Youth literature

The brothers Jacob Grimm (1785-1863) and Wilhelm Grimm (1786-1859), co-authors of an extremely monumental modern German-language dictionary, are first and foremost renowned in the academic circles of their homeland as two of the main founders of German philology.
But of course among us lesser mortals they are best known for their remarkable collection of popular tales that they published in two volumes in 1812 and 1815.
We present here three of the best tales, selected it is true largely (…)

Marie’s godfather is a very talented watchmaker who gives his grandchildren a castle with a marvellous set of animated figures on Christmas Eve – and a strangely realistic little figure with a large head that can crack nuts with its teeth. These presents are carefully put away by the parents for safekeeping out of reach of the children in a large showcase in the front hall, and Marie lingers there at midnight to admire them when she sees a group of mice led by their strange seven-headed king (…)

Dr. Heinrich Hoffman (1809-1894) drew this sketchbook with verse lessons for his three-year-old son as a Christmas present for him in 1844, after having been unable to find any books able to really interest someone of that age in the bookstores in his town of Frankfurt – they were all either too long, too boring, too stodgily moralistic, too full of adult vocabulary or, mostly, all of that together.
He was at the time the psychiatrist at the city’s Institute for the Mentally Ill – this is (…)

Written in 1862 by the Oxford lecturer in mathematics Charles Dodgson (1832-1898) to amuse Alice Liddell, one of the daughters of the dean of his Christ Church faculty, this brilliant, inventive, very original and very funny tale gained immediate world-wide attention when it was published in 1865 under the pen-name Lewis Carroll.
With its subtle psychology, its insights into the world of childhood, its linguistic creativity and its clever wit it has become one of the best-known and most (…)

Lewis Carroll’s wonderful sequel to "Alice in Wonderland" where Alice meets Humpty Dumpty, Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the Red and Black Queens and Knights, Tiger-Lily, the Walrus and the Carpenter, the Frog and the Gnat and the Lion and the Unicorn and talking flowers and so many other aspects of life – and language – on the other side of the mirror.
An all-time classic, thoroughly imbued with the charm and linguistic subtleties of Lewis Carroll’s inimitable style and imagination, as (…)

The famous tale of growing up in grassroots America in the first part of the 19th Century, with two of the best-known characters in the whole of American fiction, the resourceful and imaginative Tom Sawyer and his adventurous, semi-wild bosom friend Huckleberry Finn.
An American classic (although first published in England!) it was really intended for young people by its structure (anecdotes loosely linked together), its content matter (youthful escapades and high-jinks) and its style (…)

One of the best books for younger readers ever written - anyone who has not read this book around the age of 12 years or so has missed something important in the growing-up experience!
The writing is splendidly taut, the story moves along steadily at a nice pace, the bad guys are really well done – unlike the current mythology, pirates are not portrayed as romantic rebels or gentlemen of fortune revelling in their marginal ways, but as the savage cut-throat scum that they really were – and (…)

The young hero of this very interesting adventure story does get kidnapped early on as one expects from the title, but rapidly escapes from the ship which has absconded him off the west coast of Scotland, and spends the rest of the book wandering around the Highlands a) trying to find someone who can understand a word of English; (b) getting very seriously mixed up in the Jacobite rebellion raging at the time; c) hiding from the Crown troops who are actively hunting him as a murder suspect; (…)

Rudyard Kipling’s celebrated stories about life in the jungles of India, featuring notably the story of the abandoned boy Mowgli who has been adopted by a wolf pack, recounting his adventures with many other animals, notably the tiger Shere Khan, Baloo the bear and Kaa the python.
The other tales – all most charming and even instructive, and all with a distinctive poetical touch – involve the struggle of seals to survive the menace of mankind, the mongoose Rikki-Tikki-Tavi and his epic (…)

L. Frank Baum (1856-1919) was a prolific author of novels, short stories, poetry and theatre plays who achieved everlasting posthumous fame when this wonderful story about the adventures of Dorothy and her faithful companions (her dog Toto, a scarecrow without brains, a tin woodman without a heart and a cowardly lion) was made into a memorable Hollywood musical film in 1939 starring the young Judy Garland and directed by Victor Fleming that was later classified by the Library of Congress as (…)