A book about children’s books is, of course, one for the grown-ups, but it is a subject that holds us long after we’ve joined the readers-aloud rather than the read-to classes. CS Lewis, who was perceptive about the allure of children’s books (he would be, wouldn’t he), observed that he read children’s books with pleasure as an adult in the same way that as an adult he still enjoyed lemon squash; the difference was that he now also enjoyed port. The point is, grown-up literary pleasures do not cancel out childish ones (at least, not the good sort); they just add to them.
Sam Leith is the best kind of guide to this world in which we once wandered. He is fair-minded but terrifically opinionated; good on secondary sources without getting bogged down; excellent at analysing the technical merits of a story but not too grown-up to forget how he once listened to them – his book begins with his own father reading to him from Rudyard Kipling’s Just So stories “…O Best Beloved”. And he quotes with approval Edith Nesbit (if you haven’t read Five Children and It, what are you waiting for) – who said that she could remember exactly what it was to be a child; in fact that the only way to understand a child was through memory.
He captures, too, the dual nature of children’s stories: for the child, its freedom to identify with a character who doesn’t have the constraints of normal children – hence all those orphans and joyously parentless protagonists. For the adult reader, or writer, the genre represents “freedom from adult responsibilities, freedom from loss and sorrow… the children’s writer is able to imagine him or herself as a child again”. It’s striking how many writers had traumatic childhoods that they could put right in story, or idyllic childhoods that they could recapture.
Grown-up literary pleasures do not cancel out childish ones, they just add to them
This journey through the genre is chronological. It begins before there were children’s books at all, with Aesop and the moral stories and the folk tales, through the Grimm Brothers’ Household Stories and the courtly fairytales of Charles Perrault. These weren’t intended for little ’uns; Leith reminds us, some of Grimm is way too dark for children. As JRR Tolkien put it, stories are like those pieces of furniture which start out being used by everyone and, as they get battered and shabby, finally end up in the nursery. So many of the tales come in one form or another from the ancient world, get repurposed and fragmented and reappear in other stories. Books appear within books; remember in Little Women how the girls act out characters from Pickwick? There’s a lot of that.
The turning point in this account comes with the Edwardians. For it was then, Leith feels, that publishers designated and marketed children’s books as such; it’s odd to think that a generation earlier, Little Lord Fauntleroy was a hit with everyone. Alice in Wonderland was, even in its own day, a stretch for young children, which was why the author produced the Little Folks abridged edition, the form in which most children should read it. Perhaps the Edwardians didn’t so much create the genre as gave it a firm commercial impetus. Onwards and upwards, then, to JK Rowling.
There are so many old friends to meet here, so many authors you long for other people to read, and now perhaps they shall. At the end, Leith pays tribute to the illustrators without whom many stories would not have taken wing at all. Instead of naming the favourites, it’s easier to note the omissions: no John Masefield (The Box of Delights!), no Joan Aiken (Black Hearts in Battersea!), no Edward Ardizzone, incomparable illustrator. But he got so much right; mustn’t complain.
The Haunted Wood: A History of Childhood Reading by Sam Leith (Oneworld, £30) is out now.
