamb would go/It fertilized the soil”); they make a point of how seriously children take their own beliefs and legislations (like that one’s statements must be taken as truth if one claims to ‘hope to die’ for example), while at the same time children find creative ways to subvert adult authority. There is a long section about what we called “nicky-nicky-nine-doors” in my childhood in the 1980s, which involved knocking on doors and then running away.

Taken as a whole, the text gives a strong sense that there is a secret world of children, what the Opies’ call a “savage tribe”; it also shows the curiousness of lore itself, where some nonsensical phrases or beliefs can last for centuries and cross cultures while others quickly die out.

I was at times shocked at the lack of commentary, especially by the lists of fairly awful names that children call one another and by the uncensored racist epithets. We live in such a different era. Marina Warner, in her introduction, touches on the question that raised itself to me most often as I was reading: are children still like this? In this digital age, when children’s lives are increasingly supervised and mediated, when their tastes and stories are so influenced by advertisers, can children’s lore be so spontaneous and heterogeneous? So nonsensical?

Warner writes:

In the forty years since they published the book, the sense of crisis around children’s culture has however deepened, and [the Opies'] picture of witty, playful, imaginative youngsters inventing rhymes and passing on chants and riddles seems to belong to another universe. . . . Yet, from my personal observation, children haven’t forgotten how to play, not altogether, not if given the opportunities to gather safely together (xvii).

The Opies also address the issue:

When one contemplates the amount of money, and talent, and publicity which is expended on the cinema, radio and T.V., and the amount of time some children give to these entertainments, it is perhaps remarkable how little the new arts have affected child lore. Indeed, one cannot help gaining the impression that by and large the cinema and T.V. only have a superficial effect on schoolchildren (118).

Of course, the amount of resources expended on “entertainments” for children has increased ridiculously. Still, we are reminded that, despite the worrying of adults, children will have their childhood, with a cultural world of their own, built from both past and present, taken from other children and out of books and from movies, full of assumptions and inventions all mashed up and passed along.

At almost 400 pages, while The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren is fascinating and often delightful, it is also a bit of a drag, at times, especially since the Opies are not motivated to come up with an arc that would connect the threads The ‘scrappiness’ of it is one of its greatest strengths, but also makes it much more like an encyclopedia than a text to read, as I did, cover to cover. Although this is not really reading for pleasure, it is not without its pleasures.

Further reading:

• Wikipedia entry for the Opies. I read one other book by them–a collection of fairy tales that I found in my own childhood when I was looking for a collection that wasn’t censored–and I’m thinking of buying my kids their collection of nursery rhymes.
• Blurb from the New York Review Books page (check out the other amazing titles, too, which have now made my to-read list overly long.
• An article from Brain, Child, which contains one mother’s reflections on her son’s creativity, despite screen-time.