Along with Lavender's Blueby Kathleen Lines, this book is one of July 2011 Guest Editor Anne Fine's choices:
"Everyone talks about how hard it is to introduce poetry to children, but that’s nonsense. Just start here. They’re rich and colourful, with rhythms that make them easy to read and fix in the brain. And since they mirror so many of a child’s everyday experiences, they catch their attention at once."
How do you like to go up in a swing, Up in the air so blue? Oh, I do think it the pleasantest thing Ever a child can do! Robert Louis Stevenson's rhymes have charmed children and adults alike since 1885, when they first appeared to a delighted public. Stevenson's joyful exploration of the world speaks directly from a child's point of view and celebrates the child's imagination. This Golden Books edition, originally published in 1951, features lively, colourful illustrations by Caldecott Medalists Alice and Martin Provensen. The original artwork has been digitally restored for this edition-resulting in a stunning, best-ever reproduction!
Robert Louis Stevenson was born to Thomas and Margaret Isabella Balfour Stevenson in Edinburgh on 13 November 1850. From the beginning he was sickly. Through much of his childhood he was attended by his faithful nurse, Alison Cunningham, known as Cummy in the family circle. She told him morbid stories about the Covenanters (the Scots Presbyterian martyrs), read aloud to him Victorian penny-serial novels, Bible stories, and the Psalms, and drilled the catechism into him, all with his parents' approval. Thomas Stevenson was quite a storyteller himself, and his wife doted on their only child, sitting in admiration while her precocious son expounded on religious dogma. Stevenson inevitably reacted to the morbidity of his religious education and to the stiffness of his family's middle-class values, but that rebellion would come only after he entered Edinburgh University.
The juvenilia that survives from his childhood shows an observer who was already sensitive to religious issues and Scottish history. Not surprisingly, the boy who listened to Cummy's religious tales first tried his hand at retelling Bible stories: "A History of Moses" was followed by "The Book of Joseph." When Stevenson was sixteen his family published a pamphlet he had written entitled The Pentland Rising, a recounting of the murder of Nonconformist Scots Presbyterians who rebelled against their royalist persecutors.
