Innocence destroyed? The Carnegie Medal and the post-Bulger years

By Lucy Pearson

The murder of two-year-old James Bulger in 1993 had a profound impact on discourses about childhood in the 1990s. A Britain shocked by the revelation that James’ abduction, torture and murder had been carried out by two ten-year-old boys was torn between soul-searching about how two children could have been led to commit such a horrific crime, and refusal to accept the child status of the killers at all. Was it a tragic outcome of bad parenting or exposure to video nasties? Or was this a case of children ‘born evil’?

The legal response to such questions largely came down on the latter side. The decision to conduct the trial publicly in an adult court – with the defendants separated from their parents in the dock and with court officials in full regalia – implicitly suggested the nature of the crime was such that Jon Venables and Robert Thompson had forfeited their child status even before they were convicted, even though the decision did not go uncriticised.

In the wake of their conviction, the whole idea of childhood innocence was fundamentally disturbed: in 1998 the concept of doli incapax (the principle that children under 14 could not be presumed to have full understanding of the difference between right and wrong) was abolished in the UK.

These questions also found their way into the world of children’s books.  Carnegie Medal shortlists in the years after the murder show a much more thoughtful and sustained consideration of childhood innocence than was present in newspaper reports which referred to the Bulger murders as ‘monsters’. These books repeatedly return to the question of how we treat our children, what they might be exposed to, and how we might understand deviation from innocent behaviour.

The Carnegie Medal is the UK’s oldest and most prestigious children’s book award. Established in 1936, it has played a significant role in creating many ‘modern classics’. Like most cultural awards, it has frequently been the target of criticism: so much so that on the occasion of its Silver Jubilee, the critic Brian Alderson commented that ‘perhaps the chief thing that the Jubilee should celebrate is the doughty resilience of that lady in the nightdress who holds sway on the obverse of the medal.’ But the choices of the 1990s provoked renewed anxieties not just about the choice of books, but about what they said about childhood itself. Such concerns were already rumbling at the start of the decade, when the Medal went to Berlie Doherty’s Dear Nobody (1991), which focuses on the experience of teenage pregnancy. This was a boundary-pushing topic for the Carnegie Medal; the particular qualities of Doherty’s book, however, mitigated its potentially controversial topic. The book’s protagonists, Helen and Chris, are both eighteen, on the verge of entering university. While the book deals with the legacy of family trauma – in the shape of illegitimacy and divorce – it is a book which straightforwardly focuses on what it means to move into adulthood, and which foregrounds secure, middle class experience. Although the subject of teenage pregnancy brings it within the genre of ‘problem novel’, the problem posed by Helen’s pregnancy is personal – and familial – not societal. Its selection for the Medal prompted questions about whether the award was for teenagers rather than children, but did not prompt more fundamental questions about the nature of childhood itself.

The winner for 1993, Robert Swindell’s Stone Cold, prompted much more discomfort. The book was selected after the Bulger trial (until 2004, the Medal was awarded a year in arrears), and though it does not touch on the same subject matter, it does reflect some of the cultural anxieties provoked by the case.

 Like Dear Nobody, the book was aimed at teenagers rather than children – its protagonist, Link, is sixteen – and can be said to be a ‘problem novel’, tackling teenage homelessness. Stone Cold deploys a dual narrative: Link’s narrative recounts his experiences living rough on the streets of London. It is interspersed with ‘Daily orders’ from ex-army ‘Shelter’, whose determination to rid London’s streets of homeless is gradually revealed to be his motivation not for charitable work, but for serial murder. Inevitably, the two narratives ultimately converge. In the wake of anxieties about whether Venables and Thompson’s crime had been prompted by ‘video nasties’, the decision to award the Carnegie to a book which portrayed a sadistic serial killer prompted some concerns about the effects of such topics on children. Indeed, even a member of the selection panel was reported to have misgivings, crying out that she wanted to ‘recapture the Carnegie for children.’ In comparison to Doherty’s novel, however, perhaps the most controversial element of Stone Cold was the lens it turned on society and its responsibility for its children.

The book opens with an epigraph from Matthew 25: ‘Inasmuch as you have done this unto the least of my brethren, you have done it unto me’. This is accompanied in later editions by a dedication to left-wing Labour MP Bob Cryer: ‘There was room in his world for all of us’. Taken together, these two epigraphs signal the major theme of the book: that society is failing its most vulnerable members. Link ends up on the streets after fleeing his violent stepfather, but this is not presented purely as a failure of the family. On the contrary, Link’s narrative demonstrates that failures in the social safety net make young people more vulnerable:

I’d got five GCSEs, which was a miracle when you remember what was going on at home, but I couldn’t get a job and there’s no government money for school-leavers. You’re supposed to be on a training scheme, but there aren’t enough places and I didn’t get on. I’m sure Mum would’ve supported me till I found something, but it wasn’t long before Vince started on at me about living on his money.

Robert Swindells, Stone Cold, p.5.

Stephen Moss, writing in the Guardian, suggested that Stone Cold positions its difficult narrative in the context of hope, citing the fact that the serial killer is caught. In fact, however, the image of society the book leaves us with is much bleaker: still living on the streets, Link reflects on the irony that his would-be murderer will benefit from three meals a day and a roof over his head. Although Shelter is the ostensible antagonist of the novel, then, the real antagonist is the society which turns a blind eye to the systems which result in young people falling victim to such predators. Similarly, while the gutter press had characterised Jon Venables and Robert Thompson as monsters, other reporting on the case had suggested that their crime might have been a result of nurture rather than nature. A Guardian story published in 2000 observes that: ‘a narrative emerged of two childhoods influenced not merely by the flaws of parents or the absence of a father, but by the environment in which these boys lived, a world of social and economic deprivation, of trashy television and cultural poverty, inadequate social services, failed schooling and general confusion.’  In selecting Stone Cold  for the 1993 award, the Carnegie committee were raising the same question posed by many reports on the trial: what are we doing to our children?

These questions were to recur in the Carnegie in the years that followed. 1994’s winner, Theresa Breslin’s Whispers in the Graveyard, features dyslexic Sol, struggling with a neglectful alcoholic father. These challenges make Sol a ‘problem’ pupil at school, but his truancy and learning difficulties are met with bullying rather than assistance by his teacher. The plot centres around a supernatural threat unearthed in a nearby graveyard, but as in Stone Cold the real antagonist is a social system which offers too little protection for its most vulnerable. More optimistic than Stone Cold, the book demonstrates that individual and familial difficulties can be overcome with outside aid: Sol’s life ultimately changes for the better following the intervention of a sympathetic teacher.

The Carnegie winner for 1995 was to become a major children’s literature phenomenon: the Medal went to Northern Lights, the first instalment of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. Pullman would go on to become the first children’s author to win the Costa book of the year (for The Amber Spyglass in 2001). Along with JK Rowling, his work ushered in a new era of high-profile children’s literature. It is significant that this came about in the wake of the Bulger murder: both Pullman’s trilogy and the Harry Potter series turn on questions of childhood innocence, familial love (or the lack of it), and the capacity of children for agency, good, and evil. Pullman’s philosophical treatment of the themes of innocence and experience in Northern Lights speak to the questions raised by the murder; he does not shy away from depicting children as capable agents who can lie and even kill when needed, but his concept of Dust makes the difference between children and adults a visible reality. In the universe of Northern Lights, the concept of doli incapax would perhaps be more difficult to set aside.

The themes of innocence and experience came to a head in the Carnegie Medal for 1996. The winner for this year engaged directly with the question of whether children are inherently innocent. Melvin Burgess’s Junk portrays its young teenage characters engaging in decidedly uninnocent behaviour: fourteen-year-old runaways Gemma and Tar are quickly drawn into heroin addiction, prostitution, and teenage parenthood. Like Robert Swindells, Burgess draws attention to the role of familial and societal failures in pushing young people into such situations. Tar is a victim of physical abuse from an alcoholic father, but because he is from a middle-class household, people are willing to ascribe his physical injuries to fighting rather than abuse. Gemma observes: ‘Tar’s dad’s a teacher at one of the local high schools. You can see the way my dad’s brain works. Teacher = good. Bad relationship with Tar = Tar’s fault.’ (Kindle edition: np).

Burgess’s portrayal of young teenagers, however, complicates an understanding of them as ‘innocent’. Although Tar has experienced real abuse, Gemma’s conflicts with her parents are more quotidian: she acknowledges that her situation is quite different to Tar’s, wondering at the start of the book, ‘Was being bored a reason for running away to the city at fourteen years old?’. Ultimately, though, it is her parents’ heavy-handed attempts at discipline which prompt her to leave. Offering a tongue-in-cheek guide to running away to the reader, she comments, ‘it might be easy and it might be hard, but how do you know? You’re only a kid, you’ve got things to learn’ (Kindle edition: np). The irony of Gemma’s knowing tone is revealed as the book unfolds: she has got ‘things to learn’ and her parents’ attempts to shield her from such knowledge has only served to make her more vulnerable. The premise that information actually works to protect young people’s innocence is central to the book. Its frank portrayal of the pleasures of drugs attracted particular controversy, but – Melvin Burgess argued – ‘we live […] in an age where television, radio, the press and the internet have rendered the secrets adults may wish to keep from children impossible to hide. […] Our best hope is to help them become fleet of mind, understanding, tolerant and above all, able to make decisions for themselves.’ The Carnegie judges concurred, responding to criticisms of their choice with the assertion that ‘Literature can help children explore the dark side of life’.

The Carnegie judges’ robust defence of Junk as the 1996 Medal winner speaks to the ways in which the Medal – and children’s publishing as a whole – had negotiated the issues raised by the Bulger murder. The books selected for the Medal in the years immediately following the murder and trial together represent a rejection of the binary understanding of childhood which had dogged much of the discourse around Jon Venables and Robert Thompson. The shocking nature of their crime had been so incompatible with ideas of childhood innocence that many commentators had been unable to acknowledge that Venables and Thompson were children at all. By contrast, the Carnegie winners of these years presented a view of children as both vulnerable and capable of agency, highlighting that violence, sexuality, homelessness and abuse were all parts of childhood experience. In these texts, the ‘childness’ of characters makes them more likely rather than less to respond to these experiences with undesirable or even ‘unchildlike’ behaviours. Cumulatively, the novels represent a call for a more nuanced understanding of children and a more robust social safety net: children are not, they suggest, inherently innocent, but nor can they be ‘born evil’. Both their innocence and their experience is socially constructed. 

About the Author

Lucy Pearson is Senior Lecturer in Children’s Literature at Newcastle University. Her research interests focus on twentieth-century children’s book history and publishing. She is author of The Making of Modern Children’s Literature in Britain: Publishing and Criticism in the 1960s and 1970s (2013) and the editor of Jacqueline Wilson: A New Casebook (2015). She is currently working on a history of the UK’s Carnegie Medal: recent publications on this topic include Prizing the Nation: postwar children’s fiction,  in Gill Plain, ed. Postwar: British Literature in Transition 1940-60 (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2019), pp.209-224 and  (with Karen Sands-O’Connor and Aishwarya Subramanian), ‘Prize Culture and Diversity in British Children’s Literature,’  International Research in Children’s Literature 2019, 12(1), 90-106.

References

Audrey Gillan. “Did bad parenting really turn these boys into killers?,” The Guardian, 1 November 2000.
Blake Morrison. “Life after James,” The Guardian, 6 February 2003.
Brian Alderson. “Going for Gold,” Books for Keeps 106, September 1997.
Jonathan Foster. “Bulger ruling: If the defendants could not talk about their crime, how could they conduct a defence?” The Independent, 17 December 1999.
Melvin Burgess. Junk. London: Penguin, 2003 [1996].
Melvin Burgess. “What is Teenage Fiction?” Books for Keeps 152, May 2005
Robert Swindells. Stone Cold. London: Penguin, 2016 [1993].
Stephen Moss, “Sex and drugs and a damn good read,” The Guardian, 9 July 1997.

Cite this article as: Lucy Pearson, “Innocence destroyed? The Carnegie Medal and the post-Bulger years,” in Changing Childhoods, 8 December 2020, https://changingchildhoods.com/the-carnegie-medal-and-the-post-bulger-years