2.1 The Study of Representation in Children’s Literature

Before considering the portrayal of academics in children’s books, it is useful to survey the long history of the study of representation in children’s literature. Representation studies – focussing on the analysis of particular aspects featured in children’s literature by: their illustration; the tone and word choice used in textual description; and how these two interact – are usually targeted towards broad measures such as gender,Footnote ¹⁴ ethnic diversity and cultural identity,Footnote ¹⁵ parental roles,Footnote ¹⁶ sexualityFootnote ¹⁷ and disability.Footnote ¹⁸ Qualitative and quantitative analyses reveal time and time again that children’s literature is severely lacking in all areas of diversity.Footnote ¹⁹ Representational analysis is also used to study subjects in children’s literature as diverse as behavioural issues,Footnote ²⁰ school environments,Footnote ²¹ bereavement,Footnote ²² Art MuseumsFootnote ²³ and the appearance of objects such as the moon.Footnote ²⁴

These previous studies, which often analyse written and visual text in both qualitative and quantitative approaches, informed the methodology. The number of books analysed varies, depending also on the methods used: from close reading – with two books,Footnote ²⁵ four,Footnote ²⁶ thirteen,Footnote ²⁷ fourteenFootnote ²⁸– to the use of qualitative methods – with twenty-two books,Footnote ²⁹ twenty-five books,Footnote ³⁰ thirty-three,Footnote ³¹ thirty-seven,Footnote ³² seventy-three,Footnote ³³ seventy-four,Footnote ³⁴ seventy-eight,Footnote ³⁵ eighty,Footnote ³⁶ eighty-four,Footnote ³⁷ ninety-one,Footnote ³⁸ 100,Footnote ³⁹ 111,Footnote ⁴⁰ 200,Footnote ⁴¹ 300,Footnote ⁴² 455,Footnote ⁴³ 537Footnote ⁴⁴ and 952.Footnote ⁴⁵ Given the relatively large size of our corpus, a mixed method approach was both helpful and required, looking to the studies that carried out an analysis of over seventy books, using a content analysis methodology detailed in Section 3.

2.2 Why Study Representation in Children’s Literature?

Why does it matter to study such representation and to identify stereotypes? Entertainment media affects the behaviour, ethical approach, perspective, outlook and conduct of consumers.Footnote ⁴⁶ Much research into diversity in children’s literature assumes stereotypes are bad without explaining their mechanisms or the evidence that exists for their negative affect on child development. To counter this, Peterson and LachFootnote ⁴⁷ surveyed previously publicised research into the effects of gender stereotyping in children’s books on child development, showing ‘that the reading materials to which we expose children shape their attitudes, their understanding and their behaviour’,Footnote ⁴⁸ indicating that stereotypes

Likewise, SteyerFootnote ⁵⁰ updates this survey of research into the effects of gender stereotyping on children, including television, film, books, video games and the Internet, showing that negative portrayals had ‘a negative effect on female self-efficacy’.Footnote ⁵¹ Research into the effects of other stereotypes is in its infancy but is expected to closely follow these findings associated with gender stereotypes, and, indeed, the very threat of being judged negatively due to stereotypes affects performance.Footnote ⁵² Negative stereotypes can be subverted; for example, ‘exposure to non-sexist gender portrayals may be associated with a decrease in stereotypical beliefs about gender roles’.Footnote ⁵³ The success of ‘media literacy education to reduce the media’s role in perpetuating stereotypes – training people in the skills to “interpret, analyse, and critique” negative stereotypes ’ – is not yet well evidenced,Footnote ⁵⁴ but it offers a potential source of intervention into the perpetration of bias.Footnote ⁵⁵ Understanding the source, mechanism and prevalence of representational stereotypes helps unpack their power and provides a means by which to critique and suggest alternatives. The study presented here aims to provide an analysis of how academia is portrayed in children’s literature, in the hope we can both understand, improve and learn from it.

2.3 Analysis of Vocations in Children’s Literature

Analysing diversity in children’s literature, or the lack thereof, is a major contemporary topic for the research community.Footnote ⁵⁶ Previous work analysing the representation of different professions in children’s books focuses on occupational gender stereotypesFootnote ⁵⁷ and how they have changed over time: Allen et al.Footnote ⁵⁸ found a weak trend towards more egalitarian representation, although males are more likely to be characterized as ‘active, outdoors, and non-traditional … in diverse occupations more often than females’.Footnote ⁵⁹ Tangentially, a strand of research also follows, considering how occupational stereotypes are perceived by, and affect, children.Footnote ⁶⁰ The representation of individual, specific vocations in children’s picture books has received relatively limited attention, the focus instead having been primarily on distinct professions identifiable to children, such as doctors,Footnote ⁶¹ veterinarians,Footnote ⁶² librarians,Footnote ⁶³ farmers,Footnote ⁶⁴ soldiersFootnote ⁶⁵ and teachers.Footnote ⁶⁶ These studies examined various areas such as gender, ethnic diversity (the lack of diversity in both gender and race is a common cause for concern) and characteristics of the individuals portrayed, to look at both the explicit and implicit messages about these professions that the illustrations and text were conveying.

Of greatest interest is previous work done on the representation of scientists in children’s literature (in both fiction and nonfiction): it should be borne in mind that scientists are not all academics, and academics are not all scientists, but there is some understandable overlap between the two, and previous studies proved useful to this approach. Rawson and McCool examined images of 1657 scientists in 111 nonfiction juvenile trade books, demonstrating that ‘Scientists in these books are shown in a wide variety of settings and are largely missing stereotypical features’; however, ‘the standard image of the scientist as a White male is still perpetuated in these titles, and this is a cause for concern’. Footnote ⁶⁷ Van Gorp et al. looked at the representation of scientists in a range of books and comics aimed at Dutch children and teenagers, identifying seven main stereotypes: ‘the genius, the nerd, the puzzler, the adventurer, the mad scientist, the wizard, and the misunderstood genius’,Footnote ⁶⁸ stressing that scientists in children’s fiction were generally more stereotypically eccentric, undertaking more risky, useless experiments than those in factual texts. Similar findings emerged from Van Gorp and Rommes’ study of scientists in Belgian comic books.Footnote ⁶⁹ There has been a great deal of work done on the representation of scientists in media marketed towards adults, including literatureFootnote ⁷⁰ and film and television,Footnote ⁷¹ which will contribute to the discussion of the research findings: scientists in fiction are generally old, white malesFootnote ⁷² with a master narrative of the scientist as a bad and dangerous person linked to societal fears regarding the impact of technological change, which is particularly pronounced after the Second World War.Footnote ⁷³

2.4 Analysis of Higher Education in Popular Culture

Previous analysis of depictions of higher education in popular culture suggests

Even the campus novel itself, analysed in Showalter, while usually ‘sensational and apocalyptic’,Footnote ⁷⁵ adheres to these well-established hierarchies, dealing with anything that deviates from them in regard to sexuality or race in ways which are ‘quirky, pedantic, vengeful, legalistic, and inhumane. The ivory towers have become fragile fortresses with glassy walls’.Footnote ⁷⁶ There are well-established tropes of who gets to have intellectual agency within the fictional academy in books, television, and film, with gendered portrayals that ‘unjustly and inaccurately privilege men within the context of a higher education environment’.Footnote ⁷⁷

The analysis of higher education in specific comic strips has been carried out, such as in Tank McNamaraFootnote ⁷⁸ and Piled Higher and Deeper.Footnote ⁷⁹ A qualitative analysis of the representation of academia in American comic books published between 1938 and 2015 found examples of higher education, including settings and characters, in over 700 comic books, and purposively sampled them to analyse how Higher Education is depicted in generalFootnote ⁸⁰ and how professors are depicted specifically.Footnote ⁸¹ Expertise is the defining characteristic of comic book academics:

The dominance of STEM subjects is also identified, and the absence, or grotesque portrayal of women, leading to

Interestingly, ‘only rarely do professors deliberately work for nefarious purposes’,Footnote ⁸⁴ puncturing any expectations of evil scientists. ReynoldsFootnote ⁸⁵ traces the history of academia in comic books, finding both static and dynamic elements of depiction of fictional higher education. College itself is ‘a spaciously green, safe space that doesn’t really change … connect[ing] with and bolster[ing] public imaginings of US institutions of higher education’ but ‘depicting fictional institutions of indistinguishable type’.Footnote ⁸⁶ The act of going to college provides a structural narrative convention around which much action pivots. Students are a dominant focus, but there are also many professors ‘who are overwhelmingly male’ that ‘feature in narratives as main or supporting characters’ acting ‘as villains or rivals in some comic book narratives’.Footnote ⁸⁷ Women tend to have peripheral roles. Heroes are all white ‘but perhaps unsurprisingly, villains might not be’,Footnote ⁸⁸ and there is limited inclusion of diverse characteristics. Reynolds suggests that the ‘blanket anti-intellectual discourse in media related to higher education’ is replaced with ‘more sophisticated understandings of these themes’,Footnote ⁸⁹ sometimes challenging, but sometimes reinforcing, anti-intellectual messages. These studies provide a useful counterpoint to the work presented here; however, many of the comics surveyed are produced for a much older age range than is focused upon in this analysis.

2.5 Analysis of Individual Children’s Texts

There are a few analyses of individual academic scientists in children’s fiction. For example, Smith’s examination of the ‘kindly’ Professor Ptthmllnsprts (‘Put them all in Spirits’) from The Water-BabiesFootnote ⁹⁰ in his overview of the importance of science to the Victorian novel highlights how

Ptthmllnsprts is considered ‘a symbol of secular science … particularly illustrated by his obsession with collecting’ in Talairach-Vielmas.Footnote ⁹² Giddens uses Ptthmllnsprts as a frame to discuss the illustration of science to a nineteenth-century childhood audience, showing how the adult body dominates depictions of science.Footnote ⁹³ Bell’s consideration of Professor BranestawmFootnote ⁹⁴ looks at the ‘ways in which images of children or the childlike are used in the construction of the scientist’.Footnote ⁹⁵ JafariFootnote ⁹⁶ explores the Jungian archetype of the wise old man in The Chronicles of Narnia,Footnote ⁹⁷ examining Professor Digory Kirke’s role in temporally and intellectually framing the series from The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe onwards.Footnote ⁹⁸ Much academic interest surrounds the Harry Potter series;Footnote ⁹⁹ for example, see Heilman,Footnote ¹⁰⁰ WhitedFootnote ¹⁰¹ and Fenske,Footnote ¹⁰² with publications mentioning the professorial teachers at Hogwarts such as Birch, who demonstrates that Albus Dumbledore is a paragon: ‘kind and gentle, energetic and wise, trusting and trusted, experienced and patient’Footnote ¹⁰³ and that Minerva McGonagall’s ‘appearance, her personality, and her pedagogy conjure images of a stereotypical school-marm’.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ However, Birch stresses the ‘absence of intellectual work by teachers as well as the singular and completely school based identities’,Footnote ¹⁰⁵ and there is little consideration of the academic achievements or standing of the professors found in the Harry Potter critical literature (or, indeed, in the texts). Overall, considerations of lone academics are rare. There has been no prior overarching work found on trends and tropes in the representation of academics, more broadly framed, in children’s literature.

2.6 Conclusion

The literature review has shown that there has been no prior overarching research on the representation of higher education in children’s books, despite both the importance of these institutions to today’s society, and the fact that academics (such as professors and non-medical or research doctors) feature in many popular and enduring works. Nowadays, university is an expected educational ‘next step’ for a large proportion of school-leavers in the Western world, and the lack of prior work on how academia is portrayed to a childhood audience through literature is therefore surprising. There are useful research methods that can be appropriated from the analysis of representation in children’s literature and other media, and relevant prior work on how specific professions, including scientists, are portrayed and perceived in children’s literature. Understanding the representation of the university sector in books marketed towards a young audience is important, given the effect stereotypes and portrayals have on children’s actuation and development, and this analysis will reveal what messages are being portrayed to young children about intellectual achievement and higher education.

3.1 Building the Corpus

The corpus was constructed over a four-year period between April 2012 and April 2016, gathering all relevant texts possible that were published before the close of 2014. The gap between the end of the census and analysis allows for the fact that books often take a while to appear in library catalogues or other online environments. The use of digital resources was central to this task, facilitating the commonly used information seeking behaviour of starting, chaining, browsing, differentiating, monitoring and extractingFootnote ¹⁰⁶ to identify relevant examples. Seed keywords included many terms related to academia (and their plurals): academic; academy; campus; college; degree; doctor; faculty; fraternity; fresher; freshman; graduate; graduation; lecturer; polytechnic; professor;Footnote ¹⁰⁷ research; researcher; semester; sophomore; student; term; tutor; undergraduate; university; and varsity.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ The irony is not lost here that searching for illustrated academics in children’s books required textual searches: there is no current way to allow searching for aspects of academia that may be pictured, such as mortar boards or academic gowns and hoods, in illustrated texts, many of which are still in copyright and few of which are available in digital form. Such representations, without textual explanation, may also only be of old-fashioned schoolteachers (for example, this is surely the case with the bespectacled, gowned scholars seen in the background of the town square in Zeralda’s OgreFootnote ¹⁰⁹).

Standard online bibliographies, major library catalogues, specific children’s literature resources and digital libraries were consulted. These included WorldCatFootnote ¹¹⁰ and libraries such as The British Library,Footnote ¹¹¹ The National Library of Scotland,Footnote ¹¹² The National Library of AustraliaFootnote ¹¹³ and The Library of Congress.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Specific catalogues of children’s literature that were utilised include The International Children’s Digital Library,Footnote ¹¹⁵ The International Youth Library,Footnote ¹¹⁶ The Children’s Literature Collection at Roehampton University,Footnote ¹¹⁷ Children’s Literature Research Collections at the University of Minnesota,Footnote ¹¹⁸ The National Centre for Children’s Books (UK),Footnote ¹¹⁹ The Center for Children’s Books at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,Footnote ¹²⁰ The Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature at the University of FloridaFootnote ¹²¹ and the Children’s Literature Collection at the State Library of Victoria.Footnote ¹²² Digital libraries used included Google Books,Footnote ¹²³ Hathi Trust Digital Library,Footnote ¹²⁴ the Internet ArchiveFootnote ¹²⁵ and the Digital Public Library of America.Footnote ¹²⁶ The coverage and cataloguing in these resources varied, but the combination of a positive match on at least one of the search terms and a note that a book was illustrated was enough to check a copy, ideally of the physical book or a digitised version from a reputable source, for an instance to be included in this corpus. In some cases, user-generated videos of children’s books being read aloud, which had been posted to YouTube,Footnote ¹²⁷ also proved to be a useful resource for the checking of details (although the problematic relationship of these amateur videos to official publishing channels is acknowledged).

In addition to traditional bibliographic methods, the building of the corpus was facilitated by interacting with online communities and via social media. Many of the mentions of universities, professors or doctors do not appear either in the title of the book or in library catalogue descriptions, meaning examples were not apparent through a traditional literature search: for example, Professor Euclid Bullfinch in Danny Dunn and the Antigravity PaintFootnote ¹²⁸ or Mrs Hatchett, Doctor of Literature in The Pirate’s Mixed-Up Voyage.Footnote ¹²⁹ However, there are various other online sources that contain textual details, including listings on Amazon,Footnote ¹³⁰ eBayFootnote ¹³¹ and online marketplaces specialising in rare books such Abe Books,Footnote ¹³² AlibrisFootnote ¹³³ and Biblio:Footnote ¹³⁴ these are useful precisely because they contain alternative descriptions to library catalogues. In particular, user reviews on Amazon and other social media sites for reviewing, tracking and rating books, such as GoodReads,Footnote ¹³⁵ LibraryThing,Footnote ¹³⁶ BookDigitsFootnote ¹³⁷ and Shelfari,Footnote ¹³⁸ and fan forums such as posts on Stack Exchange,Footnote ¹³⁹ revealed university-related content. The author’s own use of social media throughout this project helped identify candidates: finds were parked on a dedicated Tumblr microblog, ‘Academics in Children’s Picture Books’,Footnote ¹⁴⁰ and the topic was regularly discussed on the social media platform Twitter.Footnote ¹⁴¹ In 2014 a preliminary analysis of the corpus was presented on the author’s blog,Footnote ¹⁴² which was syndicated and featured elsewhere onlineFootnote ¹⁴³ and in print in the Times Higher Education.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ This activity encouraged others to get in contact to propose further candidates for inclusion: 20 per cent of the corpus was provided by readers’ suggestions, which would not have been found by any other method. For example, two professors in an Oor Wullie cartoon,Footnote ¹⁴⁵ spotted by Ann Gow and sent to the author via Twitter: ‘Crivens, profs from Oor Wullie, 1944. A’bodys stereotype.’Footnote ¹⁴⁶

It is acknowledged that there will be other relevant texts that have not been found,Footnote ¹⁴⁷ but the limits of both traditional and non-traditional bibliographic methods to gather candidates for the corpus have been exhausted.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ In addition, the online information environment is ever shifting and it is difficult to replicate the conditions and sources upon which a search was based: if this corpus were started in the ‘now’ of the reader, it would likely be different to the one on which this analysis is based, which was gathered between 2012 and 2016. The constraints of copyright upon digital libraries plays a part in the ease of finding texts, with many pre-1920s texts being available digitally in the public domain, and those after unable to be computationally full-text searched.

Paradoxically, given how useful online search mechanisms were to finding texts, it was incredibly difficult to identify bona fide candidates for the corpus printed after 2007, given the exponential rise in self-published ebooks. Although the ‘[s]elf-publishing of books has a long and illustrious history’,Footnote ¹⁴⁹ the ease at bringing self-published books to market changed in 2007 when the Kindle Digital Text Platform was launched, allowing authors to format and upload texts for sale as self-published books on Amazon.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ ‘Publishers’ such as CreateSpace, iUniverse, Lulu Enterprises, Inc., Xlibris Corporation and AuthorHouse are actually print-on-demand services which individually print ebooks once a sale has been made, supporting the self-publishing market.Footnote ¹⁵¹ At the time of writing, there are over one million self-published books listed on Amazon via its CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform service.Footnote ¹⁵²

These changes in the publishing environment have resulted in the flooding of the literature market with digital-only texts of variable quality, with little signs of readership.Footnote ¹⁵³ For example, an imprint of Speedy Books LLCFootnote ¹⁵⁴ giving itself the author name ‘Baby Professor’ uploaded 102 digital-only children’s books for Kindle to Amazon on 15 December 2015 alone.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Given the huge number of ebooks of questionable quality identified by the methodology that were published after 2007, it was decided to exclude digital-only, or print-on-demand, texts from the corpus. Examples thus excluded on these grounds include the print-on-demand Professor Woodpecker’s Banana SandwichesFootnote ¹⁵⁶ and the only-available-in-ebook The Adventures of Professor Bumble and the Bumble Bees: the pool,Footnote ¹⁵⁷ neither of which have been included in any of the 16,452 library collections worldwide that share their digital bibliographic catalogues via WorldCat.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ It should be noted that the vast numbers of digital-only ebooks produced for children since 2007 raises methodological questions for the study of present-day children’s literature, just as questions are being raised and methods developed within the library sector to catalogue and process self-published items and e-resources.Footnote ¹⁵⁹

Once candidates for inclusion were identified, the texts were consulted to check they met the criteria. More than three-quarters of the corpus was purchased. The current low cost of second-hand books, many retailing for a penny online, made this feasible.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ Rare and prohibitively expensive texts were consulted while on other academic business to major libraries including The British Library, The National Library of Scotland, The Koninklijke Bibliotheek, and The National Library of Australia. Online versions of texts from digital libraries were extensively used. Digitised versions of twenty-one items were procured using ‘digitisation on demand’ services, mainly from libraries in North America. For example, The Dream Slayer Mystery, Or, the Professor’s Startling CrimeFootnote ¹⁶¹ was digitised within a matter of days, without cost, by Northern Illinois University Libraries (thanks!). Despite this multi-pronged approach, there were twenty books identified that could not be viewed in person: although Legal Deposit Libraries can request copies of all books printed within their jurisdiction, the current situation for library provision of children’s book collections was explained by John Scally, the National Librarian of Scotland:

As a result, it can be difficult to find print copies of minor, pre-twentieth century children’s books, even in major national libraries. The twenty potential books that could not be located, many of which were printed in Singapore and Malaysia,Footnote ¹⁶³ were therefore sadly excluded from the analysis, although they are listed in Appendix C.

3.2 Analysing the Corpus

Once potential books had been identified, they first had to be checked to see if they met the relatively strict criteria for inclusion. Firstly, it became apparent that mentions or illustration of any facet of higher education were for the most part associated with specific fictional characters, meaning the research began to focus on these doctors and professors. Books were checked to ensure they did contain images relating to a fictional academic, keeping the analysis here strictly to fantasy: heavily illustrated books discussing the work of real academics and their research are not included. There is a parallel strand of these texts throughout the history of children’s literature: for example, Victorian texts encouraging curiosity and experimentation, such as The Boys’ Playbook of ScienceFootnote ¹⁶⁴ and A Short History of Natural Science: And of the Progress of Discovery from the Time of the Greeks to the Present Day.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ More recently, there are many biographies of real scientific figures specifically produced for the children’s literature market. This is a fascinating subgenre, with a variety of picturebook biographies available for leading scientific figures such as Mary Anning,Footnote ¹⁶⁶ Albert EinsteinFootnote ¹⁶⁷ and Marie Curie.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ For this study it was felt that comparing the representation of fictional academics such as Professor Pippy Pee-Pee Diarrheastein Poopypants EsquireFootnote ¹⁶⁹ or Professor PigglePoggleFootnote ¹⁷⁰ to the accomplishments of world-leading innovators such as Anning or Einstein was simply not appropriate. For an analysis of the portrayal of scientists in children’s science biographies, see Dagher and Ford:Footnote ¹⁷¹ non-fiction texts are often aspirational and can exist as a counterpoint to the biases which are entrenched within fiction, and an analysis specifically of how academics are represented within these would be an obvious future study.

Generic scientists with no academic title or stated university affiliation are not included (which would be another future study). This excludes the likes of the wonderful Mrs Castle, who goes to work as an atomic scientist while her husband stays at home, minds the children and makes plum preserves in Jam: A True Story,Footnote ¹⁷² given there is no mention of her academic title or university setting. Medical doctors are not included in the corpus, unless they are noted as carrying out some aspect of university-based research, for example, Dr Dog,Footnote ¹⁷³ who ‘went to a Conference in Brazil to give a talk about Bone Marrow’Footnote ¹⁷⁴, or Doc Eisenbart in Daisy-Head Mayzie,Footnote ¹⁷⁵ who thinks that the plant growing out of Mayzie’s head will assist him in getting research funding. Doctor Dolittle also falls into this category,Footnote ¹⁷⁶ as he leaves medicine to undertake zoological research (although he is on the very borderline of being included in this study, showing how difficult it can be to set up exhaustive classification frameworks).

Characters that first appear in film, television or video games are excluded: this research focusses on those that originate from children’s texts, rather than in book spin-offs created from other media. This eliminated a variety of material including: books containing Professor Yaffle from the much-loved television show Bagpuss,Footnote ¹⁷⁷ the Professor Fizzy cookbooks based on the online series by PBS Kids, Fizzy’s Lunch Lab;Footnote ¹⁷⁸ the professors in Pokémon Black and White, a manga cartoon book series based on the Pokémon video game;Footnote ¹⁷⁹ and the hundreds of books based around the Pixar film Monsters University.Footnote ¹⁸⁰ These are just some of the academic characters found that did not have their genesis in books: an analysis of the representations of higher education in other media marketed to children is an obvious follow-up study.

Characters who appear first in magazines and comics specifically marketed towards a pre-teen audience were included – which meant that professors appearing in Wide Awake (1886), St Nicholas (1888), The Up To Date Boy’s Library (1900), Oor Wullie (Sunday Post 1944), Eagle (1950), Jinty (1977), Toby and See-saw (1977) and Rupert the Bear (1993) feature. Given the importance of children’s magazines and serials to the history of children’s literature,Footnote ¹⁸¹ it seems churlish to exclude them here, and comics have been included in other studies of children’s literature.Footnote ¹⁸² However, because of the difficulties in finding content in early comics, it is likely that they are a source of more academics for the corpus, and this shall continue to be pursued in a future study via references in the Grand Comics Database.Footnote ¹⁸³ Comics marketed towards a young-adult audience and upwards, such as superhero titles, were excluded from the analysis given the complexity of knowing whether this material is age-appropriate (although, without a doubt, many of these comic books are accessed and read by younger childrenFootnote ¹⁸⁴).

Books originally written for or marketed towards adults, which may now be commonly thought of as Young Adult Fiction, were also excluded (in particular, the works of Jules Verne fall into this category,Footnote ¹⁸⁵ as do those of Arthur Conan Doyle). There are fictional reimaginings of characters that first appear in previously published fiction, with Frankenstein and Frankenstein’s monster (who are often conflated) frequently reimagined as characters in other children’s books; for example, Making Friends with Frankenstein;Footnote ¹⁸⁶ The Frankenstein Teacher;Footnote ¹⁸⁷ and Robot Zombie Frankenstein.Footnote ¹⁸⁸ Given the huge volume of these, just one randomly chosen example is included here for completeness (Dr Frankenstein’s Human Body Book: The Monstrous Truth about How Your Body WorksFootnote ¹⁸⁹); likewise, one reimagining of Professor Van Helsing from Dracula (How to Slay a WerewolfFootnote ¹⁹⁰) is included. An analysis of how famous literary figures (such as Frankenstein and his monster, or Dracula and Van Helsing) have been repurposed in children’s literature would be a separate study.

Each academic is only counted once in the quantitative analysis, so in the case of a character who appears in multiple books in a series, such as Professor Branestawm,Footnote ¹⁹¹ they are only recorded the first time they appear in illustrated form (which may not be in the first edition of the text: for example, Professor Ptthmllnsprts appears in Kingsley’s The Water-Babies in 1863, but is not illustrated until the 1885 edition; Dr Mary Malone appears in Pullman’s The Subtle Knife of 1997, but is not pictured until the Folio Society Edition in 2008Footnote ¹⁹²). This concentrated the corpus on when figures were first presented to a childhood readership.Footnote ¹⁹³ Illustrated books with a Professor or Doctor in the title are included even if there is not an illustration of that individual: it was noted during the course of the research that the academic can sometimes be an absent, omniscient narrator, guiding the reader through a voice of authority (although these texts are in the minority, with only five in the corpus: for example, Professor Miriam Carter in The Mystery of Unicorns, The True History RevealedFootnote ¹⁹⁴). Both fiction and non-fiction texts were examined, as fictional professors are often employed as a device of authority to encourage education and instruction in factual texts, as well as being characters in fiction: ambitiously, the full range of books produced as part of the children’s literature market is considered here.

Once the corpus was constructed, all books were read and notes taken on the text. An open coded content analysisFootnote ¹⁹⁵ was used to identify and delineate concepts about each academic, including name, gender, age, appearance, subject area, temperament, place of publication etc., using a developing coding scheme to produce label variables that emerged from the data itself as each individual instance was examined. Based on a grounded theory methodology,Footnote ¹⁹⁶ this technique assists in the synthesis of large amounts of informationFootnote ¹⁹⁷ and can facilitate an efficient and effective summative evaluation of documentary material.Footnote ¹⁹⁸ Previous studies have used a fixed coding instrument developed in advance of the analysis of the data: for example, ChambersFootnote ¹⁹⁹ developed the ‘Draw-a-Scientist Test’ (DAST), which looked at seven common features of scientists in addition to gender, and this has been adapted and used since by others.Footnote ²⁰⁰ Instead, a coding instrument that could expand to encompass many aspects as the analysis progressed was employed.Footnote ²⁰¹ For example, as it became clear that gender uniformity was a major issue, the gender of the writer of each text was determined (to the best available knowledge)Footnote ²⁰² in order to ascertain whether there was a correlation between male writers and male protagonists. Working with a large but defined set of texts which did not exceed ‘a single researcher’s analytic capabilities’Footnote ²⁰³ meant that this coding methodology was the most efficient for this application. Data were checked and cross-referenced at various intervals, including a complete corpus check at the close of the analysis to identify any duplication or errors, allowing the results to be audited and ‘validated in principle’Footnote ²⁰⁴ even though undertaken by a sole researcher. This analysis was undertaken incrementally from 2014 onwards, and finalised alongside the final list of texts included in 2016, with the write-up undertaken from August 2016 onwards.

Clark notes that, while quantitative approaches such as content analysis provide a valuable tool for feminist and socialist analyses of children’s literature, the limits of positivist methodologies can result in narrow findings under a certain pressure to quantify.Footnote ²⁰⁵ Clark stresses the importance of qualitative methods: ‘it is time for feminist social scientists to do something other than counting as well’.Footnote ²⁰⁶ In this study, quantitative approaches are used in tandem with detailed qualitative analysis, juxtaposing close and distant readingFootnote ²⁰⁷ and treating both illustrations and their surrounding stories as unified texts,Footnote ²⁰⁸ to provide a multifaceted approach to a broad corpus in order to identify and understand its major themes. The broad content analysis allows us to identify trends, and to track and present both individual textual and pictorial examples for closer scrutiny, looking at the ‘complementarity of image and text’Footnote ²⁰⁹ both ‘literally and expressively’.Footnote ²¹⁰ This is done rather than focussing solely on illustrative techniques employed: given the size and scope of the corpus there is a full range of both monochrome and colour printing processes used, and attention is drawn to the mechanics and features of individual illustrations (given that there can be many pictures of a single character throughout even one book) only when pertinent. Examples of both illustrations and quoted text are woven into the analysis where useful and instructive, to flesh out and describe the findings. Copyright clearance for these was an arduous and expensive process,Footnote ²¹¹ undertaken in 2017.

3.3 Conclusion

The gathering and analysis of the corpus presented here was no small task, and required a structured, methodological approach to identify texts that originated as being developed for a child reader (rather than as spin-offs from other media). Taking the time to develop such a stringent framework allows confidence in the resulting corpus of 289 books, while providing the basis for their qualitative and quantitative analysis.

4.1 An Overview of the Corpus

There were 328 academics found in 289 different English-language illustrated children’s books, which are listed in Appendices A and B. The English-language corpus is international, with the majority published in the United Kingdom (49%) and the United States (41%),Footnote ²¹² but with texts also from Australia (5%), Canada (2%), India (1%), New Zealand (1%) and one text each from Ireland, Germany, South Africa and Singapore. It is noted that amongst these, some – such as The Water-Babies,Footnote ²¹³ the Dr Dolittle series,Footnote ²¹⁴ the Professor Branestawm series,Footnote ²¹⁵ The Famous Five series,Footnote ²¹⁶ The Chronicles of Narnia,Footnote ²¹⁷ The Moomins series,Footnote ²¹⁸ the His Dark Materials seriesFootnote ²¹⁹ and the Harry Potter seriesFootnote ²²⁰ – are more popular and enduring than others – such as Walk Up! Walk Up! and See the Fools’ Paradise: with the Many Wonderful Adventures There as Seen in the Strange, Surprising Peep Show of Professor Wolley Cobble,Footnote ²²¹ The Wisdom of Professor Happy,Footnote ²²² Professor Peckam’s Adventures in a Drop of Water,Footnote ²²³ Professor Fred and the Fid-FuddlephoneFootnote ²²⁴ or Vampire Cat, the Phoney-Baloney Professor.Footnote ²²⁵

The books were classified given their potential audience’s age range, as catalogued using the MARC 21 bibliographic specification ‘target audience’ 22/006/05,Footnote ²²⁶ which indicates whether a book is written for an unknown, preschool, primary, pre-adolescent or adolescent reader. No infant board books containing fictional academics were found.Footnote ²²⁷ There are ABC board books about real universities, particularly in the United States, marketed towards ‘alumni, students, and toddling future graduates alike’;Footnote ²²⁸ for example, B is for BaylorFootnote ²²⁹ and 1, 2, 3 Baylor: ‘Babies and toddlers can get to know Baylor University before they can even speak!’Footnote ²³⁰ However, no fictional academics in books for very young children were identified. Additional words have to be associated with the illustrations to indicate academic affiliation (which is a limiting prerequisite of this methodology), and in books designed to develop the vocabulary of very young children it is unlikely that the word ‘Professor’, or other words associated with the university, will be prioritised. Mentions of higher education which are not made in relation to a character such as a Professor or Doctor are very rare.Footnote ²³¹ Only two exceptions to this were found: in the picturebook Baby Brains, the smartest baby in the world is pictured out for a walk in his buggy, pushed by his mum, and ‘On the way home Baby Brains said he wanted to go to university and study medicine’;Footnote ²³² in Flix,Footnote ²³³ the eponymous dog goes to university, as a normal episode of the anthropomorphic life described between birth and becoming a parent himself, although there is high drama as he saves a student from a fire in the female dormitory, whom he then goes on to marry. The university setting here is incidental, although there is an unnamed, pipe-smoking dog in full academic regalia, sitting at a bench. While it would be possible to manually search through children’s picture books looking for visual signifiers of higher education such as this – mortar-boards, gowns and degree scrolls – this is an impossible-to-quantify manual task.

As the target age range of audiences for the books rises, there are more instances of professors: the corpus consists of 22 % Preschool texts (ages 3–5), 33 % Primary (6–8) and 35 % Pre-adolescent (9–11) texts. Understandably, the books move more and more towards full text throughout these stages, with more contextual detail provided. Books marketed towards a 12+ (Adolescent) range make up only 10 % of the corpus, usually having small or occasional illustrated decorations,Footnote ²³⁴ and it can be difficult to know where the cut-off point for inclusion in the children’s literature corpus is. The majority of the books are fiction (255, 88 %). There are twenty factual books (7 %) explained by a fictional professor, such as Professor Standish Brewster, professor of Pilgrimology at Plimouth University (sic), who explains the voyage of the Mayflower from Plymouth to the New World in 1620, in Two Bad Pilgrims,Footnote ²³⁵ or a sympathetic kingfisher who answers questions about the natural world, agony aunt style, in the Ask Dr K. Fisher series:

There is one cookery bookFootnote ²³⁷ and one art and craft manual.Footnote ²³⁸ Fourteen books (5 %) are a curious blend of fact and fiction: where a fictional professor explains how the world works, but get it very, very wrong. This is used for comic effect, such as in the Dr Xargle seriesFootnote ²³⁹ (this genre will be explored in Section 5), but also to persuade children of the veracity of ideas: seemingly ‘academic’ expertise is used to promote creationism and other religious propaganda, for example in Professor Noah Thingertoo’s Bible Fact Book, Old Testament.Footnote ²⁴⁰

4.2 The Appearance of Professors in Children’s Literature

The earliest Professor is to be found in a chapbook primer,Footnote ²⁴¹ printed circa 1850:Footnote ²⁴² The Parents’ Best Gift: A New Spelling Book, Containing a Large Quantity of Reading, Spelling, etc. with the additional cover title Professor Howard’s First Step to Learning. The content of the primer – as is common for chapbooks – is adapted, reprinted and copied from earlier publications promoting both the Anglican Church catechisms and rote learning of letters and numbers.Footnote ²⁴³ The fictional Professor Howard featured within a classroom setting (See Figure 1) is presumably invoked to represent intellectual, academic and social authority as a positioning device to promote and encourage children’s learning (although that authority is directed towards the adult purchasing the book: this primer, in an increasingly crowded market, is the one you should trust). The picture of Professor Howard with his class – reminding us that professors are associated with teaching as well as expertise – is juxtaposed with an ambiguous image on the title page that looks remarkably like Field Marshal Arthur Wellesley, the 1st Duke of Wellington (1769–1852). It was common for woodcuts to be reused by early printers,Footnote ²⁴⁴ and often ‘children’s books were built up out of woodcuts lying around in the shop or borrowed from other works’.Footnote ²⁴⁵ This particular untitled image is further used to convey power: it may or may not be our Professor Howard, but this is a book confidently espousing its teaching credentials in a display of male authority and privilege. There is no further mention of the professor within the text, which is a short, fourteen-page pamphlet containing the popular Tom Thumb’s Alphabet,Footnote ²⁴⁶ reading lessons, church catechisms, and ‘one hundred moral maxims’ such as ‘Books alone can never teach the use of books’.Footnote ²⁴⁷

Figure 1

Woodcut illustrations, title page (left) and frontispiece (right) from The Parents’ Best Gift: Professor Howard’s First Step to Learning (circa 1850),.

used with permission, Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, Opie G 255

The use of a Professor in the publication of this fourteen-page pamphlet in the mid-nineteenth century is significant. During this period, children’s education was rapidly changing, becoming more institutionalised with an expansion of the scholastic system (which is reflected in children’s literature of the periodFootnote ²⁴⁸). The new importance of learning resulted in an expanding market for ABC books, chapbooks and primers,Footnote ²⁴⁹ although many of these were ‘numbingly dull compilations of facts and dates which Victorian schoolchildren had to learn by heart in those “catechetical” classes’.Footnote ²⁵⁰ Well-circulating textbooks were printed throughout the nineteenth century that traded on the academic qualifications of the authors as an imprimatur. An 1816 guide for Young LadiesFootnote ²⁵¹ contains a ‘hypothetical bookseller’s bill’ as a ‘revealing index of what were considered desirable reading habits’:Footnote ²⁵² out of twenty-four (real) texts, three are written by those with higher degrees, and sold as such: Dr Watts’ Improvement of the Mind (first published 1741, with many subsequent editions);Footnote ²⁵³ Essays on Rhetoric by Dr Blair (first published in 1784 with many subsequent reprints)Footnote ²⁵⁴ and Dr Mavor’s New Speaker, or English Class Book (1811).Footnote ²⁵⁵ Dr Isaac Watts and Dr Hugh Blair both spent considerable time in the academy and gained qualifications.Footnote ²⁵⁶ However, Dr Mavor is a pseudonym for Sir Richard Phillips, a schoolteacher and bookseller, and the title is presumably used for marketing purposes.Footnote ²⁵⁷ This established mechanism of academic titles being used to frame a text’s trustworthiness crosses over into a recommendation from a fictional professor in our mid-nineteenth century chapbook: indeed, much of the religious text for this chapbook appeared in an earlier format which was promoted by an actual academic figure, Dr William Paley:Footnote ²⁵⁸ Parents Best Gift containing the Church Catechism, Questions and Answers out of the Holy Scriptures. Dr Paley’s Important Truths and Duties of Christianity.Footnote ²⁵⁹ This title, and the habit of using an academic imprimatur to promote texts, indicates a potential trajectory for the switch into fictional endorsement of the reprint of the text in Professor Howard’s First Step to Learning, around 1850. By the late nineteenth century, other authors with professorial titles are selling textbooks, such as Professor Miekeljohn’s Series, one of the first, best-selling standard set of school textbooks in the late Victorian era, written by J. M. D Meikeljohn, Professor of the Theory, History, and Practice of Education at the University of St Andrews and published by Blackwoods from 1883 onwards.Footnote ²⁶⁰

Professors would have become more visible during this period, as the university sector was also transforming, becoming more established throughout the world and playing an increasing role in society, integrating science into a curriculum that had previously eschewed it.Footnote ²⁶¹ Between the 1860s and 1930s ‘a small, homogenous, elite and pre-professional university turned into a large, diversified, middle-class and professional system of higher learning’,Footnote ²⁶² transforming universities from what had been previously been viewed as an optional phase in the development of privileged young white gentlemen into a core institution informing modern society.Footnote ²⁶³ Moving away from their ‘traditional task of serving the older landed and professional elite’,Footnote ²⁶⁴ universities started to adapt to the needs of industrial society. As ‘pressure intensified on parents to invest in education’,Footnote ²⁶⁵ and as the university curriculum became more distinct from secondary schooling, accelerated further by state intervention, we see the forming of an ‘academic profession, which only becomes recognizable as such at the end of the nineteenth century’.Footnote ²⁶⁶ The emergence of ‘the academic’ expert in both research and teaching is itself part of the rise of Professionalism during the Victorian period.Footnote ²⁶⁷

These developments in the university sector, and the growing public perception of academia as a profession, can be coupled with the fact that the nineteenth century was a period where more and more books were being created for a childhood audience, particularly in the United Kingdom and the United States: ‘The latter half of the nineteenth century saw the beginnings of a great age of children’s fiction, an outpouring of literature written by middle-class adults for middle-class children’.Footnote ²⁶⁸ In addition, advancement in printing technology at this time allowed illustrations of higher quality to be produced more easily.Footnote ²⁶⁹ In many ways, the confluence of these factors mean we could only expect an academic to appear fully illustrated in children’s literature from the mid-nineteenth century.

There are forty-one other academics which appear in the corpus in the nineteenth century, all in its last thirty years, with twenty others from the United Kingdom and twenty-one from the United States (see Appendix B, and also the open access anthology which draws together many of these short stories and poemsFootnote ²⁷⁰). It should also be noted, however, that the coverage of books from the United States is influenced by the number of texts appearing in the corpus from the wonderful Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature at the University of Florida, which provides much digitised children’s literature in the public domain: showing how mass digitisation, combined with the constraints of copyright (American texts published in or after 1923 remain in copyright and generally are not digitised and made freely available, but those published prior to that can be without risk, meaning only earlier texts are freely available), can influence the dynamics of corpus-based analysis.

The appearance of professors in children’s literature over this period reflects the growing importance of universities at that time in these contexts, although few characters have anything to do with academic institutions. The Professor in The Professor’s Merry ChristmasFootnote ²⁷¹ is the first to be included in fiction,Footnote ²⁷² in a Christian retelling of Dickens’ A Christmas CarolFootnote ²⁷³ two children are illustrated delivering food to a poor, elderly professor who has decided not to celebrate Christmas, until shown visions of families, charity and the second coming. There is a showman (Professor Wolley Cobble, in Walk Up! Walk Up! 1874), American coming-of-age tales of hard-working students and young professionals (Herbert Carter’s Legacy, or, The Inventor’s Son,Footnote ²⁷⁴ Professor Johnny,Footnote ²⁷⁵ Professor PinFootnote ²⁷⁶ and a thrilling adventure in the The Professor’s Last Skate,Footnote ²⁷⁷ where a teacher recalls to his students the last time he went skating alone, years ago: breaking his leg and having to haul himself miles home across the ice). Many of the early professor’s in the corpus are indistinguishable from higher-level school teachers, showing both the changing linguistic use of the term and also the formalisation of academic training: for example, the Old Professor in the Princess of Hearts,Footnote ²⁷⁸ draughted in unsuccessfully to deal with a precocious royal child. More random stories do start to appear: the grotesque Professor Menu is a ‘celebrated experimental cook, who had been driven away from London because of the effect of his awful experiments on the digestions of the customers at his restaurant!’,Footnote ²⁷⁹ discovered on an island by starving shipwrecked sailors, but whose worrying scientific experiments on food drive the narrator ambiguously to madness, or a confession, it was all a tall tale.

An early colour illustration (Figure 2)Footnote ²⁸⁰ appears in the fairy tale Professor Bumphead,Footnote ²⁸¹ which publishes a lecture given by the fairy professor, on the setting up of a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Inanimate Objects (stressing the ridiculousness of professorial advice, at this early stage, mocking Victorian scholarly and scientific societies): ‘A few well-chosen words addressed to a gate-post, flower-pot, bottle or any other inanimate object, will cheer its heart and encourage it to get through the terrible monotony of its existence’.Footnote ²⁸²

Figure 2

Professor Bumphead lecture tells us how miserable windmills are. In The Fairies’ Annual (Johns, The Fairies’ Annual, p. 31). Every effort has been made to trace any right-holder who may own the rights to this work (the estate of Cecil Starr Johns, and The Bodley Head), although it is believed to be in the public domain: any further information is most welcome in order to remedy permissions in future editions.

Early professors in children’s literature cover a range of tales and genres, symptomatic of the first one hundred years of the corpus, where there are sixty-eight academics found (thirty-eight being from the United Kingdom, with thirty from the United States). There is a warning tale of a conman and magician (Professor De Lara),Footnote ²⁸³ advice on healthy living (The Wisdom of Professor Happy),Footnote ²⁸⁴ a scientific quest in Professor Peckam’s Adventures in a Drop of Water,Footnote ²⁸⁵ and an anthropomorphic short story in the style of Beatrix Potter (Professor Porky the Porcupine).Footnote ²⁸⁶ The most enduring characters of this period are the scientist Professor Ptthmllnsprts in Kingsley, The Water-Babies, the doctor turned zoologist Doctor Dolittle,Footnote ²⁸⁷ and the baffled scientist and inventor Professor Branestawm,Footnote ²⁸⁸ giving three best-selling blueprints for scholarly conduct in children’s literature. There are two spikes Chart 1, which shows the date of publication of books in the corpus: the first towards the end of the nineteenth century shows both the growing awareness of the university sector and also the effect of full text search in public domain mass digitisation on the process of corpus building. Instances fall away once manual searching of print takes over in early twentieth-century texts, before rising again. It is only from the mid-twentieth century that academics in children’s books gain in popularity in this dataset, becoming more prevalent (or, at least, easier to find) and settling down into established stereotypes.

Chart 1

Academics appearing in English language children’s books per year since 1850. Note, in some books, more than one academic may be featured: therefore the number of books in which they appear per year has been noted, as well as the total number of academics found per year.

It is tempting to relate the growth of the number of illustrations of academics found in children’s books per year across in the second part of the twentieth century to the rapid expansion of and increased access to higher education throughout the English-speaking world within that period.Footnote ²⁸⁹ For example, in the United Kingdom, the number of universities more than doubled in the latter half of the twentieth century, and the population’s ‘overall participation in higher education increased from 3.4% in 1950, to 8.4% in 1970, 19.3% in 1990 and 33% in 2000’.Footnote ²⁹⁰ However, the growth shown in Chart 1 does not necessarily correlate to this; nor does it mean that academics are becoming more important as a theme in children’s literature and appearing in a higher percentage of texts.

The growth in the corpus can be plotted against known data on book production from two library catalogue sources. Firstly, counts of all books catalogued as English language for a junior audience in WorldCat were manually scraped from the site.Footnote ²⁹¹ Given it is so difficult to ascertain reliable statistics for book publications over time,Footnote ²⁹² WorldCat remains a useful resource for quantitative analysis despite its known limitations.Footnote ²⁹³ There are 1781 books in WorldCat that were catalogued as being English-language juvenile-audience text published in 1856, 1574 in 1906, 8082 in 1956 and 50,477 in 2006 (concluding the period prior to the exponential growth of self-published books, many of which do not feature in library catalogues). Secondly, The British National Bibliography (BNB),Footnote ²⁹⁴ which has been recording the publishing activity of the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland since 1950,Footnote ²⁹⁵ was contacted and asked for a list of children’s books published in the United Kingdom, which had been included in the BNB since its inception, and which they began cataloguing in 1961 given changing cataloguing conventions.Footnote ²⁹⁶ However, it should be noted that the division between children’s and adult books is not often clear within the catalogue,Footnote ²⁹⁷ and there is yet to be a special edition of the BNB listing only children’s books, given books for children and books about children are often hard to distinguish within the ‘juvenile literature’ heading (this is an area ripe for community input, to crowdsource a national bibliography of children’s fiction and non-fiction literature). There are currently 1033 juvenile literature books in the BNB catalogued as being published in 1970, 2912 in 1980, 3653 in 1990, and 8938 in 2000. To allow comparison between WorldCat and the BNB data, the volume of books catalogued as juvenile literature published per year is expressed as a percentage of the total books in each individual series, indicating that more books are produced towards the end than the middle of the twentieth century.

Chart 2 shows growth in the number of children’s books appearing in the BNB and in WorldCat, year on year, from the mid-twentieth century: more books classified as juvenile literature are produced yearly. The WorldCat data (from 1850) comprises of over 1.6 million books, the BNB data (from 1961, where books published in England and Ireland were first catalogued as Children’s Literature in the BNB) contains just short of 270,000 records (although there may be some false positives in this dataset, with books for children as subject being conflated with books for children as audience, so further cleaning and statistical work is needed on this dataset). Our corpus of 289 books in comparison shows a much more volatile trajectory, being more sensitive to the addition of one or two texts per year. However, all show upward trends, indicating that despite the growth of the university sector, the increase in the number of academics is correlated with the fact there are simply more and more children’s books being produced in the second half of the twentieth century, rather than the topic becoming more important and prevalent in juvenile literature over time (which would be represented by curve that deviated further from the BNB and WorldCat series in Chart 2). The percentage of texts which feature an illustration of an academic (calculated by the total books per year, and the books catalogued, as above, in WorldCat or the BNB – provided all possible examples have been found, which is rather unlikely!) is roughly constant. Using the BNB introduces interesting methodological opportunities for the study of children’s literature (or ‘juvenile literature’, as it is described as a topic in the Library of Congress Subject Headings used by the BNB) but requires a robust methodology to be developed to mitigate against statistical uncertainty. The BNB and other national bibliographiesFootnote ²⁹⁸ are, as yet, an untapped dataset for children’s literature scholarship, and hold future potential for evidence-based quantitative research on the topic, provided the datasets can be further cleaned and moderated in a way which would establish them as authoritative data sources for children’s book publishing.

Chart 2

The growth in book production over time, by publication year. The number of children’s books published that contain professors is compared to two available data sources: total number of books catalogued for juvenile audience in WorldCat, and books catalogued as ‘juvenile literature’ in the British National Bibliography. The x-axis represents the percentage of books published in that one year, in comparison to the total number of books published for that series between 1950 and 2014 (the series total reaches 100 %, so in the case of WorldCat we can see that 0.5 % of books classified as juvenile literature in WorldCat are published in 1950, but 3 % in 2004: the number of children’s books produced over time rises year on year). In all three series, proportionally more books appear across the end of the twentieth century, suggesting that there are more children’s books being published in total (which, in addition, are more likely to be catalogued in the modern library environment; see quote from Scally in Section 3.1), not that academics in children’s literature are becoming proportionally more prevalent.

The increase in number of books in the corpus towards the close of the twentieth century does mean that 50 per cent of the academics first appear in books published from 1993 onwards, and will therefore reflect modern representations of academia, once tropes have had a chance to develop, in a form which ‘declares its debt to postmodern modes of production’ with ‘the rise of the experimental, multi-voiced, metafictional children’s text in the latter half of the twentieth century’.Footnote ²⁹⁹ The prominence of academics in enduring and popular best-selling children’s texts means that their influence goes far beyond this relatively low occurrence in the pantheon of children’s literature, with ‘famous’ academics in children’s literature both building and reinforcing the stereotypes used by subsequent authors and illustrators as blueprints and shorthand for their characters. Overall, distinct themes emerge which become constant: universities as places or institutions are not as important as the people within them, and fictional academics have stereotypes that emerge involving gender, race, class, age, appearance and academic subject. These – and the dominant stereotypes that emerge – will be explored and placed into context via their external influences. Drawing on trends and stereotypes that came before them in often ‘playful subversion’,Footnote ³⁰⁰ as the stereotype of the mad male muddlehead coalesces, it can become both easier to drop a character into a children’s story without need for explanation as part of intertextual exploration, and harder for writers and illustrators to confront and break free from these expected mores.

4.3 The Presence and Absence of the University

It may be thought obvious to look first at how universities are pictured as settings in children’s literature. However, after reading and analysing the corpus, it became clear that any analysis should concentrate on the individuals that appear in the books, both as protagonists and minor characters, rather than the representation of universities as places or institutions: there is so very little comment on anything other than the people in the texts, either in text or as background setting in illustrations. This is unlike school stories, where ‘the school features almost as a character itself’,Footnote ³⁰¹ or the analysis of universities in American superhero comics where the leafy green park life spaces of campus ‘connect with and bolster public imaginings of U.S. institutions of higher education’.Footnote ³⁰²

There are only three books for a young audience that are mainly based in university settings, although descriptions of these are slight and show the dominance of Oxbridge and the Ivy League in popular conception of universities. Sylvie and Bruno and Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (the last novels written by Lewis Carroll, in 1889 and 1893) proceed in a rather disjointed dual setting: the university and fairyland.Footnote ³⁰³ They have a range of characters typically found around Oxbridge colleges (although no specific geographical setting is given), with seven illustrated: the Professor, the Other Professor, the Vice-Warden, the Chancellor (1889), two Heads of College, and a student (1893). The stories focus on and ridicule the people and processes within academic institutions, rather than the physical university itself: although there are mention of libraries, college halls, lecture rooms and gardens which have conversations, teaching and meetings within them, they are not described at all, and only appear as the odd brick wall or corner of a room in illustrations. There are parallels drawn between fairyland and the university system, poking fun at intellectual expertise, within the text. Much fun is made of the pursuit of funding: a visiting academic tells the tale of how professors motivated students by offering them money for correct answers, until the students made more money than the professors earn. Students were chosen by ‘Scholarship Hunts’ where principals chased them through the streets as they get off the train, aiming to catch the best ones (Figure 3).Footnote ³⁰⁴ Throughout the book, it is these characters, and their reminiscing and actions, rather than the setting, which is important.

Figure 3

Heads of college chasing good students, in a ‘cub-hunt’, in Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (p.189), illustrated by Harry Furniss. Public Domain: image from copy held at University of California Libraries and available at archive.org. This style of illustrating the university of Sylvie and Bruno is common throughout the text, with hints of stonework and flagstones.

Likewise, Jack Dawe Super Scientist and the Professors,Footnote ³⁰⁵ a book which never had a wide circulation – written by an anonymous Oxford professor for his nieces and nephews – has illustrations of indistinguishable packs of male dons wearing sub fusc mortar boards and gowns, but little comment on the university itself. The scientist Jack Dawe works at Oxford, but is called away to deal with infestations at the Australian University, university business at The University of the Ganges, and the Congo University, and to procure computers for universities in America. There is little comment on the buildings or settings of the universities, with the book instead mostly focussing sarcasticallyFootnote ³⁰⁶ on the male academics within each setting and their weird academic lifestyle (there is a lot of going to the dining room, see Figure 4).

Figure 4

The Oxford Professors, with super scientist Professor Jack Dawe, and the children who accompany him on adventures. In Uncle B and Green, Jack Dawe Super Scientist and the Professors (p. 61), illustrated by Brian Green. Every effort has been made to trace the current right-holders, Allday Limited, Uncle B and Brian Green, who own the rights to this work: any further information is most welcome in order to remedy permissions in future editions.

‘The Professors’ throughout are clueless academics with insular, limited views, in colonialist tales:

The academics themselves are the focus, even though there are different university settings, presented without description or illustration, throughout.

The exception to this is Mahalia Mouse Goes to College,Footnote ³⁰⁷ where we see a fully illustrated university setting with detailed depictions of Harvard’s redbrick campus, including pictures in the background of the diverse student population, based on a poem that was delivered as part of the award-winning actor John Lithgow’s commencement speech there in 2005.Footnote ³⁰⁸ Mahalia is shown partaking in all aspects of campus life (even if she is a mouse in a world of humans, accepted because of her genius), appearing in lectures, theatre productions, the dormitory, cafeteria, glee club and the graduation ceremony. The lecture halls and porticos of Harvard loom behind her mouse-eye-view in a redemptive story of the transformative power of education as a means to lift oneself out of poverty, ending on commencement day (Figure 5).

Figure 5

Mahalia mouse celebrates her graduation at Harvard. In Lithgow and Oleynikov, Mahalia Mouse Goes to College (p. 39).

All rights reserved, Simon and Schuster. Used with permission.

Lithgow describes that his intention in writing Mahalia mouse was ‘to get small children already interested in the idea of education in general and college in particular, giving them this very, very, far away goal to aim for’.Footnote ³⁰⁹ These three texts were all written by those with a close relationship with the university: Lewis Carroll and the mysterious ‘Uncle B’ being Oxford academics, Lithgow being a graduate of Harvard himself, speaking this poem aloud at graduation there.Footnote ³¹⁰ Both the satirical and inspirational take depend on insider knowledge of the university setting, and trade upon in-crowd jokes.

It is not until books created for an older childhood audience – such as Professor Pin,Footnote ³¹¹ the first two and last chapters of Carney’s House Party,Footnote ³¹² the His Dark Materials trilogy,Footnote ³¹³ The Seven Professors of the Far NorthFootnote ³¹⁴ and The Oath of the Five LordsFootnote ³¹⁵ (and, of course, Hogwarts in the Harry Potter seriesFootnote ³¹⁶ if you are willing to believe the apex of the formal wizarding instructional system counts as an Higher Education institution) – that the university and its buildings routinely function as a character itself, and these are mostly textually described rather than illustrated. Our seats of learning would seem to require explanation rather than depiction.

There are three specific places on campus that appear in the background of illustrations: in a very few recent books there are lecture halls, generally showing professors professing on stage in front of a half-empty or disinterested audience (Figure 6).Footnote ³¹⁷ More prevalently, in a fifth of the books there are scientific laboratories. Most of the factual books explain science, and these tend to have settings in laboratories, such as Professor Crackinbottle and Professor Tidymind and their Two Young Helpers,Footnote ³¹⁸ Professor I.Q. Explores the Senses,Footnote ³¹⁹ Professor Astro Cat’s Frontiers of SpaceFootnote ³²⁰ and Professor Whiskerton Presents Steampunk ABC,Footnote ³²¹ which explains the alphabet through clockwork Victoriana, engines, machinery and derring-do explorer’s maps and zeppelins.

Figure 6

Professor Mudweed lecturing, in Orme and Richardson, Boffin Boy and the Wizard of Edo (p. 1).

Used by kind permission of David Orme and Peter Richardson.

The scientific kit on show represents complex yet stereotypical depictions of science (there are lots of test tubes regardless of subject area). The few labs which appear in fiction are usually messy, dangerous and crammed with mysteriously complex scientific equipment.Footnote ³²² The laboratory in Professor Puffendorf’s Secret Potions,Footnote ³²³ which is filled with complex glassware, smoking machinery, bicycle chains, spills, books, skulls, notebooks, furnaces, cobwebs, top-secret cabinets and gadgets including a ‘Titanium Blender’ and Puffendorf’s own inventions, the Banana-matic and Smell-o-Telephone. Likewise, the short reader Professor Rumbold and the Great Recycling MachineFootnote ³²⁴ (see Figure 12) is set in a complex factory or laboratory setting with conveyor belts, robots and gadgets. These laboratory settings require scrutiny by the reader to comprehend – or to be in awe of – the rich scientific environment: invention and science would seem to come from a place of chaos and other-worldliness.

Figure 7

The Professor’s Lecture, in Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (p. 345), illustrated by Harry Furniss. Public Domain.

Image from copy held at University of California Libraries, available at archive.org. Note the scientific kit he demonstrates, in an early example of a professor being aligned to a laboratory.

A final place which is either mentioned within the text or referred to in illustrations is the library. Professor Inkling in The Octonauts and the Frown FishFootnote ³²⁵ exclaims ‘to a confused crew’ when explaining what always cheers him up: ‘There’s nothing like perusing the printed word to stimulate the intellect and galvanize the imagination! … To the library, my delightful colleagues!’Footnote ³²⁶

In other texts, libraries are alluded to, or characters pass through them or book-lined studies in illustrations, without much comment or fanfare, as books are presumed to be part of the intellectual landscape. See, for example, background detail in illustrations of Professor Johnny,Footnote ³²⁷ The Professor in Mistress Masham’s Repose,Footnote ³²⁸ The Administrator in Professor Diggins Dragons,Footnote ³²⁹ Professor Barnabus Quill and Professor Quibble in The Rise and Fall of Mount Majestic,Footnote ³³⁰ Professor Mortimer in The Oath of the Five LordsFootnote ³³¹ and Professor Tobin in Maisie Hitchins: The Case of the Feathered Mask.Footnote ³³² In addition, many of the illustrated characters hold or carry books (see Figures 8, 10, 11, 22, 23, 27and 29 in this Element), showing how important the spread of information is to their livelihoods. Books seem to be the one pictorial way that education and intellectual achievement is communicated to the childhood audience.Footnote ³³³

Figure 8

Professor Inkling reading aloud to his more junior crew, much in the same way as reading sessions happen in pre-school settings. From Meomi, The Octonauts and the Frown Fish (p. 24), used with kind permission from Meomi and Immedium.

However, laboratories, lecture halls and libraries are far from the most common of settings within the illustrations. There is a trope of academics being away from their institutional homes in order to carry out fieldwork, such as the zoologists in Professor Twill’s Travels,Footnote ³³⁴ Professor Wormbog in Search for the Zipperump-a-ZooFootnote ³³⁵ and Professor Potts meets the Animals in Africa;Footnote ³³⁶ the archaeologists in The Amazing Time Travelling Adventures of Professor McGinty in Ancient GreeceFootnote ³³⁷ and Professor Nutter and the Curse of the Pharaoh’s Tomb;Footnote ³³⁸ the palaeontologist in the Dog that DugFootnote ³³⁹ and The Case of the Crested Cryptoclidus. Professor Barrister’s Dinosaur Mysteries,Footnote ³⁴⁰ and Professor Mackenzie, the explorer in the Maisie series.Footnote ³⁴¹ Most of the action in Professor Puffendorf’s Secret PotionsFootnote ³⁴² happens in her lab when she is away at a conference, and Dr Dog travels away to a conferenceFootnote ³⁴³ and then on holiday.Footnote ³⁴⁴ Academics are rarely at their university: as a result, it is a place seldom presented to the readers of these children’s books, either in illustration or description. Paradoxically, universities are not explained to children through books, perhaps as they are thought not to be known to them: but universities are not known to children as they are not explained as part of the media produced for a child audience.

Academics are not depicted as being part of institutions: they mostly work alone. Twenty-two of the 289 books feature pairs or triples of professors working together – or against each other – in the same text (for example, Professor Gylden Lox and Dr Med Yusa run a hairdressing academyFootnote ³⁴⁵). The largest number of individually named academics in a single book is four, working together in a lab in Mad Professor: Concoct Extremely Weird Science Projects.Footnote ³⁴⁶ Two books briefly feature exclusively male scholarly societies and all-male academic panels: the scientific committee in Moon ManFootnote ³⁴⁷ and the ‘Wise Professors of Prague’ in The Wicked Tricks of Till Owlyglass.Footnote ³⁴⁸ Jack Dawe Super Scientist and the Professors has its packs of dons.Footnote ³⁴⁹ However, in the majority of the corpus, in 267 books, the academics are lone figures acting independently, generally away from the institution: academia is mostly portrayed as a singular, even lonely, endeavour, which mimics the upholding of the myth of the lone scholar emanating from the academy itself: see Grendler’s analysis of depictions of lone scholars in the Italian RenaissanceFootnote ³⁵⁰ and Algazi’s analysis of depictions of studies in Early Modern European Cultures.Footnote ³⁵¹ This is in stark contrast to family stories that dominate children’s literature.Footnote ³⁵² ‘Like small children who play on their own, main characters in preschool literature act alone … they make their decisions based on their need to discover how the world works for them’:Footnote ³⁵³ lone academics are set up as adult counterparts to the lone child reader, experiencing difference together.

More than half of these academics are depicted in their household environment rather than in a university setting. The distinction between work and home is blurred by the fact that many carry out scientific experiments on their own property, which are therefore not the type of homes that the book’s readership would typically live in. For example, Professor Mickimecki has a barn workshop with a windmill on the roof, scientifically kitted out, and big enough to build submarines in.Footnote ³⁵⁴ Professor Nut ‘lived in an old house in the oldest part of town’,Footnote ³⁵⁵ and it is there that he has a laboratory where he can record an avant garde (tuneless!) symphony with his friend Professor Crotchet. Professor Oliver Query has a spaceship in his yard, ‘a telescope on the roof, and a weather-vane that pointed in two directions at once. There was even an anchored flying saucer’.Footnote ³⁵⁶ This focus on the home of the person as the locus for the intellect stresses the importance of the academic individual rather than the higher education institution within the children’s literature genre. It is interactions within these homes that situate the plot: the starting setting of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe is Professor Digory Kirke’s isolated house, ‘in the heart of the country, ten miles from the nearest railway station and two miles from the nearest post-office’ which was ‘so old and famous that people from all over England used to come and ask permission to see over it’.Footnote ³⁵⁷ CockatoosFootnote ³⁵⁸ centres around the birds of a baffled professor, which decide to hide all over his large house. The Mysterious Collection of Dr David HarleysonFootnote ³⁵⁹ features a treasure hunt around his mansion, with no indication of why he would be called Dr in the first place, given he is a ‘famous artist’Footnote ³⁶⁰ – with the treasure hunt ending in the most domestic of rituals: Dr Harleyson’s marriage. The individual, and the individual’s home, is the focus here, but homes are different to usual suburban living, often being large, messy mansions full of antiquities, oil paintings and silverware. Professor Digory Kirke’s House is full of ‘the pictures and the armour, and the rare books in the library’.Footnote ³⁶¹ These strange abodes give some sense of the other-worldliness of the academics:

Figure 9

Dr Sphinx’s living room. In Ryan, Weird Street: The Riddle of Dr Sphinx, © Margaret Ryan, 1997, Weird Street: The Riddle of Dr Sphinx and A&C Black Children’s and Educational, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, p. 37.

Used with permission. Not your normal interior household design.

It is therefore not universities or higher education per se that are of interest in texts marketed towards a childhood audience, but the people who belong to the university – the professors and doctors – and their lifestyle and characteristics, that are presented to readers. By meeting them in their home environment, we can see the differences in how they choose to live, and what a ‘life of the mind’ involves, in a location where children can come into contact with them easily. These individuals, in turn, come to represent the university, and intellectual achievement, in children’s literature. As a result, this analysis will focus on the representations of academics across the corpus, the stereotypes that emerge, and the influences and perceptions that endure.

4.4 Gender

The most striking element of the corpus is gender: of 328 academics, 298 are men and twenty-nine are women (9 per cent), with only one having an ambiguous gender identity (Chart 3). The delineation between heterosexual gender norms is pronounced, and even with the five unseen narrators, or animal or inanimate object academics, it is easy to determine gender, given names, pronouns and physical characteristics. This difference between male and female characters accrues over time, and this visualisation demonstrates the dominance of male characters.

Chart 3

Gender of academics, revealing totals over time. The first female student appears in 1949, and the first female academic did not appear until 1950. Although there has been a growth in the total number of books featuring academics, they are still mostly men. Non-gender-specific individuals are not an important factor in the corpus.

This discrepancy between male and female academics can be explained in two ways. Firstly, it has to be acknowledged that, despite the admission of women to study in many places of higher education in English-speaking areas from the late nineteenth century, women were mostly barred from taking up academic positions until the late twentieth century.Footnote ³⁶³ There is still a range of ‘structural-institutional, social, and cultural factors’ that explain women’s current woeful underrepresentation in academic life.Footnote ³⁶⁴ Across Europe in 2015, only 20 per cent of full professors were female.Footnote ³⁶⁵ There were therefore, and are therefore, few women in society who have a senior academic role and the corpus reflects this expected discrepancy in the profession. Secondly, the corpus is only of fictional academics, and it would have been reasonable to hope that authors’ imaginations could reflect possibilities and depict contemporary impossibilities or aspirations rather than to entrench realities: unfortunately, children’s literature seems to veer towards safe, established, dominant tropes that allow plots to develop without much explanation, rather than behaving imaginatively.Footnote ³⁶⁶ This, however, has the effect of reiterating and reinforcing social inequalities. The incentives and discincentives for the publishing of ‘radical’ children’s literature that exposes unjust power structures and promotes social justice are covered in Mickenberg and Nel,Footnote ³⁶⁷ although, as we shall see in Section 6, the current digital environment seems to be finally marrying publishers with an audience for such material.Footnote ³⁶⁸

The first female in our corpus is a student, Carney Sibley, in the early and final chapters of Carney’s House Party published in 1949, a fictional account of the time around the summer break at the then all-female Vassar College in the United States.Footnote ³⁶⁹ Although Carney clearly loves the campus, the novel focuses more on her engagement and her future as a wife than on her education. Shortly after, the first female professor appears in the corpus – a full hundred years after the first male, when there are already sixty-eight males; Professor Jocelyn Mabel Peabody, who appears in the Eagle comic (1950 onwards) as Space Fleet’s Permanent Special Advisor to the Exploration and Research Department and a regular sidekick to Dan Dare. She is a product of the imagination of the writers, with her blue-chip academic backstoryFootnote ³⁷⁰ including a doctorate from Magdalen College, Oxford, being impossible at the time of writing.Footnote ³⁷¹ Set in the mid to late 1980s, the writers saw the future of science as including women. Dan Dare’s creator and artist, Frank Hampson, said of Peabody when interviewed in 1974:

However, Professor Peabody encounters significant bias and approbation at every turn, see Figure 10.

Figure 10

Professor Peabody’s first appearance, as she joins Dan Dare’s team in Eagle, 12 May 1950 (Vol. 1 No 5). She holds a book as a symbol of her professional status.

Reproduced with kind permission of the Dan Dare Corporation Limited.

Unfortunately, Professor Peabody is an outlier (and featured in a comic rather than a codex). The first illustrated female academic in a book, after sixty-nine males are already in the corpus, is a ‘researcher’ and mother, not even given a name as the focus in on her male employer and her son, in Professor Coconut and the Thief (Figure 11):

The Doctor of Literature in The Pirates Mixed-Up VoyageFootnote ³⁷⁴ is not given her academic title, being known as Mrs Hatchett.Footnote ³⁷⁵ The female palaeontologist in The Dog That Dug is not given a name.Footnote ³⁷⁶ The first book to contain a named female professor is the short scholastic reader, Professor Rumbold and the Great Recycling Machine (1991) (Figure 12), in which she calmly designs technology to deal with the world’s growing environmental crisis, in a reader published to support the introduction of Science into the new UK National Curriculum in schools.Footnote ³⁷⁷

Figure 11

The female anthropologist in Gelman and Richter, Professor Coconut and the Thief (p. 13), an outsider to the male argument led by Professor Albert, who is renamed Professor Coconut by the children. Note that she is holding paperwork, even in the jungle.

Illustrated by Emily Arnold McCully, used with kind permission.

Figure 12

Professor Rumbold, the first named female in the corpus. Note the robots in the background which interact with the child reader, as the professor concentrates on the technology. In Crispin, Professor Rumbold and the Great Recycling Machine (p. 3).

Illustrated by Alan Rowe. Used with kind permission of Mavis Crispin and Alan Rowe.

There are significantly fewer females than should be expected given the current statistics of real-life academia: even over the five-year period 2009–14 there are fifty-nine male academics to only seven females (12 per cent) in the corpus, which is half of the number that would be expected in the real-life academy in this recent period. We are reminded that males routinely outnumber females as protagonists in children’s literature,Footnote ³⁷⁸ that ‘female characters … in award-winning pictures books [are] almost non-existent and, when present, [are] stereotypically passive and domestic’.Footnote ³⁷⁹ ‘Male characters are twice as likely to take leading roles in children’s picture books and are given far more speaking parts than females.’Footnote ³⁸⁰ A quarter of children’s books have no female characters at all, and this ‘symbolic annihilation’ has ‘implications for children’s understandings of gender’.Footnote ³⁸¹ Will this proportion of professors in children’s books change as time goes on, with the growing public perception of women being part of the academy? Or does this erasure contribute to children’s perception of appropriate gender roles, and so reinforce inequalities?

The female academics are illustrated in books published in the United Kingdom (18), the United States (9) and Canada (2): showing how lacking the representation of intelligent, authoritative females are in the rest of the English speaking world’s children’s literature (7 % of the total corpus comes from three countries: Australia, 5 %, India, 2 % and New Zealand, 1 %; there is not a female academic to be found among these, nor in the single books published in Ireland, Germany, South Africa and Singapore). Women are so lacking as protagonists that the surprise denouement of a ‘choose your own adventure’ book hinges upon the fact that a missing professor is actually female, and you didn’t expect that, did you? (Whatever Happened To Professor Potts?: Follow the Clues to Unravel the Mystery.Footnote ³⁸² Apologies for the spoiler.) In addition, the illustrations featured in the American editions of the Harry Potter novelsFootnote ³⁸³ concentrate on the male academics: Dumbledore, Snape and Quirrell;Footnote ³⁸⁴ Lockhart;Footnote ³⁸⁵ Mad-Eyed Moody and Hagrid;Footnote ³⁸⁶ Firenze and Lupin;Footnote ³⁸⁷ Slughorn.Footnote ³⁸⁸ The only two female professors illustrated are TrelawneyFootnote ³⁸⁹ and Umbridge:Footnote ³⁹⁰ Professor Minerva McGonagall, although a central maternal figure within all the Harry Potter books, is omitted from any illustration in any English language edition published prior to 2015.

There are plenty of women in the 289 books, but they tend to be wives and housekeepers who very visibly provide stability and practical support for the helplessly dependent academics, such as the wife in the ‘Structural Reader’, Professor Boffin’s Umbrella (Figure 13).Footnote ³⁹¹

Figure 13

How can professors keep dry without a wife to help them? In Alexander, Professor Boffin’s Umbrella (p. 3).

Every effort has been made to trace the current right-holders of this work (L. G. Alexander and Longman publishers): any further information is most welcome in order to remedy permissions in future editions.

Or:

Or:

And (indicating that this trope is not outdated, but enduring):

Professor Digory Kirke has a housekeeper called Mrs Macready and three female servants.Footnote ³⁹⁶ Professor Euclid Bullfinch has a housekeeper, Mrs Dunn, whose son Danny accompanies the Professor on adventures.Footnote ³⁹⁷ Professor Diggins relies heavily on his wife for dressing and feeding.Footnote ³⁹⁸ Dr Xargle relies on Matron to undertake practical elements of student activities.Footnote ³⁹⁹ Professor Dupont has a cook called Hortense.Footnote ⁴⁰⁰ Professor Mortimer has a housekeeper called Mrs Benson.Footnote ⁴⁰¹ Over and over, women are shown in subservient positions, in little change from what Nilsen noted as long ago as 1971 that the majority of women in children’s books are ‘token females … [who] stand in doorways … look through windows … unobtrusive’.Footnote ⁴⁰² There are parallels here with campus novels written for adults about the university system: in an analysis of which Showalter noted, ‘I was always hoping to find stories of women professors … I’ve been sharply aware of the women who appear in the background, as students, as eccentric dons and dames, and especially as faculty wives’.Footnote ⁴⁰³

Figure 14

Professor Magnus MacWhizzer is fawned upon by his long-suffering housekeeper in Englander, The Amazing Professor and his Travels in Time (p. 26). The children pictured are his great-great-niece and nephew, relieved they have returned safely after time-travel did not go to plan.

Used with kind permission of Egmont Publishing.

Figure 15

Professor P. Brain’s disdain for household chores. In McLeay, Professor P. Brain’s Astronomical Trip (p. 32). Illustrated by “Mark Fenton and his computer”, in the first obviously digital illustration.

Every effort has been made to trace the current right-holders, Arnold-Wheaton Publishers, Anna McLeay and Mark Fenton, who own the rights to this work: any further information is most welcome in order to remedy permissions in future editions.

The women academics do not have partners or assistants, with the exception of Professor Puffendorf, who has a male lab assistant – Enzo – but the story revolves around his jealousy, and what happens when he chooses to disobey Puffendorf’s instructions when she is away.Footnote ⁴⁰⁴ The men may have wives and housekeepers to assist them but there is an absence of their own offspring. Only one woman and seven men are noted as being parents: the unnamed female anthropologist in Professor Coconut and the Thief mentioned by her son, the childhood narrator (no father is in the text);Footnote ⁴⁰⁵ the mostly absent scientific father in The Professor’s Children,Footnote ⁴⁰⁶ Professor Hayling, loving father of Tinker and a friend of Uncle QuentinFootnote ⁴⁰⁷ in Five Are Together Again,Footnote ⁴⁰⁸ the mysterious Professor Gamma, who involves his daughter Kiryl in a series of science fiction adventures,Footnote ⁴⁰⁹ Professor Mackenzie, absent explorer father who leaves his daughter Maisie with her grandmother,Footnote ⁴¹⁰ Lord Asriel, who has placed his daughter into the care of others,Footnote ⁴¹¹ and Professor Oliver Query, who is reunited with his daughter after she had been living with her mother, in My Father the Mad Professor, although ‘I have no ambition to be a normal father’.Footnote ⁴¹² The father in ‘The Mad Professor’s Daughter’ is never seen, but his fearful presence, while out of sight, is terrifying.Footnote ⁴¹³ The gender of the parent is usually juxtaposed with the opposite gender of child, with the majority being (absent) male professors with daughters. There are three uncles: Dr Ivor Dare, Dan Dare’s uncle;Footnote ⁴¹⁴ Professor Dinglebat, ‘we’re so lucky to have an uncle who’s a famous professor’;Footnote ⁴¹⁵ and The Evil Professor in Tetrax the Swamp Crocodile in the Sea Quest series;Footnote ⁴¹⁶ and one Great-Great-Grand-Uncle, Professor Magnus MacWhizzer in The Amazing Professor and His Travels in Time.Footnote ⁴¹⁷ However, there are no academic aunts. Although many academics are depicted in the place where family stories are usually set – the home – the academics are normally not in a family environment (nor a typical home environment, given their houses are so strange), which sets up a different mechanism for plot and theme given that ‘probably the majority of children’s fiction has been set within the family’.Footnote ⁴¹⁸ Interactions with unrelated children spur on plot lines and challenge scientific stereotypes, which will be explored in Section 4.12.

It is worth noting that, although only 9 per cent of the academics in the corpus are female, ninety-two (32 per cent) of the 289 books have an identifiably female author, and thirty-three have a female illustrator, showing the dominance of male creative influence in the corpus.Footnote ⁴¹⁹ Of the 29 female academics, sixteen are authored, and nine illustrated, by women. Both male and female authors have preferred to write about dominant male academics and subservient females who facilitate and enable their intellectual brilliance, although female authors are more likely to include female academic characters.

It can be difficult to introduce ambiguity, or to get away from male dominance, in children’s picture books: the author and illustrator of Traction Man is Here (2005), Mini Grey, said: ‘There’s an issue I often face with picture book characters – that when I want to make them gender-neutral, I make them vaguely male rather than female – but really I want them not to have a gender’.Footnote ⁴²⁰ Subtle characteristics can be both introduced by the author and/or perceived by the reader, to reinforce the ‘implicit biases’ we all have regarding gender.Footnote ⁴²¹ Only one character in the corpus has an deliberately playful, ambiguous gender identity: an unspecified narratorial voice which may or may not be the female child of colour on the cover of, or one of the boys inside, Professor Cook’s Mind-Blowing Bakes.Footnote ⁴²² Debbie Foy, the Managing Editor of Wayland, part of Hachette Children’s Books, confirmed:

This response from a present day publisher of children’s books suggests that they are both aware of the gender inequalities of children’s literature and hoping to overcome them, through creative ambiguity and playing with established stereotypes. Challenging the dominance of the male in children’s literature can only happen if done deliberately and imaginatively.

4.5 Race

Fictional academics are predominantly white. There are only seven who are visibly of black, Asian or minority ethnic descent, and only three of these are actually adults within a university: a Chinese Professor, in Rollo’s Journey to Cambridge,Footnote ⁴²⁴ a Professor of Linguistics in Points of View with Professor Peekaboo,Footnote ⁴²⁵ and Professor Wiseman, the science museum director, in the later instantiations of the Curious George book series.Footnote ⁴²⁶ The remainder invoke the term ‘professor’ to suggest intelligence: a charlatan professor in a Chinese folk tale,Footnote ⁴²⁷ one child so intelligent he is called ‘The Prof’ in Henry’s Baby,Footnote ⁴²⁸ and two of the children in The Preschool Professors Learn How Seeds Grow.Footnote ⁴³¹ This inclusion of visibly, culturally different races in these few examples is a recent response to the long-noted white hegemony of children’s literature.Footnote ⁴³² In fact, Professor Wiseman in the Curious George series changes both gender and race over the course of the franchise, turning from a stereotypical white academic male to a friendly, female ‘American, likely with Indian ancestry’,Footnote ⁴³³ in the latest range of books that accompany the PBS television cartoon series running since 2006: this indicates how issues of diversity can be influenced by external pressures (Figure 16).Footnote ⁴³⁴

Figure 16

The change of Professor Wiseman, Science Museum Director, and erstwhile Rocket Scientist, in the Curious George series. Left: 1957 original version (seated at desk). Illustration from CURIOUS GEORGE GETS A MEDAL by H. A. Rey © 1957 and renewed 1985 by Margaret E. Rey. Reprinted with permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.Footnote ⁴²⁹ All rights reserved. In Rey and Rey, The Complete Adventures of Curious George (p. 189).

Right, 2010 version. Illustration from CURIOUS GEORGE AND THE SURPRISE GIFT by H. A. Rey © 2008. Reprinted with permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.430

There are also not-so-subtle racist undertones to be found. The Chinese Professor in Rollo’s Journey to Cambridge is described as a ‘yellow-skinned gentleman with eyes cut bias’Footnote ⁴³⁵ and is not allowed to be more than an oriental caricature. Professor Jim Crow, a forgetful but kindly blackbird, who knows little about how the world operates without double-checking it first in his book of wisdom that doesn’t seem to explain anything, appears in the Little Jack Rabbit series,Footnote ⁴³⁶ particularly in Little Jack Rabbit and Professor Crow (Figure 17).Footnote ⁴³⁷ These stories for children were first syndicated through newspapers on the East Coast of the United StatesFootnote ⁴³⁸ that owe much to Br’er Rabbit, published at the height of the Jim Crow laws that enforced racial segregation in America.Footnote ⁴³⁹ A blackbird called Jim Crow at this particular point in place and time,Footnote ⁴⁴⁰ depicted in this way, reinforces the ‘romanticized version’ of the stereotype of black people as ‘simple and quaint, yet still irresponsible, stupid, and lazy’.Footnote ⁴⁴¹ Another racist slur occurs in Bugville Life for Big and Little Folk with a disturbing pastoral ditty for preschoolers called ‘Coon Songs in Bugville’:

Figure 17

Professor Jim Crow in Cory, Little Jack Rabbit and Professor Crow (Frontispiece).

Public Domain, author’s own copy.

The dissonance between the ethnophaulism and the bucolic description is jarring, in a magazine with a readership of 65,000 children a month.Footnote ⁴⁴³ The earlier quote from Jack Dawe suggests the Western world viewpoint of “foreign” civilisations as “other” (see p. 72). These instances remind us that racial and political commentary can reverberate into stories written for children, teaching and reinforcing cultural and racial oppression: ‘the colonising force of fiction to inculcate hegemonic ideologies or to reinforce gender roles is powerful through the history of children’s literature.’Footnote ⁴⁴⁴

The lack of ethnic diversity in these books mirrors the lack of diversity within academia itself.Footnote ⁴⁴⁵ In the United States in 2000, 72 % of faculty were white men, 17 % were white women, 8 % were men of colour and only 2 % were women of colour.Footnote ⁴⁴⁶ In the United Kingdom in 2015, 92.4 per cent of professors were white, with 0.49 % being black.Footnote ⁴⁴⁷ The trends observed here also follows those in children’s publishing regarding ethnic diversity: only 4% of children’s books published in the UK in 2017 featured BAME characters, despite 32% of pupils of compulsory school age in England being of minority ethnic origin,Footnote ⁴⁴⁸ and there being evidence to suggest that Black and Asian children – particularly girls – are those that both enjoy and are most regularly reading.Footnote ⁴⁴⁹ A rudimentary application of critical race theoryFootnote ⁴⁵⁰ can aid us in understanding how problematic the lack of diversity is in both children’s literature and the academy itself: which actors and processes can appropriate intellectual agency and authority, excluding others as they do so? Who is barred from both the real and the fictional professoriate, in structural and complicit decisions based on race? What affect does this cumulative lack of diversity and structural racism (a common criticism of children’s literature) have on its readership?

4.6 Visual Stereotypes and the Judging of Appearance: Age, Hair and Dress

It is important that we unpack the visual stereotypes within the corpus, given that common media depictions of professors are

The academics are predominantly middle aged or older, classed by an interpretation of their appearance in illustrations. Six were smart children, most with academic nicknames such as ‘The Preschool Professors’,Footnote ⁴⁵² twenty-one were young adults (aged 18–45), 128 were middle-aged (45–65) and 133 were elderly (65+). Forty had indeterminate age (animals, spades, etc. – see Section 4.8). However, it is worth noting that there were no elderly women: there are two children, eight young adults, seventeen middle-aged and two indeterminately aged females. There are no ‘granny’-type females with white hair or any other signifiers of age and experience. While this echoes

it would also seem to indicate an impossibility that elderly woman – who are routinely feared, patronised, dismissed and held in contempt in children’s literatureFootnote ⁴⁵⁴ – can even be allowed within the fictional academy.Footnote ⁴⁵⁵ The elderly make up the largest section of fictional academics (41 per cent), but the old here are only men.

The attire of the academics was surprisingly formal, given academia’s real-life reputation for scruffiness.Footnote ⁴⁵⁶ Eighty-nine are in a suit, a further twenty-seven wear a suit with bowtie, with an additional five in shirt and tie. Forty-eight are wearing a lab coat, five of these with bowtie. Twenty-two are in formal academic regalia (one wearing a gown accompanied fetchingly with bovver boots).Footnote ⁴⁵⁷ Sixteen are in a safari suit and eleven wear magician’s robes. Five are in black tie with an additional five also sporting a top-hat. Four are in spacesuits, four in military uniform, two in medieval robes and two in formal court uniform. Five females are wearing dresses and two are in twin sets: a quarter of the women wear lab coats and a further quarter wear suits, but no women sport ties, bowties or top-hats (Professor Peabody in the EagleFootnote ⁴⁵⁸ wears a range of clothing from ballgowns to spacesuits). Only three academics are dressed casually in sweatshirts, and six wear jeans. There are also two academics in raincoats, and one each in a bomber jacket, chef’s whites, climbing gear, cloak, clown suit, medical scrubs, pyjamas, traditional Chinese clothing, and fairy, jester, wrestler’s trunks and superhero costume. There are, of course, various animals, aliens and vegetables that do not have any garments (see Section 4.8). The majority of those wearing clothing think they are dressed for authority and business, although there is a lot of tweed going on, and the suits are often crumpled and threadbare, living up to the unkempt stereotype where formal attire has seen better days. For example, in the choose-your-own-adventure book Professor Q’s Mysterious Machine:

Hairstyles are where the formalities end: intellect is demonstrated with dishevelled and uncouth styling. Although fify-four have neat, short hair, with a further eight with fashionable short men’s haircuts, forty-nine are decidedly scruffy, with a further twenty-one sporting long white spiky hair, mimicking Einstein, who had by the mid-twentieth century come to represent the archetype of American Genius.Footnote ⁴⁶⁰ His, hair, in particular, presented a ‘symbol of populist intelligence’:Footnote ⁴⁶¹ we see it visually referenced again and again in Professor Gamma,Footnote ⁴⁶² Professor I. Q.,Footnote ⁴⁶³ Professor Poopypants,Footnote ⁴⁶⁴ Professor Bumblebrain,Footnote ⁴⁶⁵ Professor DinglebatFootnote ⁴⁶⁶ and Professor Von Evil.Footnote ⁴⁶⁷ One alien, Professor Dribble, disguises himself as Albert Einstein, including the hairstyle and moustache, to go incognito on planet Earth (Figure 18).Footnote ⁴⁶⁸

Figure 18

The alien Professor Dribble, incognito. In Kettle, Professor Dribble (p. 44).

Illustrated by Melissa Webb. Used with kind permission from Melissa Webb and Macmillan Education Australia.

Eighty-four men are bald, symptomatic of the age-range of candidates, but many of those sport long unkempt hair tufts. There are a few outliers – dreadlocks, Princess Leia buns, snakes, very long straight hair, neat bobs for women – but for the most part, big, messy hair is the order of the day, for academic men and women alike (see The Lecturer in Mahalia Mouse Goes to CollegeFootnote ⁴⁶⁹ and Professor BlabbermouthFootnote ⁴⁷⁰). This is particularly the case for those found in the latter (recent) half of the corpus, providing a counterpoint to lab coats and suits: the informal clashes with the formal. Given that almost half the corpus is illustrated with black and white images, it is difficult to ascertain anything meaningful about hair colour, although ninety-two men (no women) have white hair, and twenty-one men (no women) have grey hair (meaning 44 per cent of the humans in the corpus are greying or white-haired men). Of those in colour, ginger is the most common shade (Professor Sniff and the Lost Spring Breezes,Footnote ⁴⁷¹ The Lecturer in Mahalia Mouse Goes to CollegeFootnote ⁴⁷²) but there are also renegades sporting coiffures that are purple (Professor Med Yusa in Professor Gylden Lox’s Hair SchoolFootnote ⁴⁷³), green (Professor Rock LtdFootnote ⁴⁷⁴) and blue (Professor Blue: Top Secret Lab JournalFootnote ⁴⁷⁵), reflecting the different and outsider nature of these characters.

One hundred and seventeen (45 per cent of the humans) have facial hair, with moustaches being most common (sixty-two), then beards (forty-eight), side-burns (five) and a goatee (two). Beards also have a tendency to be messy (see The Professor in Mistress Masham’s Repose,Footnote ⁴⁷⁶ the waist-long beard of The Professor in Comet in Moominland,Footnote ⁴⁷⁷ the leaf-incrusted beard of Professor PottsFootnote ⁴⁷⁸ or Professor Perkin in Winnie’s Dinosaur DayFootnote ⁴⁷⁹), culturally echoing the unkempt beards of Victorian gentlemen of intellectual renown, such as Charles Darwin, Edward Lear and Alfred, Lord Tennyson. None of the academic women have facial hair.

There are no visible physical disabilities, and no behaviour that can be classed other than heteronormative. This lack of inclusion is simultaneously problematic while reminding us of the lack of diversity routinely shown in children’s literature,Footnote ⁴⁸⁰ and unintentionally, or subconsciously, mirroring the lack of diversity within the academy.Footnote ⁴⁸¹ Statistics for the proportion of academic staff that have physical disabilities, or are LGBTQ, are difficult to ascertain, as disclosure rates are assumed to be poor given existing prejudices within society: 4.6 per cent of UK academic staff disclosed their disability in 2016, whereas 70 per cet of staff did not disclose their sexual orientation.Footnote ⁴⁸² There is no attempt to represent academics in any way rather than being heterosexual and able-bodied: yet again, children’s literature misses the opportunity to address and tackle prejudices through positive representation of difference here, while both reflecting (and possibly critiquing?) the academy we have. The representation of mental health issues is discussed in Section 5.

4.7 Class

It is worth looking at ‘what kinds of economic lives are presented as normal and therefore desirable’ in these books.Footnote ⁴⁸³ Although there is only one Lord,Footnote ⁴⁸⁴ the message is projected over and again that academia is associated with wealth (particularly in the books produced in the United Kingdom). Academic homes are very different from those of the average reader: for example, the mansions of Professor Digory Kirke,Footnote ⁴⁸⁵ Professor Diggins,Footnote ⁴⁸⁶ Doktor Bunsen Van Der Dunkel’s ancient, lonely castle,Footnote ⁴⁸⁷ Dr Monsoon Taggert, who planned to build a palace but it came out as a very large mansion,Footnote ⁴⁸⁸ Professor QuicklyFootnote ⁴⁸⁹ and Doctor Harleyson.Footnote ⁴⁹⁰ Professor Sniff lives on a huge wind farm, and a point is made of the ‘parents’ small flat’ of the children who befriend him.Footnote ⁴⁹¹ We’ve already covered all the servants, housekeepers and cooks. In addition, the top hats and tails sported by some academics project class privilege, but so do displays of disposable income. Professors have hobbies that require vast resources, such as designing their own hot-air balloons.Footnote ⁴⁹² The Professor in Babar and the Professor has enough wealth to design and build a river boat massive enough to transport many elephant friends, on a whim.Footnote ⁴⁹³ The unnamed palaeontologist in The Dog That Dug can quickly rustle up a fortune to purchase the bones of an unearthed dinosaur fossil:

There is also discussion of expensive possessions. Packing a picnic for her Professor husband,

To finance a trip to the moon, Professor Blabbermouth ‘sold everything – all Blabbermouth’s valuable oil paintings, her stocks and shares, even her shoes and socks’.Footnote ⁴⁹⁶ These fortunes are not immutable: Professor Digory Kirke’s ‘very large house’Footnote ⁴⁹⁷ is lost by The Voyage of the Dawn Treader as ‘he had somehow become poor since the old days and was living in a small cottage with only one bedroom to spare’Footnote ⁴⁹⁸ – the shame of it! – and The Professor in Mistress Masham’s Repose was ‘as poor as a church mouse’Footnote ⁴⁹⁹ and frequently starving. However, clues abound that the professoriat is upper middle class, if not upper class, with wealth, comfort and disposable income, giving clear messages out to the readership of their social and economic standing, presenting a further barrier between them and the majority of child readers. This, of course, is reflected in the real-life academy, which follows a ‘steeply hierarchical structure that reflects profound social inequality’,Footnote ⁵⁰⁰ with entrenched ‘practices of class elitism and discrimination’Footnote ⁵⁰¹ contributing to ‘negative perceptions of the university’,Footnote ⁵⁰² which has resulting impacts that further compound class inequalities, for example, in low uptake in higher education attendance from working-class students, particularly white boys,Footnote ⁵⁰³ while apparently ‘only the rich can afford to work at Oxford and Cambridge’.Footnote ⁵⁰⁴ We have, at some point, to consider how stereotypes of academia are linked to current realities, and the effect this will have on an audience, and shall do so in Section 6.

4.8 Not All Fictional Academics are Created Human

Although 260 (79 per cent) of the fictional academics are human, there are other forms of Professor or Doctor. Forty-five (14 per cent) are animals: with six dogs, five mice, three cats, two toads, two frogs and an ant, bandicoot, bear, beaver, beetle, chimp, chipmunk, cockatoo, cockroach, crow, dumbo octopus, gorilla, kingfisher, lion, mole, monkey, otter, owl, pig, porcupine, possum, rabbit, rat, rhino, rooster, shark and stegosaurus. This does not seem to correlate with any dominance of stereotypical representation of intellectual anthropomorphism (such as Athena’s owl, or wily foxes); however, it sits within a long history of animal and object stories that help us query ‘our own species’ … claim to distinction’.Footnote ⁵⁰⁵ This also ventures into the Lacanian Symbolic, conferring animated life in ‘an anti-Cartesian world where animism rules, where all things are democratically, anarchically, even, given a voice’:Footnote ⁵⁰⁶ the corpus has five aliens, and one each of centaur, comic book bubble, fairy, gorgon, half-human half-dwarf, half-human half-giant, mineral, sock, spade and vegetable.Footnote ⁵⁰⁷ These representations challenge the intellectual authority and importance of academics, and intellectuals can be reduced to caricature: if a rock can be a professor, what value does the title give?Footnote ⁵⁰⁸ The symbolic representations are also heavily gendered with easily identifiable traits that reflect and reinforce societal conventions. Only two are female: Mahalia MouseFootnote ⁵⁰⁹ and Professor Steg the Stegosaurus in Fortunately, the Milk …Footnote ⁵¹⁰ Even four of the five academics who are godlike omniscient narrators, not pictured themselves, have male gender-specific traits and pronouns. The teacher’s guide to Fortunately, the Milk…, provided by Bloomsbury, asks, ‘Were you surprised to learn that Professor Steg is female? If so, why?’Footnote ⁵¹¹

4.9 Academic Title

The majority of academics in the corpus are professors (259, 80 per cent) with forty-two doctors. There are eight university students, two researchers, two lecturers, two heads of college and various administrators, a chancellor, a vice-warden, a keeper of a museum, a research assistant and personal assistant combined, a post-doc and, in what is probably the most specific university-related book title of a children’s text ever, an Assistant Professor Toad who is a ‘not-so-smart snozzie scientist from the Snoz Invention Centre, and he was EXTREMELY jealous of Professor Dribble’.Footnote ⁵¹² It is debateable whether these roles would be understood by their audience, especially given that they usually appear without explanation or backstory. The fact that most academics are represented with the most senior of titles – where are all the students? – creates distance between them and the childhood audience of the books, setting an unknown and unnamed process of how one would acquire this honorific between character and reader.Footnote ⁵¹³ The fictional characters form representations of intellectual achievement that are not a known continuum of a child’s own schooling, but another, strange authority: separate and unexplained, as Lithgow commented, they are ‘very, very, far away’.Footnote ⁵¹⁴

4.10 Academic Subject Area

Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) dominate the subject area of fictional academics (Chart 4).

Chart 4

Subject area of fictional academics, determined by mention of subject within text.

Although eighty-nine (27 per cent of) fictional academics have no subject area specifically linked to them (this includes the six children), 154 (47 per cent) are specifically linked to STEM areas, with fifty-four scientists, twenty-three inventors, thirteen zoologists, ten biologists, seven mathematicians, six medical researchers, four chemists, five palaeontologists, three astronomers and two each of engineers, physicists and rocket scientists. There is one aeronaut, astrophysicist, botanist, computing scientist, ecologist, explorer, geographer, geologist, marine biologist, oceanographer, criminal scientist, space scientist, veterinary scientist, metereologist, natural historian, psychologist and food scientist. Getting into the questionable areas of ‘science’, there is also a homeopath and a Necrobioneopalaeonthydrochthonanthropopithekologist (showing the ineffectual and questionable science of Professor Ptthmllnsprts in The Water BabiesFootnote ⁵¹⁵). Five are in non-existent mythical beast ‘subjects’, with three in Dragonology or Serpentology (studying Dragons), one researching Unicorns and one undertaking the very scary-sounding ‘demonological research’ (Professor Van Helsing in How to Slay a WerewolfFootnote ⁵¹⁶). This indicates a small attempt to take science and academic authority into the mythological, imaginative realm.

There are only eighty-four (26 per cent) who are non-STEM, and although they represent a wide range of experience and expertise, this bias towards the sciences projects a very limited picture of the subject range that is available, and important to children, at university level. This, of course, is a battle fought by the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences for government funds, for a fair representation of the way universities are presented in the media and even for fair support within institutions,Footnote ⁵¹⁷ but it is worrying that it is also played out in children’s books, suggesting entrenched cultural biases regarding the academic value of non-STEM areas.Footnote ⁵¹⁸ The interests of non-STEM experts can be divided into three areas: the Humanities and Social Sciences (13 %), Performing Arts (6 %) and vocational subjects (7 %). Within the Humanities and Social Sciences, the most common subject areas as archaeology (nine), history (five), museology (five), music (five), linguistics (four), education studies (four), economics (two), with one in anthropology, art, Chinese, literature, manuscript studies, psychology, theatre, theology and religion. The vocational cluster has fourteen teachers, two hairdressers, two cooks and one each of an administrator, explorer, headteacher, secret agent, comic book artist and vocal instructor. The performing arts cluster has twelve magicians and entertainers, one clown and a downright fraudster. Interestingly, this shows a non-university influence within children’s illustrated literature: the Music Hall, presenting the professor as entertainer rather than scientist, which will be explored below in Section 4.11.

Women are not necessarily associated with the ‘softer’ academic subjects. Granted, there is a hairdresser, and four that undertake more traditional Arts and Humanities subject areas (a doctor of literature, a student of history, an anthropologist and an archaeologist) and a teacher, which have been subjects traditionally more statistically likely to be chosen by females than males;Footnote ⁵¹⁹ however, there are also four female scientists, two palaeontologists, two museum scientists and a botanist, chemist, ecologist, engineer, economist, mathematician, physicist, one who studies dragons and another who studies unicorns. The few women who do appear are often wonderful role models, for example, the fictional author of My First Pet Dragon: The Complete Handbook for Beginners:

The fact that 27 per cent of the academics do not have any subject area at all is interesting: indicating that that characterisation is about expertise and authority, without necessarily displaying that in any way beyond the character’s own interactions with those around them. This is particularly the case with non-human academics, for example, the spade in Traction Man is Here:Footnote ⁵²¹ ‘wicked professor spade is really just a spade with a name – (what on earth is it going to be a professor of?)’.Footnote ⁵²² The honorific titles add meaning by linking to stereotypical prior associations of how doctors and professors behave, without necessarily positioning them in an area of expertise.

4.11 Puppeteers, Magicians and Performers

Throughout the corpus, there is prevailing influence of the academic as entertainer. Before the growth of the university sector and the establishment of academia as a profession in the late nineteenth century, mock honorifics and grandiose titles were assumed to denote expertise in music halls and circuses. Punch and Judy men had been called Professors since the eighteenth century.Footnote ⁵²³ By 1864 it was noted that the word ‘professor’ was ‘so desecrated in its use that we are most familiar with it in connection with dancing schools, juggler’s booths, and veterinary surgeries’,Footnote ⁵²⁴ and during this period the term ‘professor’ was ‘commonly adopted by marionette players, band directors, animal trainers, magicians, ventriloquists, acrobats, etc’.Footnote ⁵²⁵ Wilson writes of Victorian animal trainers using honorifics, including the sea lion tamer Professor, or Captain, WoodwardFootnote ⁵²⁶ and the dog trainers Professor Chard and Professor Devereaux.Footnote ⁵²⁷ The conjuror George Arthur Fox took on his stage name Professor De Lyle ‘from a tin of Lyle’s Golden Syrup, adding De for a touch of class and gave himself the title of Professor, as all good Punch and Judy men are called’.Footnote ⁵²⁸ The usage of the term in this way fell out of favour in the second quarter of the twentieth century.Footnote ⁵²⁹ However, we see the echoes of these showmen, in both subject area and dress: white-tied, top-hatted and ready to dazzle. The earliest example is Professor Wolley Cobble:

He is followed by Professor Knox,

Professor Bolero ‘Cannon Ball Tosser and Lightning Change Artist to the Crowned Heads of Europe’, asks:

Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn and Jim join The Professor, a showman with a balloon in Tom Sawyer Abroad:

These figures are often sinister, and linked to magic, money-making and then on to fraud.Footnote ⁵³⁴ For example, Professor de Lara in The Twopenny Spell (Figure 19):

De Lara tricks Lucy into buying a spell that will make her strong, and her brother weak (‘“No goods exchanged,” he said crossly; “you’ve got what you asked for”’Footnote ⁵³⁶), although the children’s one-day switching of roles leads to better behaviour from both, long-term.

Figure 19

Professor de Lara in Nesbit, ‘The twopenny spell’, from Oswald Bastable and Others.

Illustrated by Charles E. Brock. Public Domain: image from copy held in Osmania University Library, available via Digital Library of India, from archive.org. This is a busy street: someone must have seen them.

The circus and music hall echo throughout the corpus, in The Highly Trained Dogs of Professor Petit,Footnote ⁵³⁷ Dr Merlin’s Magic Shop,Footnote ⁵³⁸ Professor Ali Pokanini, ‘musician, magician, ventriloquist, and imitator’ in The Four Adventurers meet The Evil ProfessorFootnote ⁵³⁹ and the magician Dr Sanders in Rupert and the Rope Trick.Footnote ⁵⁴⁰ Professor Fergus Fahrenheit blends the conman and scientist together with His Wonderful Weather Machine,Footnote ⁵⁴¹ in a fictionalised story of the travelling rainmakers that would fraudulently extort money for precipitation spells in the Great Plains states.Footnote ⁵⁴² Professor Gilderoy Lockhart in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets is unmasked as a fraud, after building his celebrity on unfounded public bragging.Footnote ⁵⁴³ There is also a long-established cultural link to magic and performance as science, inherited from the trope of the alchemist,Footnote ⁵⁴⁴ which plays out in this suggestion of science and intellect as magic; for example, the long-lived scientist, Doktor Bunsen van der Dunkel in Moon Man,Footnote ⁵⁴⁵ who had been trying to build a spacecraft to fly to the moon for hundreds of years, is shown, now, as the bald-headed elderly lab-coated scientist surrounding by electronic equipment, standing in front of a portrait of his younger self as a wizard.Footnote ⁵⁴⁶ The professor as performer and magician, inherited from circus and music hall traditions and linked to the coinciding representation of scientist as alchemist, is therefore an important trope that lives on in children’s literature, long after the music halls themselves have closed.Footnote ⁵⁴⁷

4.12 The Academics in the Plot

There is little use made of characters’ intellectual expertise. Academics tend to function in a similar way to the childlike, childless ‘avuncular older men’Footnote ⁵⁴⁸ trope who shift the balance between adults and children, no longer being ‘the bringers of discipline or wisdom’.Footnote ⁵⁴⁹ Many of the benevolent, baffled professors interact with children and ‘themselves learned from, and were liberated by, the children’.Footnote ⁵⁵⁰ Plots are usually spurred on by children coming into contact with these lone, family-less, eccentric academics, allowing interactions which usually occur without parental supervision or input: the agent acting in loco parentis exhibiting behaviour far removed from typical familial activity. These interactions can take two forms, the first in an extension of the Jungian ‘wise old man’Footnote ⁵⁵¹ trope in children’s literature where the professor passes on wisdom that extends and challenges the child’s normality. For example, the Pevensie children in The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe are ‘sent away from London during the War because of the air-raids’ to the home of Professor Digory Kirke (Figure 20),Footnote ⁵⁵² who is no relation to them, persuading them of the logic that parallel worlds exist:

Lydia and Jarmes McGill (sic) are educated in wider possibilities of the natural world in Professor Diggins’ Dragons:

The reader in the biblical choose-your-own-adventure Professor Q’s Mysterious Machine visits Professor Quinten to return a book, ending up in a time machine witnessing (and perhaps dying in) various battles that feature in the scriptures, learning more about Jesus in the process.Footnote ⁵⁵⁵ The wise old man in these books opens up the world to the children. A child next door helps explore The Professor’s Garden in Maclennan: ‘My mom said the Professor’s garden was a mess. But he liked it that way, and so did I’.Footnote ⁵⁵⁶ The death of the Professor next door means the child has to process loss, and understand the importance of acts of remembrance, for a friend who had engaged with glee in the child’s games (Figure 21).

Figure 20

Professor Digory Kirke in his study advising Peter and Susan Pevensie, in Lewis, The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (1950, p. 49).

Illustration by Pauline Baynes, © Copyright CS Lewis Pte Ltd 1950. Used with permission.

Figure 21

Katy and her friendship with her ‘eccentric old neighbour’ who sports academic robes while scaring starlings, in Maclennan, The Professor’s Garden (p. 10).

Illustrated by Elizabeth Andrew. Used with permission, New Africa Books.

An inversion of this is where the child’s interaction changes the academic’s thinking by challenging their scientific values. Giddens notes that cultures of illustration in didactic children’s books of the Victorian period were ‘surprisingly reluctant to represent the child engaging with science’ but that fantasy such as Kingsley’s The Water-Babies ‘inaugurated a tradition of visually representing the child scientist (or at the very least the inquisitive child) – leading to the possibility of the child engaging critically with the natural and mechanical world’.Footnote ⁵⁵⁷ Professor Ptthmllnsprts in The Water-BabiesFootnote ⁵⁵⁸ is a friend sent out to look for biological specimens on a seaside walk, to educate an estate owner’s daughter, Ellie (Figure 22):

They come across Tom, the Water-Baby, and Ellie’s childhood views challenge Ptthmllnsprts’ scientific approach, eventually sending him mad. The Water-Babies is closely linked to, and satirises, real scientific debates and characters of the period (which Kingsley was enmeshed in), but also sets up the fictional academic in children’s literature as ineffectual with a tendency towards insanity. Although a relatively minor character in the book, Ptthmllnsprts was (and is)Footnote ⁵⁶⁰ experienced by a very broad audience, promoting a sense of ridiculousness and failure associated with experts and intellectual achievementFootnote ⁵⁶¹ while also establishing the child as essential foil to academic expertise.

Figure 22

Professor Ptthmllnsprts walking alone with Ellie at the seaside, in the 1915 edition of Kingsley, The Water-Babies,.

illustrated by W. Heath Robinson, p. 136. Note that he is also holding a book, signalling expertise. Public Domain: Image from copy held at New York Public Library, scanned by Nicole Deyo, available at archive.org

The primary school-aged Finn in The Rooftop Rocket Party ‘went to visit Doctor Gass in New York. Doctor Gass was a famous rocket scientist’,Footnote ⁵⁶² although he keeps his rockets only ‘in the most secret and unusual place of all … my head!!’Footnote ⁵⁶³ Finn ends up educating him about the presence of the ‘unmathematical … so very unscientific’ man in the moon;Footnote ⁵⁶⁴ The botanist Professor Tobin takes a room in Maisie Hitchin’s Grandmother’s boarding house in The Case of the Feathered Mask,Footnote ⁵⁶⁵ allowing Maisie to solve the mystery of a theft that the adults cannot comprehend. This mechanism links the trope of the ‘wise old man’ to the trope of the wise or ‘divine child’ (the romantic motif where ‘the adult moves from teacher to student, from stern moralizing to the undisciplined child to patient listening to the wise instruction of the simple and imaginative child’,Footnote ⁵⁶⁶ another Jungian motif). The academic figures can ‘constitute alternative ideals for children.Footnote ⁵⁶⁷ They stand as figures for the father, for the writer, for the adult authority in society’Footnote ⁵⁶⁸ but also represent what happens when this authority fails. This plays with intellectual agency, questioning expertise, prestige and power, and the child’s place in social constructs, while also indicating room for intellectual aspiration and potential, alternative, pathways to adulthood. However, these traits are taken to extremes in the stereotypes discussed in the following section, as academics become so baffled as to be ineffectual, or so eccentric as to be mad and dangerous.

4.13 Conclusion: The Stereotypes Emerge

Undertaking a content analysis of this corpus of 289 books has allowed the dominant visual stereotype of an academic, particularly in the latter part of the twentieth century, to emerge: a professor in children’s literature is now generally an elderly white able-bodied scruffy man with sticking-out messy hair and perhaps an unruly beard. The related texts suggest that they are most likely to be a scientist or inventor, with wealth or at least disposable income, and have a support network of wife or housekeeper to aid and assist them. They are most likely to be depicted away from the university, either at home or on some form of trip. It is these characters that are the most important part in children’s literature, rather than the universities or institutions that they belong to: ‘academics act as a symbol for higher education in popular culture’.Footnote ⁵⁶⁹ There is little attention paid to fictional academics’ work or expertise, rather than what they do when involved in the plot, often interacting in some way with children, playing with ideas of intellectual agency and power.

Throughout this analysis, the counts and statistics revealed have been related to available information regarding the diversity (or not) of academia. It is tempting to reflect that many of the books were written throughout the late nineteenth and into the middle of the twentieth century, and parallels that can be drawn indicate that, although the representation of academics within children’s texts may be non-diverse and problematic, it may somewhat fairly reflect the real-world academy and wider socio-political structures as instantiated during that period. It would be too easy to discount these texts as being ‘of their time’. With half of the corpus being written after 1993, many of the representations we see have chosen to self-refer to established tropes and stereotypes, indicating that that the cultural hegemony continues in modern society and remains expressed strongly through the medium of children’s literature, and, in addition, texts produced in earlier times continue to be available to, and influence, child readers today. The stereotypes coalesce into three distinct types of behaviour, and these will be explored in Section 5.

5.1 The Stereotypical Professor as Teacher

The first stereotype is that of a helpful, kindly teacher or intellectual guide. Academics appear as teachers to children throughout the corpus; to give but some examples: Professor Howard in the first book;Footnote ⁵⁷¹ the teacher in The Professor’s Last Skate, who regales his class with an adventure tale;Footnote ⁵⁷² Professor Crow who advises the young woodland animals poorly but kindly;Footnote ⁵⁷³ Dr Cornelius, mentor and teacher to Prince Caspian;Footnote ⁵⁷⁴ Dr Monsoon Taggert, head of a finishing academy;Footnote ⁵⁷⁵ and Dr Chimp, classroom teacher in mortar board and gown in Rupert the Bear.Footnote ⁵⁷⁶ This pedagogical relationship provides a mechanism for children to come into contact with adult – or grandfather-like, given they are almost always male – experts, in a formalisation of the ‘wise old man’ Jungian trope, all the way through the corpus. In factual books it is a framing device, used as a personable way to explain science and industry to a childhood readership. For example, from its publication in 1950, Professor Brittain appeared every fortnight in the Eagle comic for at least the first few years of its publication, to explain scientific developments such as telescopes,Footnote ⁵⁷⁷ deep sea divers,Footnote ⁵⁷⁸ X-ray,Footnote ⁵⁷⁹ traffic lightsFootnote ⁵⁸⁰ and motorcycle engines.Footnote ⁵⁸¹ A kind, fatherly figure, it is also important to note that he explained science equally to both boys and girls, with characters called Bob and Joan asking him questions (although their relationship is never explained). For example,

The Professor promotes science as a career for both genders: after explaining X-ray, Joan remarks, ‘Yes, I’d love to be a radiographer!’Footnote ⁵⁸³

We see this type of relationship throughout the corpus: the expert professorial father figure is used to explain facts, such as science and industry in the So That’s the Reason! series,Footnote ⁵⁸⁴ maths in Professor Googol’s Flying Machine and Atomic Space Capsule Math Primer,Footnote ⁵⁸⁵ biology in the Einstein-alike Professor I. Q. Explores the Senses,Footnote ⁵⁸⁶ the alphabet in Learning Your Animal ABC’s with Professor HootFootnote ⁵⁸⁷ and physics in Professor Astro Cat’s Frontiers of Space.Footnote ⁵⁸⁸ They are used, too, in official public health guidance: Professor Oonoose Q. Eckwoose explains food groups in a booklet made by the United States Department of Agriculture Office of CommunicationFootnote ⁵⁸⁹ and Professor Bumblebee provides a Guide to Type 1 Diabetes for Diabetes Australia.Footnote ⁵⁹⁰ These academics are nothing but kindly and helpful, and they can be used as role models; for example, in the cartoon Oor Wullie, the local policeman P.C. Murdoch remarks to Wullie, the child protagonist, ‘Ye should be stickin’ in tae yer lessons an’ be brainy like the twa professors yonder – they ken a’thing!’ (Figure 23)Footnote ⁵⁹¹ However, there is little exploration of any individuality: the trope of the kindly pedagogue, used without need for explanation, sets up a well-known mechanism for framing explanation.

Figure 23

Oor Wullie, in The Sunday Post, 14 May 1944, p. 11. Note that the professors are holding books to indicate their expertise. Oor Wullie ® © DC Thomson & Co. Ltd 2017.

Used By Kind Permission of DC Thomson & Co. Ltd. Image provided with thanks to The British Newspaper Archive (www.BritishNewspaperArchive.co.uk).

In fiction books, interactions with the teacher or mentor moves the plot forward, allowing them to learn more about the outside world, in tales based around science (often written by scientists). For example, the fictional Professor Hill explains the study of skunks (The Professor and the Mysterious BoxFootnote ⁵⁹²) and the tracking of whales (The Professor and the Vanishing FlagsFootnote ⁵⁹³) to children of a family he knows. Professor Potts’ travels are a thinly veiled mechanism to teach children about the wildlife of Asia, North AmericaFootnote ⁵⁹⁴ and Africa.Footnote ⁵⁹⁵ Professor Inkling in the Octonauts original book seriesFootnote ⁵⁹⁶ is a fount of old-fashioned wisdom, patronal guidance and scientific explanation to his younger crew of adventurers (see Figure 8). The characters can sometimes be hollow and thinly drawn, but they are trustworthy sources of information both for other characters in the book and for readers. The (relatively recently) archetypical example of a fully fleshed out paternal figure is, of course, Professor Albus Dumbledore in the Harry Potter series,Footnote ⁵⁹⁷ who is wise old man, teacher, father figure and expert combined.

This sense of expertise and authority is turned on its head in various ways: recent creationist propaganda uses elderly male professors to demonstrate religious texts as fact: for example, Professor Noah Thingertoo’s Bible Fact BookFootnote ⁵⁹⁸ and Professor Bumblebrain’s Bonkers Book on … God.Footnote ⁵⁹⁹ For more comic effect, there are books that explain mythical beasts in the style of a natural history book: Professor Dalrymple’s Fairy Field Guide;Footnote ⁶⁰⁰ Professor Miriam Carter in The Mystery of Unicorns, The True History Revealed.Footnote ⁶⁰¹ In a humorous play on convention, professors can explain how the world works, but get it utterly wrong, such as in Professor Mole’s Machines (the amazing pop-up book of how things REALLY work!) where a hamster on a wheel is shown to power a washing machine motor, and rabbits keep planes aloft by driving crankshafts: ‘Faster, bunnies, faster!’ ‘We’re tired, Daddy’.Footnote ⁶⁰² Professor Gilderoy Lockhart, in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets,Footnote ⁶⁰³ is a comically drawn cross between showman, ambitious bighead and bully, his public exposure as a fraud puncturing the sense of authority that comes with being a professor at Hogwarts.

The masters of this clash of pedagogical intention and erroneous information are Jeanne Willis and Tony Ross in their award-winning Dr Xargle picture books,Footnote ⁶⁰⁴ where the five-eyed, betentacled green alien in academic gown and mortar board prepares his class for an excursion to Earth. They each start in the same way: ‘Good morning, class. Today we are going to learn about …’Footnote ⁶⁰⁵ and investigate various topics, where the explanation rapidly falls apart, revealing tension between both the truth that is known by the reader and the explanation given in the text, and the description of the scene and its accompanying illustration, in a multi-layered questioning and refocusing on habits, Western lifestyle and English language (Figure 24).

Figure 24

Dr Xargle explains cats gleefully but wrongly in Willis and Ross, Dr Xargle’s Book of Earth Tiggers (p. 2).

Used with kind permission of Andersen Press Ltd.

In the first book of the series, Dr Xargle’s Book of Earthlets (1988), babies: ‘come in many colours … but not green. They have one head and only two eyes, two short tentacles with pheelers on the end, and two long tentacles called leggies’.Footnote ⁶⁰⁶ The baby is shown being tickled by Dr Xargle’s tentacles, questioning the assumed normality of the human body. ‘They have square claws which they use to frighten off wild beasts known as Tibbles and Marmaduke’.Footnote ⁶⁰⁷ The baby is shown happily and firmly pulling the tails of two cats, who are desperately trying to get away, evidently terrorised by the baby, who has overturned their water bowl, leaving a dummy as a calling card in their food, allowing the reader to revel in the clash of picture and explanation. After a series of explanations, Dr Xargle comments, ‘That is the end of today’s lesson. If you are all very good and quiet we are going to put our disguises on and visit Earth to see some real Earthlets. The space ship leaves in five minutes …’Footnote ⁶⁰⁸ In later books in the series, these misunderstandings anticipate that visits will go wrong in the closing illustration of the book: in Dr Xargle’s Book of Earth Mobiles (1991), Matron arranges for the students to go on a train ride, which turns out to be a fairground ghost train; in Dr Xargle’s Book of Earth Weather (1992), the aliens end up dressed as miniature Santas singing ‘Hark the horrid angels sing’Footnote ⁶⁰⁹ at a summer garden party to the bemusement of the humans; in Dr Xargle’s Book of Earth Tiggers (1992) they end up in close proximity to a tiger by mistake. This play with the role of the teacher, known facts, conflicting illustration and retooled language, revels in tensions and differences, lampooning expertise and allowing the child reader to be the expert of their own lifestyle, knowing more than the alien professor or his visiting hordes of aliens will ever do.Footnote ⁶¹⁰ This clever and funny series, which has been recommended in the teaching of science in schools,Footnote ⁶¹¹ would also not function had professorial tropes in children’s literature not previously been established.

5.2 The Stereotypical Muddle-Head

In a recurrent motif throughout the corpus, professors are routinely baffled, eccentric and ineffectual, with no grasp on the real world. The inventions and science often fail, accompanied by slapstick humour, and they demonstrate very poor life skills. A Professor in The Forgetful Forget-me-notFootnote ⁶¹² asks the flower why it is so named, and is curtly told to go away and use his skill and look it up in books himself, the plant having forgotten too. In Sylvie and Bruno, ‘The Professor’ is

Little Jack Rabbit regularly comments on how the world works, pointing out that his friend ‘Professor Crow didn’t tell me that’, in a failure of the professor’s Little Book of Wisdom.Footnote ⁶¹⁴

The archetypal absent-minded professor who creates malfunctioning inventions is, of course, Professor Branestawm (appearing in thirteen books from 1933):

These books also establish the role of the Professor’s housekeeper, Mrs Flittersnoop, as an essential enabler as well as foil (Figure 25).

Figure 25

Professor Branestawm and The Colonel, being served tea by Mrs Flittersnoop after they blow up the Palace of Squiglatania. In Hunter, The Incredible Adventures of Professor Branestawm, p. 21,.

illustrated by W. Heath Robinson. Public Domain

The publishing success of Branestawm colours the characteristics of the academics that follow in children’s literature. The Professor in Mistress Masham’s Repose

These baffled professors are often illustrated with humour, linking concentration and intellectual obsession with the reason they are incapable in other aspects of life. Webb’s illustration affectionately lampoons and characterises the features of hard-thinking professors, summing up the common stereotype in one handy graphic in Figure 26

Figure 26

Professor Ponsonby in Parker, Professor Ponsonby, McIntosh and the Wool Bug (p. 39),.

illustrated by Philip Webb. Used with permission of the illustrator and rights owner, Philip Webb

The confusion and baffled nature of the academics, who are supposed to be in control, is a plot device which causes juxtapositions to move the story along. Professor Magnus MacWhizzer invents a time machine but cannot drive it:

The erratic, chaotic travels allow the professor, along with his housekeeper and his great-great-niece and -nephew, to travel through space, although the professor himself is ultimately stranded by his invention when ‘lost in a delicious daydream, the Professor overbalanced, tripped over his own toe, and one flailing arm caught the lever marked GO …’:Footnote ⁶¹⁸ he is shown disappearing in the pop of a bubble. Likewise, the gap between what the professor perceives and what the action is drives forward the picture book Cockatoos,Footnote ⁶¹⁹ where the eccentric and absent-minded Professor Dupont is repeatedly outsmarted by his pet birds, who hide all over his house (providing a counting game to the reader). Professor Quickly doesn’t notice – unlike everyone else, including the reader, who can see a ghost at the window – that his new house is haunted.Footnote ⁶²⁰ Professor Yahoo is tasked by the Queen to collect a menagerie so she can have a zoo of her own, but trips over a goat and breaks his glasses, leading him to collect a random selection of things mistaken for exotic animals:

The denouement, in this case, is that the Queen – who has broken her glasses too – is delighted by the collection, but mistakes Professor Yahoo for a talking goose, and so he now lives happily in a zoo enclosure (Figure 27).

Figure 27

Professor Yahoo congratulates himself for collecting a ‘Polar Bear and Penguin’ for his zoo.

Reproduced by permission of the Junior League of Kansas City, Missouri, from Evans, The Mixed-Up Zoo of Professor Yahoo (p. 20). All rights reserved.

Professors get nicknames because of their baffled nature:

Professors change their own names, too:

Comment is made about the uselessness of the inventions and science undertaken. The reader in Did I Ever Tell You How Lucky You Are?Footnote ⁶²⁴ is asked to consider how much more fortunate they are than Professor de Breeze, who has spent three decades trying to teach Irish ducks to read the Jivanese language. The ducks are pictured being lectured, and are unconvinced. Likewise, Professor Ponsonby (Figure 26)

The engineer Professor Von Bean in Silly Stories spends his lifetime inventing a machine:

Whatever they are doing – whether inventing, undertaking scientific experiments or digging on an archaeological site – many of the academics are shown as endearingly ineffectual and pointless, in a deprecatory (and at times vituperative) depiction of the ‘life of the mind’.

Lectures and classes are depicted as confusing and boring. The Professor’s lecture in Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (Figure 7),Footnote ⁶²⁷ despite featuring miniaturised elephants, and explosions, is rambling, has no topic and loses the audience’s attention. ‘“How long must we wait?” grumbled the Emperor.’Footnote ⁶²⁸ Professor Mudweed in the Boffin Boy series comments, ‘None of you are clever enough to understand my invention, but I’ll try and explain it …’, at which point, an audience member thinks, ‘This is going to be really boring’,Footnote ⁶²⁹ in an exaggeration of the stereotype of a yawn-inducing academic lecture.Footnote ⁶³⁰ Professor Bumblebrain comments, ‘I do hope you are finding my lecture of interest. When you have a brain as large as mine, it is so very easy to bore an audience to death’ (Figure 28).Footnote ⁶³¹ Science, in particular, is portrayed as a magical source only accessible to academics, linking to stage-tricks and conjuring, but also crossing into fantastical thinking, showing intellect as sitting between realism and impossibility, building on tropes of nonsense-writing, of grotesques and of caricature.Footnote ⁶³² The bafflement in these cases creates a gap between the intellectual authority of the professor and the knowledge of the child reader, who can see, via illustrations, where the adults are ineffectual, wrong and boring, and not in control of the environments around them. The childhood audience is encouraged to explore the gaps, in an intellectual equivalent of spotting that the emperor has no clothes.

Figure 28

Robb, Professor Bumblebrain’s Bonkers Book on God (p. 53).

Used with permission, CWR. Notice, also, the Einstein-like Bumblebrain.

The apparent confusion at real life is often stressed by the juxtaposition of normal and magical thinking: Professor Bull

Eccentric, baffled professors are, then, playing with logic and rationalisation in an extension to and in the tradition of nineteenth-century nonsense writing, where fantastic adventures are playfully framed against known, mundane reality in a ‘perfect tension between meaning and absence of meaning’Footnote ⁶³⁴ that is amusing (particularly to a childhood audience) and that encourages the reader to think about normal behaviour and what it is to be an adult. These professors act, rather like Mary Poppins, as ‘the conduit between reality and fantasy, the structural interface in the text’,Footnote ⁶³⁵ allowing safe exploration of the impossible and illogical where ‘the structure of the text enables readers to suggest their own conclusions because there is a pattern of connection which moves from the known to the unknown’Footnote ⁶³⁶ provided by ‘a real figure of authority and didacticism … and the fantastic facilitator of magical experiences’.Footnote ⁶³⁷ While professors are shown in pejorative fashion as being ineffectual, and their work meaningless, which (as we shall see) plays into the view of the scientist in popular culture and actively reinforces distrust of expertise, this mechanism can also be more complex: giving authors and illustrators a place to play with known constraints, using tropes to explore authority and intellect via nonsense.

The mostly ineffectual nature of these academics is reflected in their challenging names. Pedagogues are apparent, with three Professor Wisemans,Footnote ⁶³⁸ two Professor IQsFootnote ⁶³⁹ and a Professor Boffin,Footnote ⁶⁴⁰ Professor Egghead,Footnote ⁶⁴¹ Professor Inkling,Footnote ⁶⁴² Professor NoodleFootnote ⁶⁴³ and Professor Tidymind.Footnote ⁶⁴⁴ However, there are far more with pejorative names. There are two Professor Bumbles,Footnote ⁶⁴⁵ a Professor Blabbermouth,Footnote ⁶⁴⁶ Professor Bumblebrain,Footnote ⁶⁴⁷ Professor Bumphead,Footnote ⁶⁴⁸ Professor Clickilty Klunk,Footnote ⁶⁴⁹ Professor Dinglebat,Footnote ⁶⁵⁰ Professor Doodle,Footnote ⁶⁵¹ Professor Dribble,Footnote ⁶⁵² Professor Hogwash,Footnote ⁶⁵³ Professor Von Hardbum,Footnote ⁶⁵⁴ Professor Muddlehead,Footnote ⁶⁵⁵ Professor P. Brain,Footnote ⁶⁵⁶ Professor PigglePoggle,Footnote ⁶⁵⁷ Professor Pingwit,Footnote ⁶⁵⁸ Professor Poopypants,Footnote ⁶⁵⁹ Professor Poppoff,Footnote ⁶⁶⁰ Professor StupidoFootnote ⁶⁶¹ and Professor Whatzit.Footnote ⁶⁶² Those who are given ‘real’ names have ones that are foreign, unusual or difficult to the English tongue, highlighting their otherness; for example: Professor Euclid Bullfinch;Footnote ⁶⁶³ Professor Pompilius McGrath;Footnote ⁶⁶⁴ Professor Mickimecki;Footnote ⁶⁶⁵ and Professor Aristides Pilaster.Footnote ⁶⁶⁶

There are also three Professor PottsFootnote ⁶⁶⁷ and a Professor Pots,Footnote ⁶⁶⁸ Professor Nutter,Footnote ⁶⁶⁹ Professor Nut,Footnote ⁶⁷⁰ Professor CoconutFootnote ⁶⁷¹ and Professor Crackinbottle,Footnote ⁶⁷² pointing to another theme in the corpus: madness.

5.3 The Stereotypical Madman

There is little thought given to the impact of ableist language by authors: ‘Sometimes I think my friend Professor Solomon Snickerdoodle is a little funny in the head.’Footnote ⁶⁷³ Books even have madness in the title, such as or My Father the Mad Professor,Footnote ⁶⁷⁴ Mad Professor: Concoct Extremely Weird Science Projects,Footnote ⁶⁷⁵ Dr Brad Has Gone MadFootnote ⁶⁷⁶ and The Mad Professor’s Workshop.Footnote ⁶⁷⁷

The apparent madness of academics is closely associated with genius:

The dishevelled, big-haired appearances of the academics feed into this slap-stick, oddball otherworldliness, where the madness can be kindly and eccentric, separated from (and not understanding) cultural norms. Doctor Crotchet and Professor Nut devote their energies to recording a symphony that is so loud and awful it terrorises their town, without them noticing.Footnote ⁶⁷⁹ Professor Peekaboo is asked, ‘would you subscribe to the view that you’re essentially eccentric?’ – and agrees.Footnote ⁶⁸⁰ Professor Molecule’s friends often laugh and shake their heads at him, commenting, ‘What a crazy Professor!’Footnote ⁶⁸¹ Professor Oliver Query is suddenly custodian to his teenage daughter in My Father The Mad Professor,Footnote ⁶⁸² and his eccentricities, and the differences between his own lifestyle and that of ‘normal’ Americans, provides the mechanism for the teenage narrator to explore father–daughter relationships and bonding with a parent, post-divorce:

However, alongside the eccentricities and questionable mental health comments, comes representation of ever-present malice and Machiavellianism:

The evil scientific desire for dominance and destruction is revealed in numerous texts, where the madness often comes to define them. Doctor Daffney in the Boffin Boy series is a ‘famous mad scientist, you know.’Footnote ⁶⁸⁵ ‘Mad Professor Erasmus’ in Stitch Head, The Ghost of Grotteskew is ‘considered by most to be the maddest professor of all. He had spent a lifetime creating crazy creations.’Footnote ⁶⁸⁶ Doctors are more likely to be evil than professors: so much so that the villain in Professor Blabbermouth on the Moon,Footnote ⁶⁸⁷ ‘The meanest and most jealous scientist in the world, and a man who smelt of aftershave,’Footnote ⁶⁸⁸ is simply known as Doctor Doctor: ‘He had been plotting and being evil all day, and Doctor Doctor was tired.’Footnote ⁶⁸⁹ The threats posed by these characters are usually told with humour, and the violence is often entertaining, such as the glorious Dr Frankenstinker, who exercises his madness as if he were the naughtiest boy in the school (Figure 29).

Figure 29

From MUNGO AND THE SPIDERS FROM SPACE by Timothy Knapman, illustrated by Adam Stower, p. 9.

Text copyright © 2007 by Timothy Knapman. Illustrations copyright © 2007 by Adam Stower. Used by permission of Dial Books for Young Readers, an imprint of Penguin Young Readers Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Notice that, despite his naughtiness, Dr Frankenstinker consults a dictionary.

Dr Frankenstinker – his name a comic play on Frankenstein just rude enough to be funny for an infant school audienceFootnote ⁶⁹⁰ – plays with the mad scientist idea, with his evil ways reflecting the kind of things children would be told off for, converted to science fiction. The author, Timothy Knapman, commented:

In Mungo and the Spiders From Space, the evil scientist needs no introduction, being accepted by the reader as a fully formed troublemaker and nemesis without the need for backstory, eventually thwarted by child hero Mungo, in a text that plays with conventions (the books are ‘deliberatively [given] a retro look … the Dan Dare-style comic of Spiders’Footnote ⁶⁹²).

In the case of Dr Frankenstinker, Knapman reflected back to his childhood viewing:

Dr Frankenstinker sits within a long tradition of evil scientists, played up for comic effect, in an intertextual rollicking space adventure that nods to the film, television, and texts that have come before it, expecting the reader to be aware of the conventions used. The humour here is in a long tradition of classic picture books reminding us that

Fully illustrated picture books for three- to five-year-olds contain many straightforward stereotypical academic madmen who are introduced without the need for explanation, such is their known trope. In Traction Man Is Here,Footnote ⁶⁹⁶ Evil Doctor Sock tries to force a cupcake to be his bride, and wicked Professor Spade keeps dollies captive (Figure 30). This references, and plays with the casual misogyny and gender structure of, boys’ own adventure tales:Footnote ⁶⁹⁷ the sock and spade in Traction Man Is Here are actors playing the part of the typical baddie, sprung from the boyish imagination of Traction Man’s owner, who drives the plot on. However, these stereotypical structures are subverted: both Doctor Sock and the harassed cupcake forget about the villain and victim roles when confronted with Traction Man’s ridiculous green knitted outfit, which has been provided lovingly by the boy’s grandmother, and worn by Traction Man unwillingly: everyone laughs, and the structures and predicted plot line disintegrate.

Figure 30

Traction Man sets out to rescue Cupcake, but is thwarted by his ridiculous knitted romper suit. Artwork: Mini Grey, from Traction Man Is Here, by Mini Grey, Published by Jonathan Cape, Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Limited.

© 2005.698

Similarly, the denouement of The Astonishing Secret of Awesome ManFootnote ⁶⁹⁹ is that Awesome Man is the alter ego of a boy, who imagines foes for his superhero character that short-cut straight to established stereotypes in superhero set pieces. Awesome Man takes on Professor Von Evil, who is illustrated inside a marauding, egg-shaped metallic robot with a pointed top and robot legs, that is shooting out green goo from its arms. The professor is shown through a green-tinted window in the centre, that reveals a small old bespectacled man in lab coat with long, pointed, Einstein-like hair and a maniacal expression as he pulls leavers, controlling the bot (Figure 31). Here is the entire mention of the evil professor, from entrance to vanquishing, in the picture book:

Awesome Man then moves swiftly on to his next adventure, fighting his ‘arch nemesis’,Footnote ⁷⁰³ The Flaming Eyeball. This playing with established stereotypes of adventure and superhero stories, in the abbreviation of children’s play, highlights how entrenched doctors and professors are as comic villains in later children’s literature, with no prior knowledge needed about the character or role to set up the scene, in a postmodern borrowing and playing with established frameworks, structures and histories. Of course the professor is an evil version of Einstein with a marauding robot that will attack the city with science! Of course! The story is not focussed on the Professor, but is about the growing autonomy, and imagination, of the child, who plays with established stereotypes.

Figure 31

Professor Von Evil from Chabon and Parker, The Astonishing Secret of Awesome Man (p. 11).

Used with permission, HarperCollins Children’s Books.

These evil representations of intelligence become more threatening as the predicted audience for the texts advances. Dr Morrison (the first of three evil woman), in the Jinty story Battle of the Wills (1977), wants to demonstrate how she can clone teenage girls, despite the effect on them, for scientific glory. Doctor Daffney wants to turn everyone into bonsai treesFootnote ⁷⁰⁴ in a reference to the Daphne and Apollo myth (Figure 32).Footnote ⁷⁰⁵ Professor Dolores Umbridge, in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2003), is malevolent, and abuses both her power and the children and adults in her care.

Figure 32

Boffin Boy and his friend Polly held captive by Doctor Daphne, in Orme and Richardson, Boffin Boy and the Poison Garden (p. 19).

Used by kind permission of David Orme and Peter Richardson.

In a 2018 study, ‘male villains were eight times more likely to appear compared to female villains’ in children’s books:Footnote ⁷⁰⁶ wickedness is heavily gendered, and the majority of evil professors here are male. Dedrick the Professor invents a Robobeast army that will take control of nature and the oceans.Footnote ⁷⁰⁷ Professor Aldous P. Lickpenny, criminal mastermind, wants to turn children into his robot ‘mechanizmos”.Footnote ⁷⁰⁸ Professor Severus Snape is a complex, vindictive, often intimidating, presumed evil figure in the Harry Potter series.Footnote ⁷⁰⁹ Lord Asriel is a dominating, stern and calculatingly cruel presence in the His Dark Materials trilogy (although in the end shows his love for his child and former lover).Footnote ⁷¹⁰ Professor Gargoyle, in a school story for older children which revolves around sinister teachers, mutant two-headed rodents and tentacles that threaten to overpower unsuspecting pupils, is shown dislocating his shark-toothed jaw, snake style, and holding up a rat to eat it whole in a frightening illustration in Professor Gargoyle, Tales from Lovecraft Middle School, showing that professors’ evil madness can also be terrifying.Footnote ⁷¹¹ Likewise, children are lured home with the ‘Mad Professor’s Daughter’ with gruesome consequences in the Allan Ahlberg poem:

This piece is commonly placed on reading lists for children aged seven to ten, and regularly recommended for a poetry exercise in UK primary schools.Footnote ⁷¹³ A tale of being lured away from the safe school setting into the hands of the Mad Professor is enjoyable when the readers are safe enough to explore fear,Footnote ⁷¹⁴ in a reminder that ‘much humour for children is exaggerated, fantasy writ large, a reminder of the monstrous and the freakish’.Footnote ⁷¹⁵ Children know that when academics are not telling them how the world works, or being ineffectual, boring and eccentric, they are being destructive and evil: readers can enjoy the thrill, laugh at the difference and explore the threat safely from tales in books. Nevertheless, the mad, evil stereotype is reinforced: intellect is predictably other, strange and dangerous. The irony here, of course, is that there are increasing levels of stress, anxiety and mental illness being reported by those working within the University system, due in part to the increasing pressures being placed on those operating within the academic machine.Footnote ⁷¹⁶

5.4 Influences from Popular Culture

Children’s literature does not exist in a vacuum, and it reflects and responds to external events and pressures. The characters and behaviour of fictional academics do not operate in isolation, but mirror historical events and existing structures which are firmly embedded into our culture, responding to and producing what publishers believe will be commercially viable product. The readers of children’s literature, too, are part of this experience: ‘children’s knowledge, understanding, and values are culturally saturated’.Footnote ⁷¹⁷ Given that half of the corpus has been published in the last 25 years, many fictional academics have absorbed and inherited characteristics from other media.

Haynes has traced the developing stereotype of the scientist in popular culture, suggesting that these function as ‘enduring myths to explore and express the deep-rooted but often irrational fears their society has held, usually inarticulately, and perhaps even subconsciously, with respect to science and technology’.Footnote ⁷¹⁸ Haynes traces how ‘the recurrent mutual suspicion between scientists and other members of society was developed and reinforced in Western literature’,Footnote ⁷¹⁹ chronicling the growing and changing stereotype or caricature: the oral tradition of the sorcerer or shaman; alchemists (moving beyond areas most people can understand); evil Dr Faustus (the intellectual madman); the foolish Restoration virtuosi (‘pursuing useless, irrelevant, and usually disgusting research, into topics with which no gentleman should concern himself’Footnote ⁷²⁰); the Enlightenment philosophers (Newton, and the scientist as genius); the ‘Romantic image of the scientist as cold, inhuman, and unable to relate to others’ which ‘has been one of the most influential in twentieth-century stereotyping of the scientist in both literature and film’,Footnote ⁷²¹ particularly in its depiction and exploration of Dr Frankenstein; the Victorian adventurer-scientist who ‘should be an isolated individual or at most supported by a small band of assistants, necessarily inferior to him in mental ability’;Footnote ⁷²² the fin-de-siècle adulation of the inventor, and the connection between the scientist and machineries of war. The impersonal and amoral scientist dominates in the twentieth century with a roughly chronological development of ‘the power maniac seeking to destroy the world … the scientist with an essentially evil philosophy … the scientist as exemplar of amoral perspective … because of his own personal inadequacies in nonrational pursuits’Footnote ⁷²³ and finally ‘a different kind of troubled and inadequate scientist, a peculiarly twentieth-century figure’: the scientist who has lost control of his discovery.Footnote ⁷²⁴ These representations coalesce in the aftermath of the atomic bombFootnote ⁷²⁵ and the invention of nuclear power and its associated risks, colouring our modern conception of the fictional scientist. Haynes stresses that men dominate throughout, and that fictional characters such as Dr Faustus, Dr Frankenstein, Dr Moreau, Dr Jekyll, Dr Caligari and Dr Strangelove have done more to influence Western society’s perception of scientists than actual scientists (Newton, Curie and Einstein being exceptions), playing out ‘Western society’s own confused cost–benefit analysis of science, its terrors, and its promises’.Footnote ⁷²⁶ This cultural bias towards science and scientists can also point to further reasons for the male dominance within the books: while science itself is dominated by men across all occupations,Footnote ⁷²⁷ the supposedly radical and forward-looking genre of science fiction is also notoriously dominated by aggressive and elite male characters.Footnote ⁷²⁸ Leading children’s books author Ursula Le Guin described science fiction’s sexist and hierarchical structure:

It can be shown how the previous depiction of academics in children’s literature informs the depictions in later texts. In an analysis of the maturing science in the Professor Branestawm books, Bell observes that, over time, ‘images of science become more ambivalent, drawing on the childlike images of the past while adding new features’Footnote ⁷³⁰ as the ‘nostalgic tendencies of book production and dissemination’ means that the images portrayed are ones that look ‘back nostalgically at the time and remains resonant in its nostalgia today’.Footnote ⁷³¹ The representations of academics we find in children’s books become more stereotypical over time, compounding and self-referencing popular fictional figures in children’s literature, from the mid-twentieth century onward. Indeed, the academics found in enduring (still in print, or available in multiple editions) or popular (many-selling) children’s books from the Victorian period until the middle of the twentieth century set the blueprint for other characters to follow, helping to form the dominant cultural stereotype of academics in children’s literature themselves, The Water-Babies’ Professor Ptthmllnsprts,Footnote ⁷³² Professor BranestawmFootnote ⁷³³ and The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe’s Professor Digory KirkeFootnote ⁷³⁴ setting the tone for much literature that followed.

Furthermore, the anti-intellectualism – ‘the distrust of intellectuals and the resentment of intellectual activities’Footnote ⁷³⁵ shown in picture books such as Professor P. Brain,Footnote ⁷³⁶ Professor Poopypants,Footnote ⁷³⁷ Professor BumblebrainFootnote ⁷³⁸ and Professor StupidoFootnote ⁷³⁹ – has a long history. ‘The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”’Footnote ⁷⁴⁰ Described as a ‘Cult of Ignorance’,Footnote ⁷⁴¹ anti-intellectual popularist rhetoric has played out in mainstream culture, particularly in American election campaigns. In 1952, Adlai Stevenson was dubbed an ‘egghead’ by Richard Nixon, and ‘this dichotomy carried over into future elections, one candidate serving an as “everyman” and the other, often unfairly, cast as an elitist intellectual’.Footnote ⁷⁴² In 1968, presidential candidate George Wallace, Governor of Alabama, ‘got his strongest applause for denouncing bureaucrats, pointy-headed pseudo-intellectuals and professors who know “how to run the war in Vietnam but can’t park their bicycles.”’Footnote ⁷⁴³ Carrying on to the present day, we find UK politicians sneering that they have ‘had enough of experts’,Footnote ⁷⁴⁴ that ‘the suspicion of experts goes back to antiquity and it’s a very healthy thing to have. Experts, soothayers and astrologers are in much the same category’,Footnote ⁷⁴⁵ and – at time of writing – a President of the United States of America decrying ‘fake news’ while promoting ‘alternative facts’ and making statements like ‘I love the poorly educated. We’re the smartest people, we’re the most loyal people’.Footnote ⁷⁴⁶ Given the coverage of this type of statement in popular news media over the past sixty years, anti-intellectualism is now firmly entrenched into western culture,Footnote ⁷⁴⁷ and is seen playing out in children’s literature, from the laughter at the lecture in Sylvie and BrunoFootnote ⁷⁴⁸ onwards. The academic as baffled failure in children’s books reaffirms established tropes, becomes more popular in the latter half of the twentieth century and teaches the next generation to distrust boffins, eggheads and intellectuals. As Franzini, in her study on the representation of intelligence in children’s television, notes: ‘this lack of emphasis on academics, together with its “uncoolness” underscores our society’s devaluation of intelligence, thus keeping intelligence unattractive to people from an early age’.Footnote ⁷⁴⁹ The children most susceptible to this bombardment, of course, are those who do not have the cultural capital (either financial or intellectual) to shield them, and who are not encouraged to partake in higher education despite these prevailing cultural messages.

There is, in addition, a double whammy for female experts, given the ‘concerted and ubiquitous … attacks on women and on women’s credibility’ in the modern media environment;Footnote ⁷⁵⁰ and the popular media’s attitude to women, and the lack of their representation, also provides another sociological driver for their exclusion in any corpus-based research. Biases exist as to expectations of who is allowed to be a genius, reflecting prevailing gender stereotypes.Footnote ⁷⁵¹ Children’s media is far from the only media that is biased against women, in a problem that is worldwide and ongoing.Footnote ⁷⁵² Children’s literature begins from a world of inherited anti-female bias, although it should be awake, by now, to this, given the volume of research that demonstrates its complicity.

Illustrators, authors and publishers draw on a cultural inheritance comprising alchemists, wizards, the music-hall, popular literature, film and television. We also see a presumption in children’s literature that academia equates to scientific enquiry, and scientific enquiry equates to male domination, which is something that has both been picked up from the history of academic institutions and reinforced by cultural stereotypes: the highlighted shorthand of modern’s children’s fiction, which ‘depends upon a canon of sentiment’.Footnote ⁷⁵³ The dominant form of the professor in children’s literature that we arrive at by the close of the twentieth century is, then, a postmodern repacking of various themes, tropes and influences, which, like postmodern art,

It can be very difficult to break these associations, once made: they can be played with, overridden or deliberately challenged, but ‘Many, if not all of us, work in systems in which books published some time in the past are used regularly’Footnote ⁷⁵⁵ and ‘The system is older than you. It has absorbed more venom than you can ever hope to emit.’Footnote ⁷⁵⁶ We have to choose to understand our ongoing inheritance from children’s literature in order to challenge it.

5.5 Conclusion

These three distinct tropes in the corpus – the teacher, the baffled inventor and the evil genius madman – have evolved over time, and now dominate the behaviour of academics in children’s literature. The stereotypes of professors and doctors themselves become functional aspects of children’s literature, and are entrenched by the time the majority of the corpus has been created from established stereotypes embedded into contemporary culture, in an act of ‘Cultural Cloning’Footnote ⁷⁵⁷

It is easy, and in places just, to decry these as pejorative or hollow depictions of intellectual achievement and the academy. We also have to concede that these stereotypes work because they are so suitable for their audience:

However, these stereotypes now also provide a framework in which modern authors and illustrators can swiftly introduce characters into children’s literature, without the need for lengthy explanation or backstory: Knapman commented that Dr Frankenstinker came from ‘rooting around in the dressing up box of children’s literature’;Footnote ⁷⁶⁰ Grey said, ‘stereotyping characters is a way of staying within the bounds of what seems normal to the reader’.Footnote ⁷⁶¹ While this does not excuse the bias and lack of diversity we see, it raises questions about the nature, role, function and necessity of stereotypes, which fulfil ‘cognitive, emotional, and pragmatic’ functions.Footnote ⁷⁶² While stereotypes are normally ‘treated in conjunction with prejudice’,Footnote ⁷⁶³ children’s literature depends on their advantages: stable relationships, constructs and meanings in which the ‘brevity of description and extreme poverty of detail permit an immediate recognition of the basic model’,Footnote ⁷⁶⁴ participating ‘in the elaboration of the text as network, in a reworking of models and problematization of commonplace visions of the world’.Footnote ⁷⁶⁵ This analysis has attempted to unpack the complex historical and societal trends which underpin the stereotypes of professors that exist in children’s literature.

An attempt to describe how we can build upon this knowledge positively is given in Section 6.