#You could make the argument that any swashbuckling adventure story is for kids but I'm a Scot and I have to repudiate that strongly | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

the-busy-ghost · 2 years ago

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British publishers seem to have a strange habit of classifying nineteenth century French novels as children’s books (a nebulous category I know- children are often more than capable of reading so-called ‘adult’ books but I find it odd nonetheless).

Jules Verne is the first one that springs to mind, but the one that always confuses me is ‘The Three Musketeers’. Yes it’s got all the swashbuckling ingredients that make up a good boys’ own story, but I’m really not sure that it’s strictly a ‘children’s’ classic.

This brought to you by the fact that I’m trying to sort all my other Dumas books into order when I realised that the ‘Three Musketeers’ wasn’t among them, even though it’s part of a wider ‘series’, the other books of which are in my ‘adult’ books. But because my copy of ‘The Three Musketeers’ was part of a set of ‘children’s classics’, it’s languishing in a box somewhere, alongside The Railway Children and the Secret Garden (great books both, but very different in tone I think). I don’t want to break that set up but I also don’t see why the story of Milady de Winter is more child appropriate than the Count of Monte Cristo.

#I should go back and reread Musketeers but even as a 9 year old I knew something stank about the treatment of Milady #And if it had been wrapped up as an adult book I would have been able to engage with the story and analyse it with the complexity it deserve #But the fact it's packaged up like a book for little children left me confused instead of intrigued as a kid #You could make the argument that any swashbuckling adventure story is for kids but I'm a Scot and I have to repudiate that strongly #Otherwise Scott and Stevenson- though not inappropriate for children either- would be left out in the cold #Why is it acceptable to do that to the French #To be fair Ivanhoe sometimes gets treated like a kids' book #Interestingly Waverley almost never is but that might just be because it's less popular nowadays #Kidnapped and Ivanhoe are both appropriate for kids in my opinion and so are most adventure stories don't get me wrong #Kids are pretty bright and ok so sometimes they're not ready for certain things but that's really up to them as readers #But if there was ever an adventure story that might have been more aimed at adult readers #I have to feel that it's the Three Musketeers #It's definitely a pattern with French translations in particular I think #Though some of the racism in the Lost World (also part of the children's classics set) also seems rather dubious #I don't know much about literature by the way it's not really my speciality so there may be reasoning #And I know that the concept of 'children's books' is a really vague and silly one #I just think it's odd that certain work by French authors tend to get lumped together under that label

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