Fat Books, Coloured Pencils, Nibs and Ink

Teaching the Juvenile Journal

Abstract

The Diary of Anne  Frank is a salient example of how valuable a youthful journal can be historically, as well as for access to the child’s subjectivity and creativity. This essay suggests that juvenile journals can provide excellent matter for a specialized course on the genre.

   With a focus on the young writer’s need for necessary writing materials, the author examines journals by a number of young diarists of different periods: Marjory Fleming, writing in Regency Scotland, who  died at eight years old, but still made it into the Dictionary of National Biography; the teenage Richard Doyle, already developing his artistic talents and turning professional in the busy London in 1840; Elizabeth Thompson Butler, struggling to achieve recognition as a Victorian female painter of battle scenes; Iris Vaughan, writing in South Africa at the time of the Boer War; seven-year-old Opal Whiteley, still on the threshold of literacy, recording her close encounters with animal life in the logging camps of Oregon in the early twentieth century; and teenager Hope Hook, recounting her crossing of Canada in 1907, as part of her family’s move to emigrate; and up to Anne Frank, a teenager in the Second World War.

   These young writers, artists, and budding professionals provide vivid insights into their thinking and writing processes, as well as windows on the history and culture of their day as perceived by a child.