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A Signal celebration.

Article Excerpt
Signal, the British children's literature journal founded by Nancy Chambers and Aidan Chambers, will cease publication this summer. The first issue appeared in January 1970; the last, Signal 100, will be published in August 2003. (The Thimble Press--which publishes not only Signal but also books and book guides, many of which developed from Signal articles--will continue to be owned and operated by Nancy and Aidan Chambers.) To mark Signal's extraordinary contributions to children's literature, a tribute was held, tucked into an International Board on Books for Young People conference, at the University of Surrey, Roehampton, on November 16, 2002. There were over two hundred people in the audience that afternoon, including many contributors to, as well as readers of, Signal. My talk, from which this article is adapted, followed one given by Aidan Chambers on dramatic productions of Shakespeare by Swedish students who had been inspired by Ted Hughes's Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being. As Aidan spoke, I was poignantly aware of the screen at the front of the auditorium, on which an unintentionally fitting message appeared between PowerPoint presentations: "no signal," it said, and counted down the minutes.

It is tempting to pay tribute to Signal simply by counting all the ways in which the ninety-nine published issues have contributed to defining children's literature studies over the last thirty years. Suffice it to say that reading Signal all the way through, article by article, year by year, constitutes a comprehensive course in children's literature. An examination of one issue, Signal 62 from May 1990, stands to demonstrate the contents of the whole.

As do all the May issues between 1979 and 2001, Signal 62 contains a Signal Poetry Award essay. The two judges, who also wrote the essay, were Peter Holding, at that time head of English at Rugby School, and author Jan Mark. The award that year went to Allan Ahlberg's Heard It in the Playground, a book still used frequently in classrooms and in children's literature poetry classes--as are other notable works discussed in the essay: reissues of de la Mare's Peacock Pie and Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market (with astonishing illustrations by Martin Ware) and books by former and future winners Philip Gross and Roger McGough. In the same issue is Margaret Meek with her analytical essay on Wayne Booth's The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction. Then there is a wonderfully researched historical essay by Charlotte Lennox-Boyd on one of the forgotten Victorian women who wrote in the spirit of Hesba Stretton's Jessica's First Prayer. Then something distinctly Signal-ish: one of John Ryder's "Intimate Leaves from a Designer's Notebook," published as an insert. Next is David Lewis's groundbreaking theoretical essay, "The Constructedness of Texts: Picture Books and the Metafictive." And finally Peter Hunt, on "Examining Children's Literature," glimpses of people teaching children's literature in their home institutions. All that in just one issue: history; design; brilliant critical discussion on new poetry; creation of an innovative theoretical insight; a long review essay on a book not directly related to children's literature, but essential to its reading; and a discussion on teaching. Vintage Signal: a perfect...

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