Thank you for reading A Poetry Notebook! I write about poetry (no surprises there), books more generally, and sometimes share my own stories. Comments and suggestions are always very welcome—and let me know if there’s anything you’d like to see more of.
Every post is free on delivery (i.e. please subscribe and forget about this message), but some will be going behind the paywall at the end of the month. If you think you might be missing out, for whatever reason, and can’t afford another subscription, just drop me an email. I would do—and have done—the same.
This week, I thought I would share my review of Sam Leith’s ‘history of childhood reading’, which was first published on Engelsberg Ideas around this time last year (The Haunted Wood is now out in paperback).1 You can read the full article below. It is always disorientating to read something like this back later, and all the more so this time. At the time of writing, our son was seven or eight-months-old. In a few months, he will be two. This, of course, is how life works. It doesn’t make the process any less strange.
Books help. The central theme of The Haunted Wood is the intensity of children’s literature’s relationship with time: every book for children is written by an adult, someone both excluded from and only just beginning to understand the experience they’re writing about. When I wrote the review I had no idea about the endless tiny griefs (and the joys) that come with watching someone growing up. I am only beginning to grasp it. Parenting, it turns out, is a process of discovering just how much you don’t know.
When I first read The Haunted Wood, I came away with a strong feeling that children’s literature needs defending as an art in its own right—even, sometimes, from children’s authors themselves. In penance for recycling, and because some time has passed, I also want to throw in a few further bones of contention.
The best children’s books are written with a real child in mind
So many children’s books published today are bad and cynical. The exact ways in which they are bad and cynical depend on the age range they’re aimed at. Often, they’re hopelessly moralising in very twenty-first century ways: there is one particular picture-book series, deathly dull and utterly surreal, that attempts to draw inspirational self-help lessons from the lives of famous figures like… Anne Frank. We are as moralising as the Victorians, only the morals have changed.2
Still, this stuff sells: the main reason so many children’s books are bad and cynical, preachy or otherwise, is that the genre is seen as one of the last lucrative markets in publishing. And one of the lessons I drew from The Haunted Wood is that children’s books are precisely the kind of books which shouldn’t be written with the market in mind, at least not if they are going to be any good. Think of a classic story and the chances are it was written for a particular child:
So many of these stories begin in private, for particular children: Alice Liddell of the Alice stories, Rudyard Kipling’s ‘best beloved’ Effie, George and Jack Llewyn Davies, who first heard Peter Pan from J. M. Barrie, Richard Adams’s daughters. We only have The Wind in the Willows because Kenneth Grahame’s editor overheard him putting his son to bed. Treasure Island crossed generations. Robert Louis Stevenson’s stepson, Lloyd, and Stevenson’s father: ‘I had counted on one by: I found I had two… My father caught fire at once.’
As that list suggests, the storyteller really doesn’t need to be a parent. But they will be writing for someone. Every child, and every childhood, is unique and it’s only through a real childhood that we glimpse the true strangeness of growing up. More to the point, the stories have to be written with love. We often complain, rightly, about cynical celebrities writing books for children, and cynical publishers pushing them. But the cynicism runs deeper than that. It isn’t, in the end, about who writes. The point is that you can’t simply sit down and say, “I’m going to write a book for children.” You have to want to write one for someone who happens to be a child. Perhaps that’s idealistic, but I think you can tell.
Picture books are the most complex kind of books
In our house, books mean picture books. Toddlers are an illustrator’s best friend, and the best illustrators hide little secrets just for them: ours will often be following a subplot in the images we aren’t paying attention to (like the mice in Mr Magnolia). The last half-century was a golden age for British picture books, helped along by cheaper off-shore production. But their rise has also encouraged the idea that children’s books are the perfect vehicle for first-time authors. Can’t you just write some words and have someone else do the illustrations?
Well, no. Picture books are works of art. In the best, the images and text are in constant dialogue: stories and jokes will begin in words and end in pictures, and vice versa. The illustrations inspire, expand on, and sometimes subtly question the text: the child looking at The Tiger Who Came to Tea sees a very different tiger to the one the adult reads. Picture books are designed, not merely drawn or written. Their creators orchestrate our movement through them.
Too many of the books in our local library are just words plonked beside pictures; even, I’m sorry to say, a few Julia Donaldson titles (The Gruffalo and Room on the Broom are brilliant precisely because words and pictures work together). A great picture book needs either a master illustrator, someone like Quentin Blake or Judith Kerr or Eric Carle, or an extraordinarily close collaboration, like Janet and Allan Ahlbergs’. That arguably makes them the rarest kind of book.
Childhood reading is the most important kind of reading
One final thought (this introduction is now as long as the review). The proportion of people who report reading for pleasure in the UK and US has been falling for years. Sometimes, I pretend the situation isn’t so bad. It is easier than ever—thanks to technology, ironically—to find other people who read widely. I’m often surrounded by people reading on the Tube, because London is the kind of city which attracts the kind of people who might read on the Tube.
But the statistics don’t lie. The cause is more controversial. I think all screens have something to do with it. Smartphones are probably responsible for the most recent declines, but the rot set in earlier. (There were no smartphones when I was a kid, but there were PCs, TVs, and PlayStations.) Those are the pull factors, if you like. But the decline of cultures which nudged people towards reading matters too: religion, the middle class, the trade union movement. Once nudged, people found their own reasons, but surely the nudges helped.3
Then again, as
notes in relation to the male reading ‘crisis’, arguing about causes often becomes a way of apportioning blame. Better, perhaps, to talk about solutions. The solution there, he says, is “boring”:To get more men to read, we need more men reading.
Men will read, Henderson argues, when they see other men reading. It sounds a little too simple, but I think it’s true (and it appeals to my inner William James). The main barrier to men reading isn’t modern publishing, or the books themselves, or men’s interests—after all, they used to read—but the absence of visible readers. What’s true for men is true for people in general.
Ideally, those visible readers will be around at an early age. For understandable reasons, most of the articles and think-pieces I read sounding the alarm around reading rates are written by people working in universities, concerned about how many of their students seem unfamiliar with or seriously estranged from books. Often, the conversation then turns to the way in which schools might be failing students. But school is too late (in the UK, schools are now expected to solve almost every social problem going). Reading, as a habit, sets in early.
That is why the statistics around childhood reading are so depressing: they suggest that more decline is already baked in. Children who don’t enjoy reading probably aren’t going to become adults who enjoy reading to their children. But, if we care about reversing that trend, that’s exactly what needs to happen. Reading will have to be something that children and adults rediscover together. The good news is that the best children’s books are made for exactly that purpose.
The Haunted Wood: A History of Childhood Reading, Sam Leith
Children eat books up. Often, when they are small, they literally eat them. One of the many delicious asides in The Haunted Wood, Sam Leith’s new ‘history of childhood reading’, tells the story of a child who wrote to Maurice Sendak, author of Where the Wild Things Are, and received a drawing of a ‘Wild Thing’ in return. The boy’s mother wrote back: “Jim loved your card so much he ate it.”
Sendak took it as a compliment. As Leith notes, the boy was a first-rate critic: Where the Wild Things Are wraps eating, love and consumption together in ‘excellently Freudian fashion’. When Max makes to leave, the Wild Things threaten to eat him themselves:
‘Oh please don’t go – We’ll eat you up – we love you so!’
As a child, I always read that line as a kind of invitation. It’s scary, too, as invitations often are. The best children’s authors know how to capture those mixed feelings and Leith is a brilliantly acute guide to the pleasures, fears and heartbreaks involved, as well as the skill which it takes to pull off lines like this. Never stuffy, he takes the texts and images seriously, which is no more than the best children’s books deserve. Time and time again, Leith gets them just right: Julia Donaldson has “one of the best ears for prosody since… Auden”; the key line in Judith Kerr’s The Tiger Who Came to Tea is the moment—almost sublime for the child reading—that the tiger drinks “all the water in the tap”.
Leith sets out to do more than just revisit the classics. “I wanted, in the role of literary historian, to see how these books have shaped each other; in the role of literary critic to ask whether they’re any good, and why; and in the role of social historian to understand how these books are involved with the story of childhood in Britain.” The three modes are connected: one of his themes is the way in which children shaped the genre through their own tastes and preferences. Naughtiness gets the upper hand, with a little help from Just William.
At times, The Haunted Wood also reads like a collective biography. Leith is bashful about this, though needlessly so. Children’s books are personal. “Often”, he writes, the authors “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.” They are psychologically complex, too, “a document not of how children are, but how adults imagine children to be, or how they imagine they want them to be”.
The selection is personal as well. Once the origin stories are out the way, Leith largely focuses on British literature, which, he argues, is one of the country’s great exports. Children’s writing, he suggests, has a “baked in nostalgia” (perhaps that is one reason why the English are so good at it) and perhaps inevitably I came away from The Haunted Wood with a nostalgia for the genre’s high watermark, that long hot summer before the First World War. Leith delivers superlative readings of the Alice books, Peter Pan, The Wind in the Willows, the world of Beatrix Potter and the life and work of E. Nesbit.
Another key theme for Leith is the way in which children’s books draw on the energy of the oldest kind of narratives, of myths and fairytales. This primal, storytelling energy, he argues, means they are always spilling out of books into playground games, retellings and other genres, television, film and even video games. I wondered if some of this energy wasn’t encoded in the act of storytelling itself. Adults rarely tell or perform stories to each other in person anymore—there’s TV for that—but we’ll still sit down with a child.
So many of these stories begin in private, for particular children: Alice Liddell of the Alice stories, Rudyard Kipling’s ‘best beloved’ Effie, George and Jack Llewyn Davies, who first heard Peter Pan from J. M. Barrie, Richard Adams’s daughters. We only have The Wind in the Willows because Kenneth Grahame’s editor overheard him putting his son to bed. Treasure Island crossed generations. Robert Louis Stevenson’s stepson, Lloyd, and Stevenson’s father: “I had counted on one by: I found I had two… My father caught fire at once.”
It didn’t take long for people to notice there might be money to be made here. One early entrepreneur was Enid Blyton, who “was banging out several dozen books a year” by the 1950s (“You don’t so much analyse Enid Blyton’s work as weigh it.”). Blyton cultivated her readership, publishing her own magazine, assiduously answering letters from her admirers and encouraging them to meet each other. The Famous Five Club “had 30,000 members within a year of its inception.” Here, if you like, is the start of fandom.4
Leith also highlights the ‘intertextuality’ of children’s literature. Like the myths and fairytales they draw on, these books borrow from one other and that is part of their appeal. He even defends J.K. Rowling from charges of derivativeness: Rowling is simply the magpie who managed to bring all the shiny pieces together. The genre is “an inexhaustible resource of… characters and situations: orphaned protagonists with portentous desires, portals to other worlds, exotic monsters and talking animals, midnight feasts… perilous journeys, enchanted objects, dark forests, thuggish bullies and evil wizards”. He is surely right about Rowling, though I wish Diane Wynne Jones got more credit and had the same readership. Two of my friends shared a copy of Harry Potter—literally reading the same book at the same time, with the faster reader always one page ahead. You can’t explain that kind of enthusiasm away as a marketing trick.
Equally, all this ‘intertextuality’ is awfully convenient for publishers and their authors. Children, as Leith notes, are conservative. Like Bilbo Baggins, they want their adventure and they want to come home for tea. They also want to come home to the same stories, again and again. Books turn into franchises, franchises never end. Perhaps we should be a little more cynical on their behalf: some of the best children’s stories of the last 50 years have been one-off performances, quietly stunning in their brevity, but Leith understandably doesn’t have room for many. I would put in a word in for Clive King’s Stig of the Dump.
Towards the end of Leith’s tale, children’s authors start making a particular, peculiar claim: that they are not children’s authors at all. The great Alan Garner is “writing for anybody who cares to read, after I have written for myself”. Philip Pullman resists the title. Leith suggests that there’s an air of things coming full circle here: children’s books were the medium which fantasy, fairy tale and adventure—originally for everyone, later sequestered in children’s fiction—were smuggled through to the present, while the novel was busy making itself ‘respectable’. On this reading, the rise of the ‘young adult’ genre (which Leith wisely puts beyond his remit) is just a righting of the scales in favour of the fantastical. Ursula Le Guin makes the claim explicit: her work, she writes, draws on “the tradition of fantastic tales and hero stories, which comes down to us like a great river from sources high in the mountains of myth”, but “modernist literary ideology shunted it all off to children”.
Le Guin’s story about ‘modernist ideology’ is faintly conspiratorial. There is no sense here that adult readers make choices, too: that there might be something about Middlemarch that wouldn’t work in a book about dragons (now that’s an idea), or that writers might have good reasons for looking askance at the ‘high mountains of myth’. After all, there are plenty of modern adventures for ‘adults’— Conrad, Melville, Du Maurier, McCarthy—they just tend to forgo the heroes and the villains. The endless battle between ‘YA’ and ‘literary fiction’ is an argument between two pretty healthy monopolies who both want more of the cake.
Children, however, don’t want adventure for the sake of adventure. They also have what Katherine Rundell calls a “thirst for justice”. The only genuinely amoral children’s book I can think of is Treasure Island. Not only does Silver get away with murder, but as Leith points out, there aren’t really any noble motives in Stevenson’s story. Everyone’s goal is the same: treasure. Stevenson pulls it all off with a wink, but few writers have dared follow him. Leith wonders whether the rift between J.K. Rowling and a section of her fanbase is yet more proof of her success: readers took Harry Potter to heart. Then again, surely in writing about a cataclysmic battle between pure good and pure evil Rowling was only accentuating a dynamic central to the genre. No one identifies as Voldemort.
Still, as Rundell has argued elsewhere, we go back to children’s books because they remind us that ‘hope counts for something’. The problem with doing away with the distinctions between books for adults and books for children is that we end up losing sight of perhaps the most important quality of both adventures and childhood: if we are lucky, they come to an end.
The best children’s books know this, which is why they are so sad. Enjoyable as The Haunted Wood is—and I want to stress that it is great fun—Leith’s wood is still haunted. “To be a child is to know that you have to grow up,” he writes. “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.” Ultimately, what defines childhood reading is the intensity of its relationship with time itself.
But then, who were the Victorians? See Matthew Sweet’s Inventing the Victorians.
This is, like most discussions of the issue, an entirely evidence-free (‘vibes based’) analysis. In my defence, at least it’s short.
See also: Substack.