The Haunted Wood, page 2
On a prosaic level, the visual iconography of children’s books is often almost comically out of date. A is for Aeroplane; and here you’ll see something with a propeller on its nose. T is for Train; and there is a stout little engine with a chain linked to a bell on the roof and a tall smokestack from which a plume of steam proceeds. T is also for Telephone, an apparatus with a handle linked to its body by a curly cable and a rotary dial. Yet landline telephones with rotary dials were last sighted when I was a teenager, most planes haven’t had propellers on their noses for decades, and the last passenger steam train to run in these isles delivered its valedictory “choo-choo” in the summer of 1968. It’s not just a reluctance to face up to the horrors of industrial agriculture and animal husbandry that fills the landscape of children’s literature with farms that belong to the 1920s or even the 1820s rather than the 2020s.
Comics like the Beano have modernized, but only slowly. In my 1980s childhood, Teacher still had his cane and mortarboard; public spaces were the province of uniformed park wardens with sharp elbows, a stick with a spike on it and a fanatical obsession with keeping off the grass. The Bash Street Kids are still basically 1930s schoolchildren, with their collars and ties and Danny’s trademark peaked cap. Minnie the Minx still wears a tam-o’-shanter. Fish and chips still appear in newspaper, teachers use blackboards, and catapults and conkers are as likely to feature as Nintendo Switches.
Fairy stories and nursery rhymes have always plunged children into a medieval Albion or a heavily forested Mitteleuropean neverwas. Here are worlds where spinning wheels are commonplace; water comes from wells; princes are expected to marry princesses; woodcutters, rat-catchers and huntsman are honorable lowermiddle-class occupations; and bears and wolves – rather than, say, off-road motorbikes – are the main thing to be nervous about encountering in the woods.
Emotionally, children’s stories have what I sometimes think of as baked-in nostalgia. That makes sense when you think about how they come about. They’re written by adults, and the resource on which those adults draw for their understanding of what it is to be a child is their memory, however distorted and partial, of their own childhood. The fuel that drives the reactor has been in storage for twenty or more years. More than that, the literary models on which they draw for inspiration will as often as not be the books that they read in their own childhoods.
So even when you see children’s books whose trappings are contemporary with their publication, you are in some sense seeing, say, a 1950s childhood in 1980s drag. Jacqueline Wilson’s taboo-busting 1990s treatment of broken families and children in care is full of the detailed flotsam and jetsam of 1990s childhood – McDonald’s, karaoke machines, mobile phones, labels from high-street fastfashion chains – but it’s also reacting against the petty snobberies and social stigmas that troubled the author’s own childhood in the 1950s and 1960s.
Remembered joys and defining traumas – above all, perhaps, the impact of war on childhood and family life – come out, often in slightly different forms, decades later. A.A. Milne was writing about late-victorian childhood in the interwar years. C.S. Lewis’s most personal Narnia book, The Magician’s Nephew, is a mirror of his own Edwardian childhood. Richard Adams, as his daughter Juliet pointed out to me, set Watership Down in the English countryside he remembered from his own childhood, one that was already all but vanished in the 1960s of his great novel’s composition. Those who lived through war as young adults often wrote children’s stories in which the experience is conspicuous only by its absence; those who experienced it in childhood wrote books, years later, in which that trauma is alchemically configured into something else.
The long history of children’s writing has thrown up an inexhaustible resource of archetypal characters and situations: orphaned protagonists with portentous destinies, portals to other worlds, exotic monsters and talking animals, midnight feasts, cosy hearths, perilous journeys, enchanted objects, dark forests, thuggish bullies, and evil wizards. It has seen long swerves between versions of realism and wild fantasy. And it has always, always, drawn on its predecessors.
“Intertextuality” – that buzz-phrase of the literary theory departments of universities, referring to the way texts refer to other texts – is all over children’s writing. Homages and tributes and echoes, the wholesale pinching of plots and situations and jokes, and even the outright reworking of earlier stories, are the stuff of which this tradition is made. It’s extraordinary, and seems to me telling, how many of the best-known children’s writers, from Carlo Collodi, E. Nesbit, and Enid Blyton to Jacqueline Wilson, Michael Morpurgo, and J.K. Rowling – have also been anthologists and retellers of fairytales and myths.
* * *
This book has a British emphasis; not from some post-Brexit chauvinism, but because it seems to me that we do have a distinct tradition, and that it is rooted in a specifically British cultural and literary and social history. It’s one that has had an outsized impact on the world. British children’s literature was – along with more predictable fare such as Routemaster buses, James Bond, and Her Majesty the Queen – one of the central themes of Danny Boyle’s London 2012 Summer Olympics opening ceremony.
The first few minutes of the program, “Journey along the Thames,” included a glimpse of the riverbank creatures from Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows. Later in the show, in a section called “Second to the right, and straight on till morning,” British children’s literature shared space, and by implication a place in our national pride, with the NHS. The segue was a troupe of dancing NHS nurses and doctors in white coats tucking pyjamaclad children up in hospital beds. Under the sheets of those beds, Tv viewers saw the children lighting torches and peering into the pages of an old-fashioned copy of Peter Pan, open to a picture of Captain Hook.
“But some would prefer a bedtime story…” came the voiceover. Standing in the spotlight, J.K. Rowling started to read. “Of all delectable islands Neverland is the snuggest,” she announced. “It’s not large and sprawly, you know, with boring distances between one adventure and the next. It’s nicely crammed. When you play at it by day with the table and chairs, it’s not a bit frightening. But in the two minutes before you go to sleep, it is real.”*
At once, circling the arena, the Child Catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang† processed on his black carriage-cum-mobile-cage as the children in their beds looked up in alarm. Soon after, giant puppets of the Queen of Hearts (from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland), Cruella de vil (from The Hundred and One Dalmatians), and Lord voldemort (from the Harry Potter books) rose on stage. A little girl, in her bed, was hoisted into the sky while a two-storey voldemort towered menacingly over her, sparks shooting from his wand. Guitars squealed. Black-clad, hooded, tufted minions with glowing green eyes danced. Then, brollies decorated with points of light, a couple of dozen Mary Poppinses – a flock of Poppinses – descended from the heavens and the puppets of the villains deflated. Lord voldemort collapsed. The green-eyed monkey-creatures scuttled off. The ceremony had enacted the journey so many of the children’s stories it celebrated describe: a pleasurable frisson of fear; a reassuring return to safety.
A focus on Britain doesn’t mean that all the writers I consider are British, by any means. I’ve come to think of it this way: the remit I set myself is to look at the history of children’s writing through the history of a British nursery bookshelf. I don’t think you can ignore Maurice Sendak or E. B. White or Dr. Seuss on the grounds of their being American; nor can you exile Frances Hodgson Burnett as an expatriate. British children have read Tintin and Asterix, Pippi Longstocking and the Moomins.
Nevertheless, American children, at least until the arrival of the digital age, have had a slightly different canon. Every American eighth-grader could be expected to know Little House on the Prairie, Little Women, Anne of Green Gables, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and the Uncle Remus stories. Many British children will have grown up reading them – these books are enduring international classics – but I don’t think they are a central part of the canon here, any more than the Famous Five or Just William stories are staples of a childhood in rural Idaho. But these are judgement calls. You may disagree. I hope you do.
Britain gave the world what you might call the ground zero of modern children’s literature in the middle of the nineteenth century. It also produced some distinctive and enduring genres – such as the boarding-school story, still going strong after nearly three centuries; and, for better or worse, the tale of colonial adventure – that could only have emerged from these islands. The British canon hangs together. These books speak to each other, and their gradually shifting furniture of Kensington townhouses and Highland castles, nannies and cooks, public parks, school holidays, English or Scottish or Welsh landscapes, speak to their audience directly of a world they will recognize or aspire to. That audience changed over the years – and that, too, is part of the story. The rise (and changing form) of education, urbanization, immigration, the experience and the idea of travel, changing ideas of social class, changing gender roles, the experience of war, the rise of new sciences and technologies, the shifting place of religion in our national life: all these are mapped, obliquely and directly, in the history of our children’s literature.
That literature is peculiarly omnivorous in its subject matter. History is repackaged in children’s writing as it is in children’s playground games. The settling by Europeans of the American West in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, much mythologized in the yellow journalism of the time, entered the British childhood imaginary as “cowboys and Indians.” Children play at bandits, at pirates, at cops-and-robbers, at highwaymen, at smugglers, at explorers, at Robin Hood and his merry men, and these playground games all take shape and are in turn shaped by children’s stories. Never mind that these versions of history are mythologies built on previous mythologies, repackaged as archetypes and tropes that bear little or no relation to the historical grounds on which they are erected.
Children’s stories are deeply involved in the creation of a British imaginary. That imaginary, like its real-world counterpart, has its nanny-staters and its libertarians. The instinct to shape and instruct children has always wrestled with the instinct to entertain them. The history of children’s literature is in one respect the history of how those aspects of stories that were initially introduced to sugar the pill became the pill.
Over the centuries, as more children were able to read books to themselves and still later to buy books for themselves, what children wanted to read influenced what was written for them. The authors of children’s stories came to speak directly to the children they were writing for. The basic direction of travel over three centuries or so has been from capsules of cod-liver oil to Bertie Bott’s Every Flavour Beans, though the cod-liver merchants have been always with us.
Take, just as one example, the way that children’s books have mapped the idea of naughtiness. Through much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the prime virtue of the child was obedience to its parents. To be “naughty,” as in the older sense of the word, was to be sinful, and the wages of sin are death. But even the most basic accommodation with reality recognizes that children are naughty. What had been a term of disapproval became a central virtue of children’s stories. Naughtiness – provided it was accompanied by a good heart – was okay, even to be celebrated. Some rules were made to be broken.
Bunking off school, sneaking out of the window at night, raiding the larder, pranks and practical jokes: these are the meat and drink of the child protagonist. The magic phrase that activates the “Marauder’s Map” in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is: “I solemnly swear I am up to no good.” Having started out as a tool for cementing adult authority, children’s stories came to allow children to imagine worlds in which they resisted or subverted it more daringly than they could possibly do in real life. And they allowed adults to indulge that fantasy – to wink at naughtiness.
Another thing that Martin Amis said in the interview I quote – “fiction is freedom” – seems to me to be especially apposite. In the narrative spaces that these books create, adults and children meet each other traveling in opposite directions. These spaces offer different sorts of freedom. For the child reader, it is a fantasy of (to borrow Isaiah Berlin’s “Two Concepts of Liberty”) positive liberty: freedom to. A child is given the chance to identify with a protagonist who has freedom to act in the world in a way that few children do in their own lives. That’s why, one way or another, and with only relatively rare exceptions, the parents have to be got out of the way. You’ll meet in these pages any number of orphans, or children severed from their parents by circumstance – whether something as worldly as a colonial posting overseas or a place in the dormitory of a boarding school, or as unworldly as a portal to a fantastical universe. The child reader can dream of a temporary, but usually safely bounded, version of adulthood.
For the adult reader or, perhaps more pressingly, the adult writer, the imaginative spaces of children’s stories represent negative liberty: freedom from. Freedom from adult responsibility, freedom from loss and sorrow, freedom from the drudgery of the workaday round. The children’s writer is able to imagine him or herself as a child again: to recreate the childhood they remember, or, as often, to concoct a compensatory version of it that will be braver, happier, less dull, less loveless. That’s the core of this strange territory. The most effective writers for children almost always seem to be the ones who have most invested in it emotionally. Often, they are writing from a wound – whether a wound sustained in childhood, or the wound of having had to leave it behind in the first place.
That’s why a surprising constant in a literature associated with ideas of freedom and innocence is grief. Many of the most enduring and most moving of these stories have a pulse of sadness in them or behind them. To be a child is to know that you have to grow up. To be an adult is to know that you have to die. And to be a parent is to be in a permanent state of mourning: as you watch your son or daughter grow up, you are saying an irreversible farewell to the child that they were, day by day, month by month, year by year.
There’s grief in the backstory of many of these books, too. It’s not brain damage that makes you a children’s writer – but for a lot of them, there was damage of another sort. This isn’t purely a literary-historical book but, here and there, a biographical one. I wanted to look at the often strange and often troubled and sometimes sad lives of the people who have written for children. Creation serves a need, and it’s seldom just a need for a royalty statement.
Many of the great children’s stories started their lives being addressed to particular children. The origin myth of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has it addressed to ten-year-old Alice Liddell. Barrie’s Peter Pan stories were directed at the childless author’s friends’ children, George and Jack Llewelyn Davies. The Wind in the Willows started life as the improvised bedtime stories Kenneth Grahame told his son Alastair. Watership Down had its origins in the tales Richard Adams spun to his daughters to beguile long car journeys. And sometimes the child whom the writer was addressing, the child the writer yearned to preserve and protect, was him- or her-self.
Those children, as children do, outgrew the images of themselves fixed in the pages. It often cost them their happiness. Sometimes, it cost them more. In disconcertingly many cases, they would not live to find out what it would cost them. The Just So stories were originally told by Rudyard Kipling to his first child, Josephine or “Effie.” “There were stories meant to put Effie to sleep, and you were not allowed to alter those by one single little word.”* Effie was “Best Beloved.” Effie died when she was six years old.
Yet the stories that were told to Effie, and Christopher Robin, and Alastair Grahame and all those real children like them, have outlived their original audiences and outlived their authors. They remain, even if shadowed by sadness, bright objects. There is adventure in them, and love, and laughter, and fun; they place their readers in each generation on the brink of new worlds, new possibilities. So let’s move on to look in more detail at how those worlds and possibilities came into being.
* Daisy Ashford’s The Young Visiters (1919) is the obvious exception; but its enduring charm, in part, is that it clearly aspired to be a book for adults written by a nine-year-old child, rather than a book for children. It’s a literary curiosity, and one that will strike some readers as charming and others as nauseating, but it doesn’t belong in this study.
* Unless it’s the Mr. Men you’re complaining about. Nuts to the Mr. Men.
* Though I make no apologies for breaking my own rules where I see fit.
* This is an approximate quote from J.M. Barrie’s Peter and Wendy, abbreviated and simplified for the occasion.
† The 1968 movie, to be pedantic; the character doesn’t feature in the 1964 novel by Ian Fleming on which it was based.
* St Nicholas magazine, December 1987.
I
ONCE UPON A TIME
Anonymous · Aesop · Apuleius · Vladimir Propp · Joseph Campbell · Philippe Ariès · Lawrence Stone · John Locke · Jean-Jacques Rousseau · William Blake · William Wordsworth
