AS THE book points out, this is the first general history of the genre. It has the potential to sit on shelves alongside works such as Farah Mendlesohn and Daniel Levy’s Children’s Fantasy Literature and Alison Lurie’s Don’t Tell The Grown-Ups. Like those books, The Haunted Wood takes children’s literature seriously as a form: neither a watered-down version of other stories, nor a preparation for “real” literature later. And it does not cut it off from the historical and cultural world that shaped the books. The Haunted Wood is genuine literary history, bringing together the changing stories on the page and the changing circumstances beyond, to great effect.
The introduction provides some striking complications. Leith notes that “childhood reading” often involves books that are definitely not intended for children, such as Agatha Christie or Wilbur Smith, as well as books that were not originally intended for children, such as Perrault’s fairytales or The Swiss Family Robinson.
In one especially brilliant flourish, he suggests that children’s books offer both of Isaiah Berlin’s conceptions of freedom to different audiences: to the child reader, they imagine freedom to, producing a world where they can participate in experiences and adventures. To the adult writer, they provide freedom from, an escape from the constrictions and demands of adult life, and perhaps from their own actual childhood.
The chapters that follow swoop back into the 17th and 18th centuries to lay out the prehistory of the form, then explore the books in chronological chunks through the centuries that followed. Along the way, there are discussions of Robert Louis Stevenson, Francis Hodgson Burnett, T. H. White, Tove Jansson, Judy Blume, Jacqueline Wilson, and J. K. Rowling, among many others.
Leith writes fluently and illuminatingly about the books in question, combining summary and explanation with insights about style and what’s going on behind the story. Paragraphs of quotation, giving a flavour of the authors, sit alongside his own analysis. It is scholarly enough to sketch an overall history, and personal enough to prompt disagreement at times. A thoroughly satisfying read.
Jem Bloomfield is an Assistant Professor of Literature at the University of Nottingham and a Reader in the Church of England.
The Haunted Wood: A history of childhood reading
Sam Leith
Oneworld £30
(978-0-86154-818-7)
Church Times Bookshop £27