On the evening of November 12, Caldecott Medalist Sophie Blackall joined Maria Popova, author and founder of the Marginalian, at the Morgan Library & Museum in Manhattan for a discussion about “Children’s Books as Philosophy for Living.” The event was part of an ongoing series of Centennial Conversations hosted by Popova in honor of the Morgan’s 100th anniversary. Guiding their talk were three objects in the Morgan’s collection: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s original watercolors for The Little Prince, which marked 80 years in print in 2023; the 1862 diary entry in which Lewis Carroll described his first telling of the story that would become Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; and Beatrix Potter’s picture letters, which contained early iterations of Peter Rabbit and other characters.
The recent election cast the work of children’s book artists in a new light for Popova. She told the audience, “I don’t believe in moralizing children, but I do believe that morality is a branch of the imagination—just like creativity and curiosity—and if the imagination is rooted in kindness, then morality stands a pretty good chance.” Popova suggested that “the solution” to current conflicts “must begin with the moral education, with raising children who cannot want or imagine a world that is not kind.” The duo dove down numerous rabbit holes, exploring this notion of children’s literature as springboard for empathy.
Gently teasing Blackall for being “ambivalent” toward The Little Prince, Popova said the book has been a personal touchstone. “The children’s books that endure can be read both when you’re a child and when you’re a grown-up,” she said. “I read The Little Prince once a year. And every year it tells me something about my life and the world I’m living in that I need to examine.”
Although Blackall doesn’t buy the portrayal of the prince as a young boy (“I’ve never met a child as wise or sweet or calm or focused”), she finds much to admire in the way Saint-Exupéry represents drawing. She referenced the opening pages of the story, in which the narrator recalls his early attempts at drawing a boa constrictor swallowing an elephant. “It’s a beautiful introduction to the book,” she said, “because everyone can draw—but we stop.” Popova agreed that, too often, children are discouraged by being “told [their drawing] doesn’t represent reality.” She wondered “how to preserve that fantastical imagination while adapting to the real world. Who are the kids who become artists and say, ‘I’m going to create wonder and fantasy, even though I live in the real world—and that’s also reality.’ ”
For Blackall, the desire to illustrate took hold at the age of seven, when she became fascinated with the way E.H. Shepard depicted Piglet’s ears in a particular drawing in Winnie-the-Pooh by A.A. Milne. “I would trace Shepard’s drawings because I couldn’t figure out how, with so few lines, he could create these characters that felt like my friends. It was the first book that did not condescend to me as a child,” she said. Fortunately, Blackall’s early passion for drawing was nurtured rather than discouraged. Years later, the invitation to illustrate Finding Winnie by Lindsay Mattick—the story of the bear that inspired Winnie-the-Pooh—represented a full-circle moment. She went on to receive the 2016 Caldecott Medal for her work.
Alongside The Little Prince, a formative book from Popova’s childhood was Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Born in Bulgaria under a dictatorship, Popova said, “I loved those fantastical worlds” created by Saint-Exupéry and Carroll—“both of them playing with the questions, ‘What is real? What is to be believed?’ ” Carroll (aka Charles Dodgson) was a mathematician and logician, and she remarked at how “he created this very coherent world where even the unreal things were internally consistent.” Although Wonderland is “the ultimate unreality,” Carroll’s fictional creation illuminates real aspects of human nature and society. “The fertile illusion of fantasy and the destructive delusion of fundamentalism share the same psychological structure,” she said. “They both enlist the imagination: fantasy mystifies in order to reveal some deeper truth, and fundamentalism mystifies in order to conceal.” Popova noted young Alice’s “moral courage” as she navigates this topsy-turvy world with its arbitrary rules and ruthless monarchs, who “use words to conceal the truth.”
Having reread the book recently for the first time since her children were young, Blackall said, “I also thought about how brave Alice was. It didn’t especially occur to me as a child, but she just says ‘yes’ at every turn.” She praised the story’s “delightful, subversive” quality and lamented how, by contrast, “so many of the books that we are making for kids today are didactic and moralizing.” While she hopes that “good books for children will guide them in a way to be more empathetic and kind people,” she said, “I do think that children deserve a story.” Popova added, “Stories are what make worlds.” The aim of children’s literature, she said, is “feeding young people’s imagination so they discover their own ability to make and break stories.”
Blackall expanded on the idea that books—especially fairy tales—offer a valuable form of agency for young people. “One of the things that distinguishes children’s books is they’re written for a swath of the population that has no power, basically.” As a balm for the “great unknown” of growing up, she aims to make books “that the child will want to read again and again and again. I’ve learned that children will want to return to that book, because they know how it ends, and very little in their lives is familiar in that way.” Ultimately, Blackall said, there’s room for every kind of story. Standing in opposition to book bans and those who seek to curtail children’s freedom to read, she said, “I’m a big believer in all the books—and letting [kids] choose which ones they want to read.”
The writers pivoted to discuss their third luminary: author, illustrator, and conservationist Beatrix Potter, who was the subject of a recent exhibition at the Morgan. Like Carroll—whose Wonderland grew from a story he improvised during a boat ride with Alice Liddell and her sisters—Potter wrote her books with specific young readers in mind. The early traces of her animal characters appear in her picture letters addressed to the children of her friend and former governess Annie Moore. Potter’s mindfulness of the child reader is also evident in the production of her books; she insisted on a small trim size because she wanted them to fit in a child’s hand and to be affordable.
Although Popova didn’t grow up reading Potter’s books (“she wasn’t big in Bulgaria”), she said she later “fell in love with her scientific drawings and studies of mushrooms. I love people who refuse to reduce their gifts to one category.” She always suspected that Potter’s tales might be a bit too saccharine for her taste, but Blackall countered, “One of my favorite things is that underlying darkness in something that seems sweet on the surface.” She noted how Potter’s scientific mind informed her storytelling. “Her characters are true to their animal selves,” she said. “They’re all basically trying not to eat each other!” Referencing Potter’s practice of dissecting her childhood pets after they died and preserving their pelts, Blackall concluded, “There’s nothing squeamish about her.”
Finally, returning to the notion of children’s books as guides for looking at and moving through the world, Blackall said, “I want to foster a curiosity in children so that they will feel confident that they can read any book that they might want to pick up. And so, if a child is encouraged to be curious, I believe that they will continue to read and they will become a more empathetic human being. And I think we need that.”
Popova replied, “There is no greater philosophy for living than curiosity, because that is the antidote to contempt.”
