The Historical-Cultural Value of the Juvenile Collection: The McLaren Collection at the University of Melbourne and its Girls’ Books

Abstract

In the last fifty years special collections of children’s books have received increasing attention from scholars who have started to realise the value of these books as literary and historical documents. Collections of children’s books in academic libraries across the world1 provide a sampling of the types of books children would have read in a particular period or country. The McLaren Collection of children’s books, held in the Baillieu Library at the University of Melbourne, is valuable for its varied range of children’s books. This important collection was assembled by Ian McLaren (1912- 2000), a chartered accountant and Member of Parliament who also took a particular interest in book collecting during his long and varied career. His collection comprises over 50,000 items on Australian politics, history and literature. While the majority of his collection is held by the Baillieu Library, the National Library of Australia holds his collection of local histories, church histories, business histories and organizational histories. Approximately 5000 books in the McLaren collection were classified by him as children’s books, and they are all held at the Baillieu Library.

This article will consider the importance of collections of children’s books in the university library generally, and why they can be of use to scholars. It will then address the McLaren collection specifically, creating a small sampling of girls’ books from the collection to discuss the sort of books Australian girls would have been reading in the first half of the twentieth century, and the views and values that authors of this period wanted to pass on to girls. These will be used to address a broader discussion of the historical-cultural value of girls’ books in the collection.