In memory of Danny D. Smith, Gardiner, Maine (1950-2019)

1Laura E. Richards (1850–1943), one of the most prolific and popular writers of children’s literature and Nonsense poetry of the nineteenth century is hardly remembered today other than perhaps as the biographer of her famous parents, Julia Ward Howe (1819–1910) and Samuel Gridley Howe (1801–1876). When Richards is mentioned in scholarly works, she is defined dismissively as the daughter of her mother and—following the vivacious spirit of her autobiographies—as the “cheerful” writer of children’s literature. This might explain why Richards has been overlooked and even disregarded despite the renaissance of interest in nineteenth-century American women writers. Another reason for this neglect is the overwhelming impact of Richards’s own “managed view” (Smith 71) of the history of her family in the several biographies and autobiographies she authored.

3This special issue is an attempt to change this state of affairs both by increasing the amount of scholarly research on Richards and the visibility of her work. It is in fact the first issue ever to be devoted solely to Richards’s children’s literature, granting Richards and her work the serious attention they have never received. Its nine contributions, which examine the literary value of Richards’s works as well as her cultural significance alongside questions of gender, genre, and canonicity, increase the amount of research on Richards exponentially, possibly enabling to evaluate Richards’s vast body of work more seriously in broader literary and cultural contexts. In addition, the volume introduces two of Richards’s poems to four more languages: German, Hebrew, Italian, and Polish in an attempt to bring Richards’s work to a wider and more diverse public, both English speaking but not only. The translators, all experts in the fields of linguistics, translation studies, and children’s literature offer brief insights into the process of translation and the challenges involved in translating Nonsense poetry and in translation by and large.

4Translations have always been central to the development of children’s literature and “an idealized view of translations of children’s literature holds that only the best gets translated” (O’Sullivan, 327). This might be argued for the two poems that have been rendered in other languages in this volume. At least from a critical perspective, both “My Japanese Fan” and “Eletelephony” have been found worthy of extensive scholarly attention, the first in an article by Etti Gordon Ginzburg from 2018 (“Queering the Victorian Nursery”), and the latter, “Eletelephony,” perhaps Richards’s most popular poem, in Verena Laschinger’s in-depth analysis in this volume.

7Accordingly, while the research presented here does not necessarily bid for a canonical status for Richards, its depth and scope are certainly indicative of the literary and cultural potential in studying Richards’s work. Reading the essays collected in this special issue, one may find Richards worthy of the attention granted to her not only as a skillful Nonsense writer, an earnest candidate for expanding the limited body of Nonsense literature, but also for her unique contribution as an American woman who wrote in her social roles as a wife, a daughter, and a mother—positions that have in many ways defined Richards’s work—and that bid further examination of the novel historical, cultural and personal perspective it sheds on white middle-class womanhood in nineteenth-century America. By doing so, this special issue is actively participating in recovering and re-appraising Laura Richards and her work.

8Treating Richards’s children’s literature (and children’s literature by and large) seriously as is done in this special issue is therefore as rare as it is radical. We nevertheless hope that this novelty will serve to challenge the view of Richards and her work but also question the traditional segregation of children's literature research.

9***

10The volume opens with Michaela Keck’s reading of Richards’s Nonsense poetry alongside the little-known Nonsenses of Margaret Atwood in The Penelopiad (2005) and The Testaments (2019). Aware that the juxtaposition of a nineteenth century children’s writer with a twentieth century canonical author for adults (who was only four years old when Richards passed away in 1943), might seem “startling,” Keck convincingly demonstrates that “Richards’s nineteenth-century Nonsense poetry offers insights into the Nonsense of Atwood’s postmodern fiction and vice versa.”

11Josephine Sharoni provides a similarly surprising comparative reading of Richards alongside William Shakespeare, whom the American author held in high regard. Taking the phrase “still-vexed” as the starting point of her analysis, Sharoni traces intertextual relations between Richards’s novella Captain January, adapted into a film starring Shirley Temple in the leading role in 1936, and Shakespeare’s play The Tempest. Attuned to subtle nuances in both writers’ poetic language, Sharoni effectively highlights the quality of Richards’s underrated children’s story, while advocating for greater attention to Shakespeare’s poetics and stylistics in the classroom.

12Jennifer Lewin writes about Richards’s In My Nursery (1890) within the framework of oneirocritical literature, a category whose subject matter, sleep and dreaming, encompasses works from the entire Western canon from antiquity to the present day (including the Bible, the Homeric epics, Shakespeare’s plays, and Romantic poetry among other). Discussing In My Nursery within this context, Lewin argues, both highlights the collection’s innovative qualities and emphasizes its relevance to the oneirocritic body of literature, and by implication the relevance of children’s poetry to literature by and large.

13Alongside sleep, Antonia Purk discusses several poems by Richards in the context of food, demonstrating how when served as Nonsense and seasoned with the genre’s typical excesses and contained violence, the poems dish out racist and classist warnings to white middle-class children. Often ending not only on a moralistic note but also with a clearly explicated “Moral,” Richards’s funny, entertaining poems clearly serve a serious educational purpose.

14Education is also one concern of Ralph J. Poole’s essay on Richards’s songs and singing boys. Taking the cue from Etti Gordon Ginzburg’s 2018 essay “Queering the Victorian Nursery: Laura Richards’s ‘My Japanese Fan,’” queer studies’ specialist Ralph J. Poole elaborates how Richards’s autobiography Stepping Westward (1932) and the songs in her 1939 collection The Hottentott and Other Ditties “offer non-hegemonic models and gender-fluid potential for envisioning boyhood” in the early twentieth century. In doing so, Poole attributes to Richards’s work a subversive quality that runs counter to its otherwise ostensibly affirmed heteronormativity and thereby, at least implicitly, questions the culture of masculinization prevalent around the turn of the century.

15Yifah Hadar’s Lacanian reading of two of Richards’s children’s poems, “My Japanese Fan” and “Prince Tatters,” seasons the rich literary stew presented in this special issue. By way of catachresis, “a form of speech that ‘abuses’ the next word for the proper,” Hadar argues, Richards’s poetry addresses destructive intradiegetic outcomes, “thus rendering the poetic expression of incest on both the semantic and rhetorical levels.”

16Verena Laschinger’s essay, surveying Richards’s seven-decades-long, prolific career, follows the author’s animal poetics diachronically, in the broader context of American culture and its changing attitude towards animals. Using the lens of Cultural Literary Animal Studies, Laschinger demonstrates how Richards transitions “from Aesopian to post-Darwinist animal fables in the late nineteenth century.” Laschinger then offers a close reading of Richards’s Nonsense poem “Eletelephony,” as an imagetext, which she claims is “a modernist make-over of Edward Lear’s Victorian model.”

17In her contribution to this volume, Etti Gordon Ginzburg who put Richards’s on the scholarly radar in the first place and long before the idea of a special issue about Richards was fathomable, advocates for reading Richards’s literary Nonsense as autobiography. “Beneath a playful surface,” Gordon Ginzburg concedes, “her rhymes reveal insights and tensions that her official autobiographies strategically obscure.” Making a case for a more serious acknowledgment of Richards’s children’s poems, Gordon Ginzburg manages, practically en passant, to expose the New Critics’ formalist dismissal of biographical readings as masculinist and elitist, and rather nonsensical.

18The volume concludes with a semi-personal piece by Gary Williams, Julia Ward Howe’s biographer to whom we owe the recovery and posthumous publication of her Laurence manuscript. Deliberately employing a non-academic register, Williams delineates his scholarly struggles tracing what he deems to be a queer, sybil Julia. Laura, Williams writes, was his foe—after all, as her parents’ biographer, Richards, the “Bowdlerizer-in-Chief,” concealed and destroyed any valuable material that might have harmed the celebrity status she had been carving for them—to fondness of the queerness she shared with her mother. Observing how “the daughter found authorization and example in her mother’s masterful array of voices when she launched her own literary career,” Williams ends with a deferential tone, albeit ironic, at the daughter’s most likely inadvertent exposure of her mother’s fascinating double voice. Williams’s beautiful autobiographical reflection, perhaps more than anything, highlights the transformative potential of the budding scholarship on Richards.