"Henty was, I admit, the author whom I knew best among all English writers until I went to college. His exciting stories ... stirred my imagination mightily and, I suspect, had much to do with my liking for and concentration on history in my educational progress. When years later I travelled extensively abroad as Canada's Secretary of State for External Affairs, there was hardly a place I visited which I had not known through that prolific but now almost forgotten writer of adventure stories for boys."

Lester B. Pearson. Mike: The Memoirs of the Right Honourable Lester B. Pearson, Volume 1 1897-1948 (Scarborough, Ont.: The New American Library of Canada, 1973), p. 8.

"By some stroke of luck we were given books by Jack London and James Oliver Curwood for Christmas .... We had other books in the house, but I always came back to these, which were full of 'silence and fury' and an irrepressible faith in life, no matter how threatened by the harsh nature of the climate and the harsher nature of man. I didn't know it at the time, but what must have attracted me, besides the exciting adventures, was the fact that the characters represented courage, loyalty (to themselves and to others), innocence and sincerity. Deep down in my eight- or nine-year-old heart, I felt their intensity without recognizing it." (Translation.)

Marie-Andrée Warnant Côté. Lurelu. Vol. 9, no. 1, Spring-Summer 1986, p. 30.

The tradition of writing for children, out of which Canadian children's literature was born, has its origins in Europe. A living, growing entity, it is being changed and enriched by our whole heritage.

It dates back a long way. One of the earliest printed children's books was produced in 1477 by William Caxton, the owner of England's first printing press. It must also be noted, however, that not until the late 18th and early 19th centuries did a body of children's literature in the form that we now know it really begin to take shape.

There were child readers before that, of course, but the things that were written for them were more restricted  --  tracts and moral pieces, retellings of fables and nursery rhymes and myths and legends. If they wanted something more and different they turned to Gulliver's Travels or Robinson Crusoe or other primarily adult works. There was no substantial body of original literary work created primarily for children, no cohesive collection of books in which they formed the central characters and played the main parts.

Inevitably, change had to come. Partly this was because children were learning to read in increasing numbers, providing a growing market for publishers. Equally important is the fact that as markets developed there were writers who recognized in the world of childhood the focus of inspiration that was truly theirs.

They saw in that world possibilities and challenges beyond number. Within it, they opened new doors and followed the paths of their imaginings. Out of their imaginings the genres we now accept almost as constants  --  fantasy, high fantasy, adventure, science fiction, the family story, the mystery, the picture book  --  took form.

Just as in Europe, children's literature had in a sense "come after", so it did here. It was not only those children growing up in Canada at the beginning of this century who had to turn mainly to European writers for their reading. As recently as the 1960s, there were only 30 to 40 children's books being published annually in English and an even smaller number in French. What was produced tended to deal with a narrow range of subjects  --  pioneering, the wilderness, the Native peoples. How things have changed!