It is a classic in our libraries. Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe tells the adventures of a hero shipwrecked on a desert island who learns to live by exploiting the resources of his environment. Since its publication in 1719, this story has been given to read to millions of children around the world. The fascination for elsewhere that it gave rise to led to the writing of many stories about escape, which were called “Robinsonades”.

These literary variations, such as The Swiss Robinson, or Story of a Shipwrecked Family , by Johann David Wyss, were popular with 19th ^–  century children, as was, a little later, Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson, who no longer tells the same story this time but prefers to use a young hero as narrator. Jim, fourteen, recounts his sea journey to the mysterious island with its share of bloodthirsty pirates, mutinies and, of course, its treasure.

Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer gets up to mischief along the banks of the Mississippi and Jules Verne offers his Around the World in Eighty Days . Even the designers of school textbooks of the Third ^Republic  , eager to instill a taste for homeland in future citizens, seized on this theme. Le Tour de la France par deux enfants by G. Bruno sold over seven million copies until the First World War and continued to be used in middle school until the 1950s. The two children in the title, two brothers, introduce schoolchildren to the basics of morality, history, geography and science through their wanderings on the roads of France.

Characters: when will the little travelers be available?

Travel stories from the past seem to exclude girls who are confined to the domestic space. There are no girls in G. Bruno’s textbook , and The Little Model Girls of the Countess of Ségur remain wisely at the Fleurville estate where they will only be entitled to a brief travel story experienced by cousin Paul.

Today, however, children’s literature is gradually filling this gap. In 2015, Clémentine Beauvais published Les petites reines , a children’s novel in which three middle school girls who are bullied at school embark on an initiatory road trip by bike from their town of Bourg-en-Bresse to Paris. In 2020, in The Incredible Journey of Coyote Sunrise , by Dan Gemeinhart, a little girl travels across the United States with her father, aboard his school bus.

Studies show that children’s books know very little about genre boundaries: boys and girls have the same tastes and some old classics of travel literature struggle to find a place in the hearts of today’s children.

According to the same study conducted on a panel of 2000 Americans aged 10 to 12 and on a selection of 27 classics , Robinson Crusoe comes second to last in the order of preference. Fantasy novels or animal stories are more popular. However, G. Bruno had perhaps detected a potential that could still be exploited in travel as a teaching aid.

Stories based on personal experience

The study of geography through experimentation is a method favored by geographers. In this article from Géoconfluences , Caroline Leininger-Frézal and Cédric Daudet discuss the practices of “spontaneous geography”, which are based on the personal experience of the learner. The exceptional mobility linked to vacations forms a fertile ground for the sedimentation of geographical knowledge. Writing can intervene in what these geographers call the “implementation” stage. By recounting what he has seen, the student appropriates the knowledge.

The great novelists did it. Well before writing Treasure Island , Stevenson composed his “juvenilia”  : among them, we find a travel journal that the little boy composed between the ages of nine and twelve. He visited France, in particular Paris, which he described with delight, and the Côte d’Azur, which inspired his portrait of a resident of Menton in traditional costume. He also described Scottish castles and London museums in great detail. To become a novelist for young people, Stevenson relied on his observational skills cultivated from childhood by his parents who encouraged him to write down his memories of tourist excursions.

Children don’t even need to travel themselves to immerse themselves in stories that mobilize their knowledge of the world and of others. In a 19th-century English village ^,  Charlotte, Branwell, Emily and Anne Brontë create a fictional universe for themselves on the African continent through writing. While the three sisters become famous for novels such as Jane Eyre (Charlotte) and Wuthering Heights (Emily), their careers begin with the invention of worlds such as Angria .

From the age of ten until adulthood, the Brontës developed a world with its own government , a demographic, and a climate that admittedly mixed the meteorological gloom of their native Yorkshire with the crushing heat of a fantasized Africa. It does not matter that the knowledge is not always precise, it pushes them to open up to a vast world around them. Christine Alexander, a specialist in the Brontës, shows in this article the importance that the newspapers reporting the exploration missions in Africa had on the imaginary world of the siblings .

These budding novelists copied their stories into tiny notebooks for their wooden soldiers, to the detriment of today’s researchers who struggle to decipher them.

Telling about your travels to build yourself up

One of the goals of development is to reach the stage of abstract reasoning. According to Piaget, a pioneer in the field, this occurs during adolescence. Writing, and a fortiori writing the journey, promotes the development of the ability to imagine what is not and to master metaphors

The young Jane Austen, who would later write novels such as Pride and Prejudice , used exaggerated devices to represent her gargantuan hunger for experience. At the age of twelve, she invented a little runaway girl who devoured six ice creams and rode back and forth in a carriage, prey to hyperactivity, a sign of hypercuriosity. The following year, in “A Journey to Wales,” Austen presented two sisters traveling on one leg, each wearing a single silk slipper. Through these grotesque images, the young Austen appropriated and defied conventions with a thirst for restless and curious travel.

If the child is still at the stage of concrete operations (seven to twelve years old), recounting his travels, real or imaginary, will allow him to build memories, to amass factual knowledge like Stevenson. If it is an imaginary journey, he will perhaps develop a childish paracosm, a fictional universe that is a sign of high artistic potential. If he can learn from his travels about the world around him like Austen, this will contribute to his academic and personal development.

Travel writers have made young people travel a lot, but perhaps it is also up to young people to make us travel and to make ourselves travel.

Author Bio: Lauriana Dumont is a PhD student in English Language, Literature and Civilization at Côte d’Azur University