If you were lucky enough to grow up loving books, the world of childhood reading may now feel like a lost paradise. I remember mine as a swirl of djinn, trolls, rabbits, pointy-hatted witches, smoking caterpillars, rogue elephants, hot-air balloons, underground rivers, volcanoes, monkeys, treasure-maps and Mississippi rafts, all consumed by me with an uncritical delight that is harder to achieve in adult life.
Delight, as Sam Leith argues in this splendid survey of children’s literature from Aesop to Philip Pullman, lies at the very heart of the genre. A good children’s book thrills its readers with ripping adventures and strong characters; it evokes mental images that can stay imprinted for ever. It revels in words: think of Dr Seuss’s stories, or Rudyard Kipling’s perfect ear in lines such as: “Go to the banks of the great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River, all set about with fever-trees, and find out.” Underlying it all, children’s books tend to remain close to the deep structures of myth, providing a fast track to readerly satisfaction.
Having written about ancient and modern rhetoric in You Talkin’ to Me?, Leith knows a lot about these structures and techniques. Here, he adds a more personal angle, having revisited many old favourites with his own children. The result is not an academic history so much as a thoughtful, witty and warmhearted journey through works from different periods, mostly but not exclusively British. He reads them with a keen eye for quotes and anecdotes, and shares his loves (Edith Nesbit, and the brilliant Arthurian stories of TH White), as well as his hates. Unlike me, he has shaken off a childhood of non-stop Enid Blyton, and he is stern about Willard Price, whose zoo-collecting adventure books were such great loves of mine that I can’t bear to bury him yet.
Leith’s mini-biographies of authors remind us how many had traumatic childhoods, and traumatic adulthoods too. Nesbit was unhappy in marriage, and her son died during a routine operation. Kenneth Grahame, author of the seemingly untroubled Wind in the Willows, lost his mother to scarlet fever when he was five, and a son to presumed suicide. One of the few authors to suffer little pain in life, AA Milne, made up for it – as Leith quips – by wrecking the happiness of his own son Christopher Robin, who was severely bullied after the Pooh books came out.
Such psychodramas illuminate a remark made by Nesbit: that the best way to write for children is by remembering what it felt like to be a child yourself, rather than by observing or preaching to them from outside. JK Rowling has said something similar. Yet some writers do seek to give children moral direction. Leith sees an eternal “tug of war” emerging between didacticism and delight. For every “How doth the little busy bee improve each shining hour” (Isaac Watts), there sprouts up a “How doth the little crocodile improve his shining tail” (Lewis Carroll). Even the moralistic can find a wild rumpus breaking into their work, though: delight keeps reasserting itself.
Children’s authors are also right to take their responsibility seriously, because children are more deeply affected by their reading than adults. Leith quotes Malorie Blackman, who grew up trying to ignore the lack of characters looking anything like herself, then set out to write the books she wished she could have read. Children feel their exclusion, she wrote; it is a fallacy to think they don’t mind. Leith adds that, even now, children’s literature is less reflective of its audience than it should be. A 2018 survey showed that just one in 100 children’s books published in the UK that year included a main character of colour. As for the question of excising offensive stereotypes and language from modern editions of older books, Leith is generally in favour. A little doctoring of Hugh Lofting’s Doctor Dolittle books means their more delightful side can be rescued for new generations.
Leith rescues a great deal for adults too. Thanks to his wonderful book, my reading list is now full of titles I want to revisit, as well as others I somehow missed the first time around. How on earth did I not come across J Meade Falkner’s Moonfleet before? Hours of delight await.
• The Haunted Wood: a History of Childhood Reading by Sam Leith is published by Oneworld Publications (£30). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
