Sam Leith’s title is borrowed from an Auden poem (September 1, 1939), but furnished here with a different connotation. It reads like one of those evocative designations which, in the minds of adults, sum up the overpowering magic of remembered childhood reading. Specifically, the phrase may conjure up the northern woods of the archetypal fairytale, all sinister overtones and decorative witchery – or even the enchanted wood of a modest, exclamation-rich Enid Blyton nursery story. These, along with nearly everything in between (and after), are brought under the scintillating scrutiny of Sam Leith in his monumental and invigorating history of this especially pungent branch of literature.
The size alone of The Haunted Wood gives it an edge over other, similar, undertakings – Humphrey Carpenter’s Secret Gardens of 1985, for example, or even J Harvey Darton’s Children’s Books in England (1932) – while its cogent and engaging assessments of the books in question make it both dense and diverting. If the author cannot cover everything (which is impossible), he sees to it that every significant trend and topic gets a spirited appraisal.
Beginning with the folk and fairytales which are somehow absorbed into every reader’s system, he goes on to deal succinctly with moral tales and edifying texts for the young, before arriving at the great 19th-century progenitors of the children’s genre as we know it: Carroll, Kingsley, Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson et al. Allegory, fantasy, adventure, magical dealings of every variety came to the fore, as children in books gained the freedom to go about their intriguing enterprises unchecked by old-fashioned moralising interventions.
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Children’s literature, to its immense benefit, went down the rabbit hole with Alice, underwater with Charles Kingsley’s Tom, and off to find colourful jeopardy with Jim Hawkins in Treasure Island. It took on a singular playfulness with The Wouldbegoods, blossomed with Mary Lennox in The Secret Garden, and went adventuring with everyone from Ratty and Mole to the famous Blyton quintet. None of this happened out of the blue, indeed, and Sam Leith provides a social context for all the audacious innovations which enriched, expanded and gingered up the genre.
At the same time, he gives us enough biographical information to afford an insight into the foibles and preoccupations of individual authors. Who knew, for instance, that E Nesbit came to consciousness amid “griefs and terrors” or that Anna Sewell’s life was warped by a seemingly trivial injury to her ankle when she was just 14? Psychological blows and buffetings such as these feed into the literary impulse of certain writers, and in rare instances contribute to the creation of a classic work of literature: Black Beauty, for example, Tom Brown’s Schooldays or Ballet Shoes.
Sam Leith is an assured and astute commentator who sometimes goes too far (or occasionally not far enough). To my mind, he is too kind to Kipling, he reads too much into Peter Pan, and he’s insufficiently beguiled by the E Nesbit of the Psammead stories (say), or the middle-class-urchin antics of William Brown as related by his author Richmal Crompton. Leith has proper praise for The Wind in the Willows – a book it is hard to dislike – but fails to castigate its two awful predecessors by Kenneth Grahame, The Golden Age and Dream Days. He acknowledges the progressive attitude towards animals displayed by Hugh Lofting of Dr Dolittle fame (“a bullfight is a stupid, cruel, disgusting business”), and takes account of Enid Blyton’s breathtaking productivity – though it’s hard to know here if he is admiring or aghast. (He rightly demolishes the execrable Noddy.) Blyton, he says, is the first children’s writer who, “during her own lifetime, was a brand”.
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As we come closer to the present, Leith expertly discusses the ways in which certain major storytelling themes were overturned or overhauled, as new ideas relating to children’s capacity to take strong or quasi-adult material in their stride, began to emerge. Continuous reinvention, too, overtook the old staples of make-believe, magic, mystery, time-travelling and alternative worlds, with supreme examples in the works of Tolkien, CS Lewis, Alan Garner and others.
Children’s literature went down the rabbit hole with Alice, underwater with Charles Kingsley’s Tom, and off to find colourful jeopardy with Jim Hawkins in Treasure Island
(I wish the author had found space for Joan Aiken, William Mayne and Penelope Lively, but these, alas, are absent from his pages. Philippa Pearce gets due consideration with her masterly Tom’s Midnight Garden, but not Jane Gardam or Gillian Avery; Robert Westall gets a showing but we find no mention of Leon Garfield.) Also, from the 1980s onwards, social realism was fast coming into its own, as authors such as Malorie Blackman, SE Hinton or Robert Cormier got to grips with topical enormities. These writers made no bones about tackling gang warfare head-on, along with drugs, deprivation, deformity, suicide, mental disorder, terminal illness, drunkenness, brutality and everything else you can think of in the line of blight.
Leith resists the temptation to raise an eyebrow at the endless woes inflicted on the unfortunate protagonists of the “social problem” sub-division; but his approach in general allows for gentle mockery whenever it’s appropriate: for example, the heading attached to one section of his book reads “The Darker Side of Children (and Rabbits)”. His serious and nearly unprecedented purpose is to survey the entire field of writing for children, but this does not preclude what you might call a characteristic narrative brio and lightness of touch.
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A darkness in the universe (along with daemons and sorcery, if not rabbits) is conspicuous in the greatest achievements in children’s fiction of recent years, which come complete with elaborate structures and intensely imagined otherworlds. I’m referring, of course, to the outstanding series of novels by Philip Pullman, and JK Rowling’s great Harry Potter project. Just when it was feared that children en masse were turning their backs on books, these inspirational works told a different story.
And as a consequence, Leith has cause to be optimistic about the future of juvenile reading for pleasure, while he celebrates the abundance of storybook images and enchantments of every era, giving credit alike to Red Riding Hood and the Wolf, Toad of Toad Hall, Pooh, Biggles, Maurice Sendak’s Wild Things, the Very Hungry Caterpillar, and the sorting-hat strategies of Hogwarts Academy.
Patricia Craig’s books include You’re a Brick Angela!: The Girls’ Story 1839–1985 (1976) and Bookworm, A Memoir of Childhood Reading (2015)
