Towards the beginning of this book, Sam Leith describes the sequence from the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics in which NHS nurses herd some bouncy children into bed while JK Rowling reads them a story. As the children sleep, the stadium fills up with nightmares – Lord Voldemort, Captain Hook, Cruella de Vil and the Child Catcher chase the children around before being finally vanquished by a squadron of flying Mary Poppinses. It was conceived as a celebration of the NHS and of Britain’s remarkable contribution to children’s literature. Since 2020, however, it’s been used as “evidence” that the pandemic was really a plan-demic. The beds supposedly prefigure a Nightingale Hospital. The choreography is apparently peppered with masonic signs.
I know about this because, as the co-creator of the ceremony, I’m occasionally waylaid at book festivals by anti-vaxxers who accuse me of using children’s stories to prepare the nation for totalitarianism. A quick stroll in the “haunted wood” of literature, however, shows that someone is always using children’s stories for something – whether that’s preparing manly chaps for empire or eco-conscious youth for the fight against climate change.
Leith’s book is a box of delights, glowing with nostalgia and insight. I’ll be dipping into it forever. But it’s also unexpectedly gripping. It has all the elements of a good story. It has conflict: the endless struggle between books of fun and books of instruction, between the Tom Browns and the William Browns. That’s a battle that’s raged since Aesop and rages still, but there are more local skirmishes here too. Like the bitter rivalry between the ruthless figure of Enid Blyton and her shirty neighbour Alison Uttley, author of A Traveller in Time (1939). When Uttley affected not to know Blyton’s books, Blyton informed her that the window of their local Smith’s was packed with them, knowing that Uttley had already been in there to complain that they didn’t stock her own books.
The contrast between the creators’ darkness and their sunny creations can be amusing, but also heart-breaking. The Bastables – introduced in The Story of the Treasure Seekers (1899) – must be one of the most lovable and believable families in all literature. But their creator, Edith Nesbit, was at the centre of a web of relationships that frightened even HG Wells. She adopted the children of her husband’s mistresses, even when one of those mistress turned out to be her best friend – a friend she then kept on as housekeeper.
Nesbit claimed to remember everything about her own childhood and to be able to retreat into it. Leith observes that many of the greatest children’s writers are so concerned with imagining a perfect childhood in order to heal their own wounds that they become like little children and are therefore often horrendously bad parents. PL Travers, author of Mary Poppins (1934), adopted a child but did not tell him he had siblings. When, in his teens, his brother tracked him down, she threatened to call the police. As a children’s writer myself, this is not an aspect of my profession I like to think about too much.
There are public as well as private sorrows to be overcome. Dealing with his experience of World War One is part of what drove JRR Tolkien to create his stories of Middle Earth, but I hadn’t known before that Hugh Lofting began to write The Story of Doctor Dolittle in the trenches. He wanted to write home to his children but could not bear to tell them how things were. The need to write but not to tell is also there in AA Milne (another terrible parent). Look closer at Christopher Robin’s magical companions and you can reread each of them and discern them suffering from some kind of trauma – Eeyore a form of depression, Tigger a hyper-active anxiety, and so on. At the front, men would name the landmarks of the trench landscape after children’s stories: “Peter Pan Trench”, “Hook Copse”, “Wendy Cottage”. For me, this image summarises the power that children’s stories have to carve desire paths through the memory, reaching back from the troubled present into a happier past.
Stories shared in childhood anchor and connect memories. They’re like the note that young JM Barrie and his friends wrote and hid in the ruins of Lochmaben Castle, swearing to go back and read it when they were grown up. They are tickets back to happiness. This extraordinary ability to underwrite joy is surely every bit as important as the potential to inculcate values. This means that great children’s stories are meant to be reread and revisited.
When the arbiters of taste dismiss, for instance, Rowling for being derivative, they are missing the point. Children’s writers consciously pass the torch. Their fictional characters read fiction. The Bastables read Kipling. CS Lewis’s The Magician’s Nephew (1955) references the Bastables. And any number of books look back at Narnia. The Haunted Wood is particularly good on this. Hogwarts is a brilliant reimagining of the boarding school story. And the name Hogwarts first appears in 1954 in that equally brilliant rubbishing of the boarding school story, Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle’s Molesworth book How to Be Topp, which also includes a hilarious railway station embarkation moment, though not on platform 93/4. There’s a wonderful few pages in The Haunted Wood describing the peerless ability of the picture-book author Julia Donaldson to collect and synthesise stories from all over space and time and make them sing.
Part of that revisiting is of course the translation of books into film, television and games. And if you want to see how alive and unpredictable this process of reassessment and reimaging is – well, Paddington Bear doesn’t get so much as a mention in this otherwise comprehensive history. Presumably his ascent to nation’s number one bear and presenter of the most positive image of our monarchy happened somewhere between first draft and publication.
Whenever a new storytelling technology appears, there are moral panics about whether it will kill off books. Leith documents the ways in which this has not happened. Almost unforgivably, there’s only a passing mention here of the way the BBC’s Jackanory helped promote and even commission great writing from authors such as Joan Aiken, Helen Cresswell and Elisabeth Beresford from the 1960s to the 1990s. I suppose the fact that you can leave such giants out is an indication of how rich the tradition is.
Children’s stories have always existed, says Leith, “in more than one medium and spilled between them”. He’s optimistic about the future, listing some excellent new books on both the fun side – see Jamie Smart’s Bunny vs Monkey – and on the instructional side. You can see by the number of books that deal with the environment, identity and immigration that we still feel that children’s books have power.
Is Leith’s optimism founded? He quotes the National Literacy Trust statistic that over 50 per cent of children don’t enjoy reading, and that the figure is higher among those on free school meals. Equally worryingly, the number of adults reading to the children in their lives has dropped off a cliff. Books have endured the rise of TV, cinema, comics and games, but it seems to me that something very different is happening now. The pandemic hugely intensified children’s relationships with screens. Schools accelerated this with online homework.
We have no idea where this is leading us. But here is one example: the soothing, anodyne children’s animation Cocomelon, the most watched children’s show on Earth, sits on YouTube, where the metric of success is how long you stay watching. Frictionless viewing is everything. It’s not (yet) written by algorithm, but its writers already avoid some of the human punctuation points of storytelling – characters’ bedtimes, for instance, because they’re such a strong signal to stop watching. Episodes last one, two, even five hours. This isn’t storytelling, it’s sedation, designed to be addictive (hence its nickname “CocaineMelon”). It’s not the worst, though: in fact, episode by episode, it’s good. But it is of course most popular among the most hassled and poorest families.
The Haunted Wood brilliantly celebrates what we have gained from our unrivalled storytelling tradition. If, like me, you find that it glows with nostalgia and remembered joys, then be grateful. But also ask yourself if we are going to give our children and grandchildren something less.
Frank Cottrell-Boyce is the Waterstones Children’s Laureate
The Haunted Wood: A History of Childhood Reading
Sam Leith
Oneworld Publications, 592pp, £30
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[See also: Bella Mackie’s champagne satires]
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This article appears in the 25 Sep 2024 issue of the New Statesman, All-out war