The stories we encounter as children are the most important ones we ever read. They may not always be the most sophisticated or profound, but they are the ones we remember most deeply – and everything in the reading life that follows is built on them. GK Chesterton said that the children’s story The Princess and the Goblin had “made a difference to my whole existence”. Not everyone who reads The Very Hungry Caterpillar or Goodnight Moon goes on to read Gravity’s Rainbow or Middlemarch; but everyone who reads Gravity’s Rainbow started out reading children’s stories. And they only carried on reading because they did so.
It is in childhood – first through nursery rhymes, then picture books – that children learn to delight in the way the sounds and rhythms of words can be made to bounce off one another for pleasure. And childhood reading is part of the formation of a moral imagination: reading helps us to imagine what it might be like to have agency, to act in the world; and what it might be like, indeed, to be somebody else. In reading, we find models for ourselves.
