BBC Poll - 100 Greatest Children's Books

[Anita Bensoussane]

According to a new poll by the BBC, the "100 greatest children's books of all time" are as follows:

Where the Wild Things Are (Maurice Sendak, 1963)
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Lewis Carroll, 1865)
Pippi Longstocking (Astrid Lindgren, 1945)
The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, 1943)
The Hobbit (JRR Tolkien, 1937)
Northern Lights (Philip Pullman, 1995)
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (CS Lewis, 1950)
Winnie-the-Pooh (AA Milne and EH Shepard, 1926)
Charlotte’s Web (EB White and Garth Williams, 1952)
Matilda (Roald Dahl and Quentin Blake, 1988)
Anne of Green Gables (LM Montgomery, 1908)
Fairy Tales (Hans Christian Andersen, 1827)
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (JK Rowling, 1997)
The Very Hungry Caterpillar (Eric Carle, 1969)
The Dark is Rising (Susan Cooper, 1973)
The Arrival (Shaun Tan, 2006)
Little Women (Louisa May Alcott, 1868)
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Roald Dahl, 1964)
Heidi (Johanna Spyri, 1880)
Goodnight Moon (Margaret Wise Brown and Clement Hurd, 1947)
The Adventures of Pinocchio (Carlo Collodi, 1883)
A Wizard of Earthsea (Ursula K Le Guin, 1968)
Moominland Midwinter (Tove Jansson, 1957)
I Want My Hat Back (Jon Klassen, 2011)
The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett, 1911)
Duck, Death and the Tulip (Wolf Erlbruch, 2007)
The Brothers Lionheart (Astrid Lindgren, 1973)
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (JK Rowling, 1999)
Brown Girl Dreaming (Jacqueline Woodson, 2014)
The Three Robbers (Tomi Ungerer, 1961)
The Snowy Day (Ezra Jack Keats, 1962)
The Tiger Who Came to Tea (Judith Kerr, 1968)
Howl’s Moving Castle (Diana Wynne Jones, 1986)
A Wrinkle in Time (Madeleine L’Engle, 1962)
Watership Down (Richard Adams, 1972)
Tom’s Midnight Garden (Philippa Pearce, 1958)
Grimm’s Fairy Tales (Brothers Grimm, 1812)
The Tale of Peter Rabbit (Beatrix Potter, 1902)
The Railway Children (Edith Nesbit, 1906)
Noughts and Crosses (Malorie Blackman, 2001)
The BFG (Roald Dahl and Quentin Blake, 1982)
Rules of Summer (Shaun Tan, 2013)
Momo (Michael Ende, 1973)
The Story of Ferdinand (Munro Leaf and Robert Lawson, 1936)
The Lord of the Rings (JRR Tolkien, 1954)
The Owl Service (Alan Garner, 1967)
Ronia, the Robber’s Daughter (Astrid Lindgren, 1981)
The Neverending Story (Michael Ende, 1979)
The Panchatantra (Anonymous / folk, -200)
Treasure Island (Robert Louis Stevenson, 1883)
Mary Poppins (PL Travers, 1934)
Ballet Shoes (Noel Streafield, 1936)
So Much! (Trish Cooke and Helen Oxenbury, 1994)
We’re Going on a Bear Hunt (Michael Rosen and Helen Oxenbury, 1989)
The Adventures of Cipollino (Gianni Rodari, 1951)
The Giving Tree (Shel Silverstein, 1964)
The Gruffalo (Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler, 1999)
Julián Is a Mermaid (Jessica Love, 2018)
Comet in Moominland (Tove Jansson, 1946)
Finn Family Moomintroll (Tove Jansson, 1948)
The Witches (Roald Dahl and Quentin Blake, 1983)
A Bear Called Paddington (Michael Bond, 1958)
The Wind in the Willows (Kenneth Grahame, 1908)
Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry (Mildred D Taylor, 1977)
Karlsson-on-the-Roof (Astrid Lindgren, 1955)
The Phantom Tollbooth (Norton Juster and Jules Feiffer, 1961)
The Cat in the Hat (Dr Seuss, 1957)
The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane (Kate DiCamillo and Bagram Ibatoulline, 2006)
Peter and Wendy (JM Barrie, 1911)
One Thousand and One Nights (Anonymous / folk)
From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs Basil E Frankweiler (EL Konigsburg, 1967)
When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit (Judith Kerr, 1971)
Shum bola (G’afur G’ulоm, 1936) - (That's what the article says but I think it's meant to be G'afur G'ulom!)
Ernest and Celestine (Gabrielle Vincent, 1981)
A Kind of Spark (Elle McNicoll, 2020)
Little Nicholas (René Goscinny and Jean-Jacques Sempé, 1959)
Black Beauty (Anna Sewell, 1877)
Daddy-Long-Legs (Jean Webster, 1912)
No Kiss for Mother (Tomi Ungerer, 1973)
My Family and Other Animals (Gerald Durrell, 1956)
Jacob Have I Loved (Katherine Paterson, 1980)
The Lorax (Dr Seuss, 1971)
Fairy Tales/The Tales of Mother Goose (Charles Perrault, 1697)
The Moomins and the Great Flood (Tove Jansson, 1945)
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (L Frank Baum, 1900)
Just William (Richmal Crompton, 1922)
The Twits (Roald Dahl and Quentin Blake, 1980)
The Mouse and His Child (Russell Hoban, 1967)
Out of My Mind (Sharon M Draper, 2010)
Moominvalley in November (Tove Jansson, 1970)
Little House in the Big Woods (Laura Ingalls Wilder, 1932)
Danny the Champion of the World (Roald Dahl, 1975)
The Snowman (Raymond Briggs, 1978)
Wave (Suzy Lee, 2008)
The Black Brothers (Lisa Tetzner, 1940)
The Velveteen Rabbit (Margery Williams, 1921)
The Bad Beginning (Lemony Snicket, 1999)
The Graveyard Book (Neil Gaiman, 2008)
American Born Chinese (Gene Luen Yang and Lark Pien, 2006)
Haroun and the Sea of Stories (Salman Rushdie, 1990)

Although I like many of the authors listed, I'm surprised to see so much Roald Dahl. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or Danny, the Champion of the World deserve to be there in my opinion, but not half a dozen Dahl titles! Little House in the Big Woods is the first of Laura Ingalls Wilder's "Little House" books and is simpler than the others - surely not the best in the series by a long chalk! As for Enid Blyton, she doesn't feature at all!

Votes were cast by "children’s authors, illustrators, editors, publishers, academics, librarians, writers and readers from across the world", though we're not told how many took part. Apparently they had to choose from a set list of more than 1000 books, which makes no sense to me. Why not give voters a free choice? It would be interesting to know what the 1000 or so titles were, and who selected them (a Roald Dahl fan, evidently!):

"Respondents were able to choose from more than 1000 different books, with each picking and ranking their 10 favourite children’s books."

Because of the way the poll was conducted, it doesn't really tell us much. Would Enid Blyton have made the list if respondents had had a free rein, I wonder?

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/b ... 4a6a&ei=17

[Boodi 2]

Very odd poll indeed and shocking that no Enid Blyton book made the list. I was also surprised that so many Astrid Lindgren books were mentioned. With regard to "The Little Prince", I hated it as a child (as did my son) and it was only as an adult that I began to appreciated it when I heard it read in the original French.

[IceMaiden]

Watership Down is not a children's book!

It's a BBC poll, I'm saddened but not shocked that Enid Blyton doesn't feature.

[Courtenay]

That is really not a fair or accurate way of conducting a poll — and as IceMaiden has just pointed out with Watership Down, it's questionable how many of these are "children's books". There is a huge range of intended ages covered in that list, from pre-school to young adult fiction. I mean, seriously, there is NO COMPARISON between Goodnight Moon and The Lord of the Rings, which is also most definitely not a children's book!!

It would have made far more sense to do a poll in at least two or three separate age categories. And yes, to have allowed voters to choose their own favourites freely instead of from a prescribed list. The title of the poll would more accurately be "The Most Popular of What the BBC Deems to Be the Greatest Children's Books"... I also suspect they deliberately didn't include any Enid Blyton in the first place.

[Barnard]

I’m a bit surprised that Arthur Ransome is not in the list.

[Wolfgang]

I also wonder if some titles have been selected because people saw the films - I can't imagine a child reading voluntarily all three books of "Lord of the rings"...

[Anita Bensoussane]

As Courtenay said, it would have helped to have age categories. Watership Down and the three volumes that make up The Lord of the Rings are not specifically "children's books" but they are enjoyed by many older children. Black Beauty was written for adults too, but I read it when I was seven.

Mind you, authors like Shirley Conran, James Herbert, Stephen King and Virginia Andrews were also popular among my peers when I was thirteen!

[Anita Bensoussane]

Only 177 people voted in the poll:

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/202 ... -who-voted


This statement amused me:

Note: Some respondents voted for their own books and were invited to choose a replacement as we did not allow this. Some did not respond by the deadline, so we eliminated their own books and re-ranked their other choices. These respondents have fewer than 10 books listed under their name. One respondent asked for their ballot not to be published.

It's good to see that Enid Blyton's The Secret Island and The Magic Faraway Tree were among the 1050 choices:

Kalpana Sunder – Journalist, India
1. Charlotte's Web (EB White and Garth Williams, 1952)
2. Heidi (Johanna Spyri, 1880)
3. Little Women (Louisa May Alcott, 1868)
4. Black Beauty (Anna Sewell, 1877)
5. The Diary of a Young Girl (Anne Frank, 1947)
6. The Secret Island (Enid Blyton, 1938)
7. The Magic Faraway Tree (Enid Blyton, 1943)
8. Anne of Green Gables (LM Montgomery, 1908)
9. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Roald Dahl, 1964)
10. What Katy Did (Susan Coolidge, 1872)

Anyone spot any more Blytons?


Antonia Forest was there too, with End of Term:

Sheena Wilkinson – Author, Ireland
1. Ballet Shoes (Noel Streatfeild, 1936)
2. Watership Down (Richard Adams, 1972)
3. When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit (Judith Kerr, 1971)
4. The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett, 1911)
5. Little Women (Louisa May Alcott, 1868)
6. Anne of Green Gables (LM Montgomery, 1908)
7. Flambards (KM Peyton, 1967)
8. The Railway Children (Edith Nesbit, 1906)
9. End of Term (Antonia Forest, 1959)
10. Carrie's War (Nina Bawden, 1973)


It's great to see Charlotte Sometimes by Penelope Farmer as well, voted for by illustrator Jim Kay and several others:

Jim Kay – Illustrator, United Kingdom
1. Cars and Trucks and Things that Go (Richard Scarry, 1974)
2. The Hobbit (JRR Tolkien, 1937)
3. The Children of Green Knowe (Lucy M Boston, 1954)
4. Fungus the Bogeyman (Raymond Briggs, 1977)
5. The Arrival (Shaun Tan, 2006)
6. Amazon Adventure (Willard Price, 1949)
7. Beegu (Alexis Deacon, 2003)
8. Charlotte Sometimes (Penelope Farmer, 1969)
9. The Dark is Rising (Susan Cooper, 1973)
10. Northern Lights (Philip Pullman, 1995)

[Anita Bensoussane]

This page gives further information about the poll, acknowledging some of its limitations:

While of course far from definitive, the answers we have gleaned are fascinating – and we hope will make readers both wistful for the books they loved in their youth and ready to try out titles that passed them by, or were published after they came of age; for there is no reason that the greatest children's literature shouldn't be equally nourishing to an adult. In total, 1050 different books were voted for by 177 experts – critics, authors and publishing figures – who came from 56 countries, from Austria to Uzbekistan. Of these voters, 133 were female, 41 were male and three preferred not to say. Each voter listed their 10 greatest children's books, which we scored and ranked to produce the top 100 listed below.

The end result is a list that reflects the vast scope of children’s literature through the eras, standing as a tribute to its boundless imagination, thrilling storytelling, and profound themes – from the Panchatantra, a collection of Indian children's stories dating back to the 2nd Century BCE, to the newest book in the list, A Kind of Spark, published in 2020. Of course, though, just as the list celebrates a huge scope of work, it also has its limitations and biases. For example, 74 of the 100 books featured were first published in the English language, with the next most popular language being Swedish, with nine entries. Meanwhile books published between the 1950s and 1970s were most prevalent, which may be related to the age profile of voters, the majority of whom were born in the 1970s and 1980s.

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/202 ... f-all-time

[Courtenay]

Ahhhhh, that explains a lot — the people actually voting for these books were "177 experts - critics, authors and publishing figures - who came from 56 countries, from Austria to Uzbekistan."

So the people being consulted on "the greatest children's books of all time" weren't members of the general public — they were all "critics, authors and publishing figures", who of course are going to have their own major biases as to what makes for a "great" children's book. And there were only 177 of them consulted, along with the fact that they were given only 1050 books to choose from. If you polled several thousand people from the general public for their top 10 favourite children's books in order to compile an eventual top 100 list, and allowed them the choice of ANY books they liked, you would almost certainly get a very different final list!!

Meanwhile, it's very interesting that the voters "came from 56 countries, from Austria to Uzbekistan" (hmmm... if that's in alphabetical order, obviously they didn't include Australia ). But it also makes the whole methodology questionable, along with the final data. Those 56 countries would include a huge range of cultural and linguistic backgrounds, and yet you're asking all those different people to pick from the same 1050 books. How many of the ones from non-English-speaking countries, or non-British-and-Commonwealth cultural backgrounds, were unable to pick their actual favourite children's books because the poll didn't include them??

And yet, if they had been allowed to vote freely for any books they like, well, that huge range of countries would have made the data almost meaningless. I'm pretty sure that while someone from Austria and someone from Uzbekistan would possibly have two or three favourite children's books in common — if they're classics that have been translated into multiple languages and become famous worldwide — there would also be a whole lot of favourites they DON'T have in common, simply because of the differences in cultures and language. So why on earth would any intelligent researcher take a poll of people from so many different countries in the first place? Wouldn't it be far fairer to do separate polls for several different countries, instead of trying to pretend that this bizarre method somehow makes for a meaningful final list?

All this really shows is that some people at the BBC have no idea how to design and conduct a competent and reasonably reliable survey, but they went ahead and did it anyway...

[John Pickup]

The information above about the number of voters and the list having to be made from a narrow field renders the final list, as far as I'm concerned, utterly meaningless.

[Anita Bensoussane]

I agree with you both, Courtenay and John. The poll is absurd!

[IceMaiden]

Utterly stupid. Surely to get a 'greatest 100 whatever' list you can't limit the choice to a predetermined set of options as a) it will be inaccurate, and b) you're only only going to get a '100 greatest whatever out of these choices'. Which is not the same thing at all. It's like running a poll of the nation's top 10 chocolate bars but only giving a few specific ones to chose from. How can that possibly work? What if the ones you would pick aren't there or you don't like any that are? Is a KitKat really number one or was it simply the only choice in the list?

[timv]

This strikes me as a very odd poll, especially as we don't know who exactly was chosen (and by who - BBC producers or executives in the Children's TV department?) to vote and in which countries. Not to mention the proportions of people from the different professions cited - ones whose personnel usually come from a fairly limited and socially liberal/ well-educated background so their cultural views would be broadly similar - as opposed to children and parents. Nor what sort of children from what educational and social backgrounds, and how many of them from each age-group. I'm guessing here, but there is a mixture of quite 'grown-up' adventure and 'social issues' books (I can just see the BBC personnel homing in on the latter approvingly as 'worthy') along with books that younger children would read - and the older age-group wouldn't be likely to be reading Blyton books at that age anyway, as most readers of the most high-profile Blyton books would probably be aged eight to eleven or so.

If Enid 's 'popularity' is to be judged, for the UK or international readership, it should be for a strict age-category of children of the sort of age who would have been likelier to have read her books - ie under twelve? And the books and authors chosen include ones from non-Anglosphere countries that I have never heard of, rather than concentrating on English-speaking authors and markets. Expanding the age group and language categories adds to the possibility of Enid, or other top UK authors, being eased out - and there is no sign of some of the top best-sellers of the 1940s to 1970s in the UK who are now out of print, so only books now in print seem to appear. (This also begs the question of what is reprinted by modern publishers world-wide and how many of the latter deliberately do not reprint non-modern or non-PC authors who they disapprove of, thus cutting their chances of ever appearing on this sort of list.)

Overall, this list seems to raise more questions than it answers - not least its own reliability and notable lack of explanation of how it was selected and by whom . More of a self-congratulatory gimmick than a serious scientific analysis? I would have more confidence in it if we had been told, in detail, the methods used in it and the identity and impartiality (or not) of the people doing the choosing. As it stands, it seems a bit sloppy and muddled.

[Fiona1986]

It's like the adverts that loudly proclaim that 96% respondents said that this new moisturiser made their skin look luminous. Then in very small print it says "survey of 27 people."