This article considers the significance of Victoria Lee Burton’s authorship, specifically The Little House, for lifestyle preferences and the development of environmental consciousness in the postwar period. The article argues that Burton deliberately designed her work to evoke country-friendly sensibilities and ambiences in her audience and portrayed the city in troublesome ways. The enduring success of The Little House for young audiences suggests that Burton struck a chord. Burton’s origins and upbringing probably also infused her depiction of a cosmopolitan rural idealism. Burton’s importance for modern environmentalism deserves greater recognition than it has received and may bear comparison to that of Rachel Carson.
Victoria Lee Burton, The Little House (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1942).
2.
Victoria Lee Burton, Life Story: The Story of Life on Our Earth from Its Beginning up to Now ( Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1962 ).
3.
Maybelle is an exception and lacks an antiurban bias, even if it does contain an antiprogress bias. Maybelle, however, is not as autobiographical as Little House or Life Story. Victoria Lee Burton, Maybelle the Cable Car (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1952).
4.
Burton was reportedly unhappy with the Disney version of The Little House. See Barbara Elleman, Virginia Lee Burton: A Life in Art (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2002), 64.
Rawn Fulton and Christine Lundberg, directors, Virginia Lee Burton: A Sense of Place, Documentary ( Gloucester, MA: Red Dory Productions, 2007).
7.
Even if this narrative was heavily skewed towards New England.
8.
Fulton and Lundberg, Virginia Lee Burton.
9.
Nathalie op de Beeck, "‘The First Picture Book for Modern Children’: Mary Liddell’s Little Machinery and the Fairy Tale of Modernity,"Children’s Literature32 (2004): 41-83, at 54.
10.
Gail Schmunk Murray, American Children’s Literature and the Construction of Childhood (New York, NY: Twayne, 1998), xvi.
11.
Dolores Hayden , Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth (New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 2000), 8.
12.
Jim Cullen , The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea That Shaped a Nation (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2003), 136.
13.
Lynn Spigel, Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs ( Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 185-90.
14.
Gail Marshall , "Make Way for Children,"Elementary School Journal75, no. 8 (May 1975): 480-84.
15.
Ibid., 483. On causality among children, see Anne Schlottenmann, DeborahAllen, Carina Linderoth, and Sarah Hesketh, "Perceptual Causality in Children,"Child Development73, no. 6 (November 2002).
16.
The weighting of individual and cultural factors in the development of knowledge is disputed. See Rheta DeVries, "Piaget’s Social Theory,"Educational Researcher26, no. 2 (March 1997).
17.
In Jean Nathan , "Lives: An American Original,"Vogue Magazine (May 2008): 160.
18.
Ann Costello Galligan, "Books for the Hospitalized Child," American Journal of Nursing75, no. 12 (December 1975): 2166. Etheredge is interviewed in Fulton and Lundberg, Virginia Lee Burton.
19.
Cited in Fulton and Lundberg, Virginia Lee Burton.
20.
Ellemann, Virginia Lee Burton: A Life in Art, 132.
21.
Etheredge, in Fulton and Lundberg, Virginia Lee Burton.
22.
See Andrea Kornbluh , in H-Net Urban Discussion on "Children’s Literature" (2007). http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=h-urban&month=0703&week=b&msg=/qdOQp0k9hpNWsa3OORByQ&user=&pw=
23.
Murray, American Children’s Literature and the Construction of Childhood.
24.
Burton, The Little House, 1.
25.
Ibid., 3.
26.
Elleman, Virginia Lee Burton: A Life in Art, 61-63.
27.
Lee Kingman, interview in Horn Book Podcast, "Lee Kingman and Virginia Lee Burton" (February 11, 2008), http://www.hbook.com/podcast/archive.asp .
28.
Burton, The Little House, 4.
29.
Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities (New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace, 1938/ 1996). In the slightly later Disney version of the Little House story, the suburban houses sprout from the ground as a second crop-an idea applied to postwar suburbanization of the Levittown type.
30.
Burton, The Little House, 14.
31.
Ibid., 20.
32.
See Marshall, "Make Way for Children," 483.
33.
Joel Schwartz , review of Max Page, "The Creative Destruction of Manhattan, 1900-1940," Journal of American History87, no. 4 (March 2001 ): 1539.
34.
Burton, The Little House, 32.
35.
Mumford, The Culture of Cities; and Ralph Steiner, and Willard Van Dyke, The City ( Naxos International, 1939/2000).
36.
Ronald Inglehart, Culture Shift in Advanced Industrial Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990). Inglehart suggested that once societies surpassed an economic threshold, they could prioritize values of things in short supply, like "quality of life concerns such as environmental protection and lifestyle issues" and could rail against deference and hierarchy. See also Abraham Maslow, Towards a Psychology of Being (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986). Maslow theorized on how consumption becomes more refined as affluence increases and suggested a hierarchy of consumption, where basic needs, consumption, and idea-construction meld.
37.
February 1970 editorial by Clinton Page, cited in Mary Lou White, "Censorship Threat over Children’s Books,"Elementary School Journal75, no. 1 (October 1974 ).
38.
See Joseph Goddard , "The Creation of Penurbia: A Geography of the Heart, 1945-2005" (PhD diss., University of Copenhagen , Denmark, 2005), 208-13.
39.
Peter Hall, Cities in Civilization (London: Phoenix, 1999), 791-95.
40.
Rachel Carson , Silent Spring (London: Penguin, 1962), 22.
41.
See Linda Lear , Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature ( London: Penguin, 1997), 206, 218; Rachel Carson, The Sea around Us (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1951).
42.
Ibid., 428-56.
43.
Goddard, "The Creation of Penurbia," 235-44.
44.
Rachel Carson , "Help Your Child to Wonder,"Woman’s Home Companion (July 1956), 46.
45.
Ibid., 47
46.
Elleman, Virginia Lee Burton: A Life in Art, 17.
47.
Lee Kingman, interview in Horn Book Podcast.
48.
Burton, Life Story, 53.
49.
By "metropolitan," I mean an urbanity of mind and background.
50.
Elleman, Virginia Lee Burton: A Life in Art, 7.
51.
In Fulton and Lundberg, Virginia Lee Burton.
52.
See Scott and Helen Nearing, Living the Good Life: Being a Plain Practical Account of a Twenty Year Project in a Self-Subsistent Homestead in Vermont, Together with Remarks on How to Live Sanely & Simply in a Troubled World (Harborside, ME: Social Science Institute, 1954 ).
53.
Many of the properties close to Burton’s have been restored or expanded to fit the needs of affluent weekenders and cottagers.
54.
Burton, Life Story, 69.
55.
Many adults spoken to during the writing of this article did not know Victoria Lee Burton’s name but recognized her drawings.
56.
See Clarence Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967): 32.
57.
Robert McCloskey, Make Way for the Ducklings (New York, NY: Viking, 1941/1961).
58.
Arthur Schlesinger , "The City in American History,"Mississippi Valley Historical Review27, no. 1 (June 1940): 43.
59.
Ibid., 66.
60.
H-Net Urban Discussion on "Children’s Literature."
