Margaret Wise Brown made a point of listening to children, and trying to see the world as they saw it. She has been rewarded by decades of loyalty
The children’s book Goodnight Moon, which is 75 this year, had a slow start in life, not least because it was rejected by the New York library system for being sentimental and lacking in an improving moral. It has now sold more than 40m copies and regularly appears on lists of most popular books to give to young children. A series of pictures show a great green room in which a small rabbit is in bed, watched by a grownup rabbit in a rocking chair, while the captions intone goodnights – “Goodnight bears / Goodnight chairs / Goodnight kittens / And goodnight mittens”. Some adults still find them disconcerting, even creepy (especially “Goodnight nobody”).
But one of the book’s many striking features is the extent and skill with which it addresses not adults but small children. Margaret Wise Brown, who initially trained as a teacher, studied under the early years pioneer Lucy Sprague Mitchell, who argued that not only did small children exist in the “here and now”, but that what adults found so familiar as to be invisible (a bed, a room, a bowl of mush) was still wondrous. (And the Mitchell Here and Now Story Book contains tales not dissimilar to Goodnight Moon.) Brown’s book sees what a child would see, and care about; there is no plot.
