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.
Brown, who wrote more than 100 books, as well as editing a children’s books imprint, spent hours studying and recording how children spoke and thought – in fact, Goodnight Moon recreates an actual game that she and her sister played as children. Children were, she once said, her books’ real authors; she was just “an ear and a pen”.
At the same time, the 130 words of text are carefully worked, holding, like the modernists Brown admired, echoes (to nursery stories, for instance, in their resolved states – bears sitting on chairs, kittens reunited with mittens) and subtle subversions, while the rhyming pattern plays with contrasting effects of full and part-rhymes, certainty and unpredictability.
The same is true of Clement Hurd’s pictures. A Fauvist who trained under Fernand Léger, Hurd was a forerunner of pop art who also illustrated a children’s book by Gertrude Stein – another believer in Mitchell’s theories. For Goodnight Moon, Hurd used a palette of flat, largely primary colours – enacting the way everything for a child is alive and vivid and not yet background – alternating them with pages of dream-vignette black and white.
Close attention is rewarded by references within references – to nursery rhymes, to a previous Brown/Hurd book The Runaway Bunny, to itself (Goodnight Moon on the bedside table); a doll’s house is lit from within, hinting at worlds within worlds, while the clock moves on in time from page to page, until all the light is from the stars and moon and dollhouse, and the bunny is asleep.
Goodnight Moon does have a moral then, but for adults: do children the honour of actually listening to them, to who they really are as opposed to who we think they ought to be. The longevity and popularity of this earliest of picture books is testament that this is as important and unusual now as it ever was.
