The Haunted Wood: A History of Childhood Reading

by Sam Leith

A girl falls down a rabbit hole. An orphan flies out of his bedroom window. Another finds a key to a secret garden… The stories written for children are a window into our deepest hopes, joys and anxieties. They reveal our past – collective and individual, remembered and imagined – and invite us to dream up a different future. More vivid, more real than books we encountered mere months ago, our childhood reading might just be the making of us. The Haunted Wood is the only history of canonical literature written for children. It explores the breadth of the British nursery bookshelf, from Beatrix Potter and Maurice Sendak to Enid Blyton and Philip Pullman. And reveals the magic of our most beloved stories, the lasting grip they seem to have on us and the ways in which they define and console entire generations.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Books About Books, Childrens, Literary Criticism, Literature, Education

602 pages, Hardcover

First published September 5, 2024

Reviews

[Sara M · Rating 2 out of 5]

A somewhat disappointing book.
Of course, it would have been impossible to fit EVERYTHING in, and yet some authors were given far too little place (Diana Wynne Jones gets half a page). The closer it gets to the present times, the more unquestioning it becomes about authorial intentions, too. In the - long! - semi-chapter devoted to Ursula Le Guin, for instance, we are mostly treated to the author's own words on her journey towards feminism. Le Guin's feminism, if it can even be called this way, is, from the contemporary point of view (but honestly, even during the 1970s) more of a journey from extreme misogyny to essentialist not-like-the-other-girls other-women-bad stance. I did not read the Earthsea cycle as a child and it was quite unpalpable when I tried at the recommendation of a friend around 2010. I can't imagine being a teenager now and enjoying being told around page 6 of the Wizard of Earthsea that women are compulsive liars, or some such.

This of course can be dismissed as cancel culture bla bla bla, but frankly I don't see the point of forcing people to enjoy things that are simply not enjoyable, even though they were meant to be, originally. This idea that the form and shape of white Eurocentric canon has to be preserved at all costs if far more toxic than most of the phenomena related to the supposed cancel culture will ever have a chance of being. It's quite evident that a lot of older books have parts of them that are racist, ableist and sexist. Dismissing this is simply dishonest. A lot of those books can be still enoyable to a lot of people: but this decision to enjoy the beauty of written prose with the occasional disturbing comment should be made consciously and not from the depths of denial.

And frankly, there is something painfully, wretchedly pusillanimous and lacking integrity about the treatment of JKR and her transphobia. With the bullying campaign she started on Twitter against Imane Khelif her transphobia can not longer be denied. Any reader should decide for themselves if this spoils their enjoyment of her fiction, but trying to claim what's there is simply not there, is, at this point, simply delusional.

[Subashini · Rating 2 out of 5]

Fairly enjoyable for what is essentially an overview, but ruined for me by the conservative defence of J.K. Rowling and the claim that "cancel culture" lovers have merely "accused" her of transphobia, instead of the bare fact of Rowling advertising her fascist views at every opportunity. Super condescending about why people who may have loved the Harry Potter books for various reasons now want nothing to do with her. Perhaps to be expected of someone who's happy to write for The Spectator.

[Finch · Rating 1 out of 5]

I was pre-warned by the helpful 2-star reviews that this book spent an extortionate amount of time discussing J.K Rowling and defending her bigotry as "accusations" and nothing more. But good lord nothing prepared me for how desperately obsessed the author is with her throughout the book. From page one he brings her and her books up every chance he gets. Every other villain is likened to Voldemort. Every whimsical make-believe foodstuff prompts a comparison to every-flavoured beans. Every book that spawned a fad or a proto-fandom is "Pottermania before Potter." Any multi-book series with spin-offs is "the original Potter verse."
It's exhausting! No other book or author gets this treatment. There is something valid in saying that she had an impact on children's publishing, I'm not denying that. But she is not worth nearly as much puppyish devotion that this author so clearly has for her. It seems at times with authors that came before her that he's annoyed he can't pin their success on Rowling.
And that's saying nothing of how he glosses over her bigotry as "cancel-culture", as rabid leftists who are so Potter-pilled that their black and white morality has instantly called her a baddie. Rowling is a self-confessed TERF. She IS transphobic. I think that because it is true. I don't need a children's book to have taught me morality to know that -- she is directly and actively harming trans people, and gleeful about it. This book was published in 2024, her bigotry wasn't a secret. The same year Rowling was spearheading harassment campaign after harassment campaign all the while crying about being cancelled and being harassed. She's donated thousands of pounds to explicitly anti-trans causes, and has recently vowed to donate proceeds from theme parks and the upcoming remake show to as many anti-trans causes as possible, purposely to make it so much harder if not impossible for trans women to simply exist. She celebrated like a ghoul after her lobbying successfully got the UK government to redefine womanhood to attempt to exclude trans women from legal protection under discrimination acts. She's an open transphobe, not trying at all to hide it. Her works are full of bigotry too, as soon as you look beyond the surface - her villains are fat, they're disfigured, they're large-nosed, they're "mannish" women. Her non-white characters, where they exist, are Shacklebolt and Cho Chang, and if not named like racist ad-libs they're cardboard stereotypes. There is a single Jewish character at Hogwarts. It does not matter that writers that came before her were also racist or fatphobic or islamophobic or antisemetic -- grow the fuck up. She's a vile, hateful little creature, and it's completely disingenuous and at this point pathetic to pretend otherwise.
But I suppose I shouldn't be surprised - the author also seems to believe that Kipling is just "claimed" to be racist in his works. Dahl's Oompa Loompas can't possibly be racial stereotypes - Charlie was black in an early concept! Blyton was a conservative, so it's "a stretch" worth commenting on out of the blue that anyone might have an interest in viewing George of the Famous Five as trans.
What can you expect, though, from Prue Leith's Daily Mail writer nephew, third generation right-wing journalist?

Aside from that, I also didn't think the book was good! He veers between in-depth biography and extremely surface level reading. Some authors - Wynne Jones and Le Guin, for example - barely get a look-in, despite being... pretty influential, all things considered. Other authors like Colfer or even Lemony Snicket, don't get mentioned at all. Fair enough, it's not a comprehensive look through. But why, then, does Rowling get a whopping thirty pages to herself? I'd argue Rick Riordan had way more of an impact on children's media as a whole, and could, if you try, link to the rise of Greek and Roman myth retellings in YA and adult publishing. But no, I guess he's got to write his love letter to Rowling, and claim that Riordan probably wouldn't have gotten anywhere if not for good old JK paving the fucking way.

For a 600 page book, it's all just extremely, extremely uninterested in actually diving into anything. Pick fewer authors. Make a tighter point. Explain better the link between then and now, beyond just restating that authors write what they remember of their own childhoods. Every time it starts to get interesting, it stops. Some authors get pretty comprehensive biographies, summaries of whatever work best exemplifies their voice or their topic of choice. Some authors get more than one summary! And others get a sentence or two. A Wikipedia summary of their biography and body of work. It's extremely inconsistent, and I fear it's just very telling of the books the author actually read, or read to his children, or just likes. It's also full of random potshots at "herbivorous liberals" and the way certain things are worded - critics "sneer" at Rowling, "moralists" consider Lee on the wrong side of the American Civil War (????) there's a "charge" of racism against Kipling - absolutely smacks of a kind of centrism I can't fucking stand, but really does explain why he defends Rowling.

If you're interested, The Fairy-Tellers by Nicholas Jubber is a more interesting and in depth view at least of the authors of the most famous fairytales, if not children's stories in general. Which -- Leith barely, barely touches on fairytales, and then almost entirely forgets that they still have an influence on stories until he's talking about how smart and cool and sexy Rowling is for using folklore and fairytales. She wasn't the first, my dude, and she certainly wasn't the best.

All in all -- I don't think this is a good book. I wouldn't think it was a good book even if I didn't know that JK Rowling is a vicious bigot. I think the author is absolutely insufferable, and had very little of interest to say - certainly not 600 words worth. I think he should have put on his big boy pants and just written the book he clearly wanted to write -- the prehistory of Harry Potter, the books that influenced Rowling and the impact she had on children's books. But I guess he was too much of a coward to just do that, knowing people who don't want to support a bigot might not have bought his miserable little book.

Also WHY does he go on for almost FOUR PAGES about how scary Goodnight Moon is? Goodnight Moon???? Are you fucking okay?????

[Nandakishore Mridula · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nostalgia occupies the present moment; the nostalgia of every generation for an imagined past; the nostalgia of every adult for an imagined childhood.

Sam Leith's book is a journey through that imaginary land, peopled by pixies, brownies, gnomes and goblins; the land of man-eating giants and fire-breathing dragons; also the land of boarding schools, midnight pranks, and brave children who save the world while consuming enormous amounts of scones, muffins and ginger beer. Starting from the very beginnings of what we term children's literature - when it was not actually meant for children at all - we travel all the way to the twenty-first century, where we have extremely blurred boundaries between childhood and adulthood.

Writing for children is not child's play. Leith takes strong exception to a statement by Martin Amis that writing for children is writing at a 'lower register', and he would do that only if he had a 'serious brain injury'. He says

Children's literature isn't a defective and frivolous sidebar to the grown-up sort. It's the platform on which everything else is built. It's through what we read as children that we imbibe our first understanding of what it is to inhabit a fictional world, how words and sentences carry a style and a tone of voice, how a narrator can reveal or occlude the minds of others, and how we learn to anticipate with excitement or dread what's around the corner. What we read in childhood stays with us.

As a person who spent a lonely childhood among books, I have to agree.

So where did it all start? Once upon a time, of course...

The earliest known literature we consider written for children are the so-called "fairy tales", which actually didn't have those cutesy-wutesy fairies and dealt with very adult themes. In fact, they were not meant for children at all: these earliest stories, originating directly from myths (which is the fountainhead of all our tales) were meant for adults. In those days, children were considered miniature adults and did not get any special treatment. Thus we have Aesop's fables and the truly grim stories of the Brothers Grimm. From there, it slowly moved into moralist territory, using stories to instruct children on how to be good human beings (according to the norms of those days, that is). Leith gives us a quick tour through various writers of the day until he arrives at the mid-nineteenth century, when a certain girl went down a rabbit-hole - and children's literature grew wings and started flying.

Sam Leith considers Alice in Wonderland as a sort of watershed book in children's literature: and I agree. Lewis Carrol (whatever he was in real life - there is a real possibility that he may have been a groomer) was truly a genius, and genuinely disruptive. Instead of instruction, his books provided children with a magical world where adult rules didn't apply.

So what did Alice give to children's writing in particular? At the time Carroll was writing, we'd had a century or more of dry books of facts and history, and moralistic fables-books that sought to improve children's minds or their souls. Both had in common that they were, one way or another, trying to shape children in an orderly way, to inscribe neat lines on the blank slate. Carroll ridiculed both these projects, and instead made a knight's move: the books repudiate a moral and rational order in favour of the chaotic play of paradox and whimsy. He took the blank slate and doodled on it.

That made available a new mode of writing for children. One in which fun and silliness was an end in itself, and the sheer otherness of a child's apprehension of the world could be acknowledged. It smashed up the old conventions, showing how children's writing could be silly, and mysterious, and magical, and entirely uninterested in preparing its readers either morally or informationally for adult life. It marked one position in a negotiation between realism and fantasy that has been going on in the bookshelves of our childhoods ever since. One tendency tracks the path of the novel itself towards the high-water mark of nineteenth-century naturalism you find in George Eliot or Flaubert; the other hews closer to the folktales and fables that are our basic narrative inheritance.

Along with Carrol, we have Charles Kingsley's The Water Babies, a curious mix of realism, fantasy and religious allegory, and also the birth of the school story (Ted Hughes' Tom Brown's School Days) and the boy's adventure story. And as the nineteenth century moved towards its close, children's literature truly flourished with the arrival of the greats such as Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Beatrix Potter.

As we move from the Victorian Age to the Edwardian, we see children losing their innocence and children's stories becoming "naughtier", with some not-so-ideal children taking centre stage. And all innocence is irretrievably lost with the First World War, when humankind realised for the first time that we can, if we want, wipe ourselves out. For me, no character represents the utter dismantling of the angelic child as Richmal Crompton's William Brown, the self-styled "outlaw".

You root for William, but you also see him with the jaundiced eye of the adults who have to deal with him. Child readers will relish the escapades of a child who goes much further than they would dare; adult readers will relish the mock-heroic framing: 'Fate was against him in every way.' Or, when he's told to read a book: 'William walked across the room with an expression of intense suffering, took out a book at random, and sat down in an attitude of aloof dignity, holding the book upside down.' They are, at their best, extremely funny.

The books also gently guy the adult pretensions of the age. William is, above all, a disrupter - sometimes witting, sometimes accidental - of the orderly world of grown-ups. Here's a secular descendant of the sentimental notion from the previous century that childhood innocence is a rebuke to the worldly and fallen world of the adult. A small boy won't show your sinfulness sup for what it is, Fauntleroy-style, but he will embarrass you in front of the neighbours. He is a creature of base and candid appetites, oblivious to the social niceties of civilisation. He's a little id in a scuffed cap.

However, the time between the two wars were an enchanted era too - it was during this time that Dr. Doolittle, Winnie the Pooh, the inimitable Mary Poppins, and the Hobbits were born. But the Second World War transformed the world forever - if the reaction to the first war was shock, the second one engendered despair and fatalism. But it also created a nostalgia for a world lost for ever; an imagined land of innocence and light, where "God was in his heaven and all was right with the world." This nostalgia produced one of the most popular and prolific children's writers ever - Enid Blyton.

Enid Blyton was responsible for making readers out of more than one generation of children, in more than one country. Though most of her novels were simple and formulaic, children loved her tales of brave children defeating despicable villains and solving intriguing mysteries, all the while enjoying scrumptious food all over the idyllic English countryside. She was very much a product of her time, and is considered totally politically incorrect nowadays - but no one can deny her influence.

Blyton went on in her writing to present a model-village version of England; one in which the wartime and post-war privations that afflicted almost every child in the country were absent, in which poverty and urban decay were invisible, and good health and high spirits came as standard. For much if not most of her audience, that was not the world they saw around them. Blyton, then, set out-as if her name itself was a hopeful play on words - to reinvent Blighty.

The world of her most successful books is a world of white, middle-class children roaming an idealised Home Counties countryside in endless school holidays or getting up to hijinks in boarding schools during term-time. The feasts and picnics and cream teas for which she is now so mocked, with their 'lashings and lashings of ginger beer', were a potent fantasy. Hers is a world in which everything turns out all right in the end. Blyton has become a byword for a particular rosy vision of post-war English childhood - one that existed more in the imagination than in reality. And it's a very partial, very insular, very little-England world. Over the years the overtly racist and xenophobic aspects of her work - the wicked golliwogs in Noddy; the 'ugly black face' of the doll in 'The Little Black Doll' (1937) - have been noted and, in modern editions, expunged.

Hers was a deeply conservative vision. The Second World War had shaken Britain's social order and its secure sense of its own place and its own destiny in the world. Blyton's work sought to reassure. Its child protagonists had freedom of action, and sometimes they would be 'naughty', but they did so in a secure and orderly social framework. Blyton herself used the bully-pulpit of her celebrity, in the post-war years, to speak out against what she saw as the corruption of childhood and the degradation of society. She hopped on, and whipped up, moral panics against bad mothers, juvenile delinquents, the popularity of comic books and the wickedness of socialism.

But despite the nostalgia, children's fiction was changing. Fantasies were getting more complex and darker. A lot of authors were exploring uncomfortable themes. Sex, alcohol and substance abuse were being discussed. Soon, the genre we now know as "Young Adult" was born. Ursula K. LeGuin, Madeleine L'Engle, Richard Adams, Judy Blume, Jaqueline Wilson, Roald Dahl... these authors were writing anything but the cosy fiction that the members of the previous generation were familiar with. William Brown's descendants were ruling the town!

Leith closes the book with an analysis of two twenty-first century authors - J. K. Rowling and Philip Pullman, who have proven extraordinarily successful in an age in which electronic media is touted as having killed reading. Of the two, Rowling especially has utilised all the facilities of the current era in creating a contemporary mythology which seems to be destined to go on forever, as more and more "Potterheads" join the bandwagon.

If you were writing a Whig history of children's books, you could see the Harry Potter stories as a natural terminus. Not only did their success transform the reception of children's writing in this country and around the world, but the writing of them deftly combines the most attractive elements of what has gone before. They are a fantastically adept mash-up of some of the most enduring tropes and genres in children's writing. Those who criticise them as unoriginal, or have sneered at Rowling's unambitious prose, have, it seems to me, missed the point.

Originality isn't, and never has been, the vital ingredient in children's writing. It's welcome when it's there, of course, but many if not most of the greatest children's books consciously and openly lean on their predecessors. They repurpose fairytale motifs, they namecheck or adapt writers of the generation with whom their authors themselves grew up - Kipling in Nesbit; Nesbit in Lewis - and they swim happily in the great torrent of school stories, portal fantasies, pirates and witches and explorers that lead up to their publication.

Yes. The tales are the same, coming down to us from primeval times, told to us as we sat huddled around the flickering campfire... while all around us, the haunted woods hummed and vibrated.

***

This is a great book. Is it a complete history of children's literature? By no means. Leith, by his own admission, is heavily prejudiced towards books which influenced children in England. American books are discussed only sparingly, as is the case with picture books. Comic books are totally ignored. But as a chronicle of the origin and development of children's fiction, and as a critical analysis of its seminal works, the book does yeoman service for the lay reader.

A must addition to any book lover's library.

[Colin · Rating 4 out of 5]

While there have been several excellent memoirs of the experience of childhood reading in recent years, there’s been a gap in the market for a comprehensive historical overview of the subject. Sam Leith’s highly readable, entertaining and revealing new book goes a long way towards filling that particular missing link. The Haunted Wood, excellent though it is, isn’t, as its subtitle would have us believe, ‘a history of childhood reading’ though. What it is, and in this respect it succeeds gloriously, is a series of insightful essays on a selection of children’s authors (illustrators only really surface in the brief survey of picture books in the last chapter) whose stories shine a light on their particular eras. Now, any book of this nature is going to be defined by what it chooses to leave out as by what is included (and Leith’s survey runs to well over 500 pages) but this does mean that some very significant figures and important trends are entirely absent. A glaring example is the flowering of great historical fiction for children in the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies from major authors like Henry Treece, Rosemary Sutcliff and Leon Garfield. I would have liked more too on how children accessed and consumed books, particularly in the postwar years; there’s barely a mention of public libraries as the key channel for enabling wide access to books for children of all classes and in all communities and not a great deal on bookshops or publishing (another significant omission from the book is the great Kaye Webb whose revolutionary approach to children’s publishing made the Puffin list of the Sixties and Seventies such a force to be reckoned with for authors, illustrators and readers alike).
But with those reservations aside, The Haunted Wood is a must-read for anyone interested in the history of children’s books, full of insight, wit, surprising information and an obvious deep love and respect for the subject.

[Nicole · Rating 5 out of 5]

5! Ecstatic! Stars!! This delightful, enchanting, rich, witty, poignant, and emotionally resonant history of children’s literature had me laughing, crying (more than once, O Best Beloved…), and compulsively adding titles to my Family TBR. For someone who considers reading to her children a sacred duty, this book was something like a religious text.

I loved tracing the course and evolution of children’s lit through history - from the very beginning (illustrations on papyrus!) through several “golden ages” up to the 20th century (it ends with Philip Pullman and JK Rowling, a fitting capstone.) It’s exceptionally well organized, grouping authors not just by period, but by movement and the broader trends and themes in children’s reading/publishing at a given time.

Throughout, the work is grounded in Leith’s clear love of and experience reading to his own children, which gives the whole thing an emotional resonance that any parent can easily relate to. I loved every page of it. It’s an absolute treasure.

[Lois · Rating 5 out of 5]

Masterful achievement! Incredibly well-written and insightful exploration of children's literature, from the very beginning right up until the turn of the century, with J.K. Rowling and Philip Pullman. I thoroughly enjoyed it and it has given me a few books that I never knew about which are now high on my to-read list. To anyone passionate about literature, I recommend this book.

[Nat · Rating 5 out of 5]

I adored this. It somehow managed to be scholarly and well-researched but also funny, nostalgic, and... kind of gossipy? Surveying the entire history of children's fiction seems like a near-impossible task, so I think the author did a good job setting out his parameters and acknowledging that others might disagree.

[Gill Quinn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brilliant. Interesting, readable, nostalgic. A real walk down memory lane, bringing back fond memories of books I read and loved as a child. Many of them I still love and read as an adult. This book is a good reminder that maybe adults should read children's books more often.

[Mrs]

A really interesting history of children’s literature - from the development of childhood as a concept, rather than small humans who work as soon as they are able, and taking in most well known children’s authors as well as some new to me. engagingly written.

[Evelynkeirstead · Rating 5 out of 5]

An interesting and informative history of childhood (mostly British) reading. The book starts out by describing the development of the idea of childhood and the idea of children actually having leisure time to read. As the author points out you cannot have children’s books if children do not have leisure time to read them or if the idea of childhood does not exist. From there the author traces the first children’s books, their author’s and their themes, continuing up to the present day.
The author is knowledgeable about his subject matter and writes an engaging text with a wit and insight that will make this text a joy to read for anyone who liked reading as a child and continues to enjoy children’s books into their adulthood. It is a nostalgic trip down the memory lane of childhood reading.

[Caroline · Rating 5 out of 5]

An epic exploration of the history of childhood reading: I loved this book from beginning to end! It took me back to much beloved childhood stories and introduced lots of new ones that I can’t wait to read as an adult. Thank you, Sam Leith.

[Jason Wilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Books about literary history are always fun and this sweep of writing forchildren is very enjoyable. It’s centred on Britain and America but dips in elsewhere . It traces the path of portraying of children away from idealisation and didacticism to realism. Of an attempt to recreate an idealised childhood to the messiness of real life . To magical other worlds and magic in our world . From the social conservatism of generations of children’s writers to the realism of Hinton, Cormier and Blume whose characters are often outsiders from the mainstream, emerging sexually , etc. which in turn leads to writers such as Jaqueline Wilson and the way Malorie Blackman examines race .

The range is wide and Roald Dahl, Rowling and Pullman are all here too. In Rowling he author sees someone who almost brings children’s fantasy full circle by meshing the lady into something new and in Pullman the antithesis of writers like Lewis .

Inevitably there are gaps . There are nods to British realist tv drama such as Grange Hill and some comic strip writing but what’s missing is British realist children’s fiction set round comprehensive schools .This js as much a part of the school story tradition as the bearding school novel tradition that Harry Potter is seen as reviving . But though there is American realist writing here there is no mention of writers such as Bernard Ashley , Jan Needle and Robert Leeson to name but three. Ashley’s novel Donovan Croft is a book I remember as dealing with racism in 1970s schools. Others dealt with family break up, abusive patenting , gangs etc . These writers paved the way for Tracey Beaker.

But a hugely enjoyable and wide ranging book. Written with great love .

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very interesting book that covers children's books from old folk tales to the present. Not only does it cover books, it also covers the changes in children's lives. Back when seven year olds were chimney sweeps they didn't have time or money for books. The big change was the onset of universal education. The book concentrates on English authors and certainly covers a lot of territory. I was sort of surprised and disappointed the Brian Jacques' "Redwall" series didn't get a mention. I really enjoyed them.

[Valerie Brett · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not that I have zero critiques, but I so enjoyed this & thought overall it was a massive project very well done!

[Jane (Avid reader) · Rating 5 out of 5]

A nostalgic trip down memory lane. Had me wanting to re read all my childhood favourites and dip into the authors that I had missed.

[Michael Fitzgerald · Rating 2 out of 5]

[Well, I have a lot to say about this. So much that GoodReads won't let me put it all in this one review text field. Here is part one and the review will continue in the comments below.]

I am a firm believer in the idea that those interested in children's books: teachers, parents, librarians, readers (whether child or adult), authors, and editors, ought to develop a thorough knowledge of the body of children's literature. There are so many books, so many great books, so many undeservedly forgotten books. Without knowing this world in detail, one can't make very satisfactory evaluations of any other books. The best way to gain this knowledge is simply by reading the books, but critical surveys and histories can also help in providing context and perspective, identifying connections among books, grouping similar authors, and pointing out noteworthy distinctions. This effort by Samuel Leith is the latest in a line of such guide books.

Its scope is ambitious - it goes all the way back to antiquity and Aesop, into the Enlightenment, on to the Puritans, to the Brothers Grimm and to Andersen and other fairy tales, before moving to the "Golden Age" with Lewis Carroll and Charles Kingsley. Then it moves forward in time through the entire twentieth century and into the twenty-first. That's a lot to cover. The first thing that needs to be mentioned is that this is not a history of children's literature, or the English-language subset thereof. The subtitle ought to be "A History of British Childhood Reading." There are other non-British authors mentioned (including some who do not write in English and are only known in translation), but Leith pointedly excludes a great number of major American authors because he feels they are not found on a hypothetical "British nursery bookshelf." As an American who has made a point of reading a great deal of British books, I did not feel disoriented (or disorientated) by the books and authors covered by Leith. So far, so good.

In fact, I was very excited when I viewed the table of contents. So many great authors are listed! However, digging deeper, I am concerned that the author has simply not done enough reading. The analysis, such as it is, is often shallow, which is probably all the better since it seems built on an uncertain foundation.

Others have written large histories covering much of the same material. Often Leith gives us the opinions of others rather than his own. This approach is acceptable and expected for a high school or college student writing an essay, but with this tome, Leith is supposedly declaring himself an expert in the field, isn't he? Throughout the book he is happy to devote pages and pages to details (often minutia) of authors' biographies, presumably with the belief that this information has relevance to understanding and appreciating their work. However, one needs to remember that the topic here is children's literature. Children do not have the slightest interest in the private lives of the authors of their books. Child readers make their decisions about liking (or disliking) a book based mostly on the content of the book itself. The other important factor is how that content relates to the reader's own life at the time of reading. Unfortunately, Leith addresses this but rarely. He is frequently too busy making snarky asides and relating tidbits of gossip. Even student writers are encouraged to avoid such tangential matters and to stick to the main thesis.

The main problem is that the topic is too broad and the author is not consistent about the level of analysis that is appropriate. Sometimes he writes for pages on a single book; sometimes he covers a book in a single sentence (or omits all mention of it). Sometimes authors are grouped together (but often not discussed together, only one after the other); sometimes a single author gets a full chapter. The writing approach is magazine-like, with the book being only a collection of fairly shallow introductory-level articles being presented in a largely chronological sequence. Leith is also prone to long quotes, indeed to overquoting. One wonders whether he felt the need to fill up space, which is remarkable since there is so much that could be said, that could be addressed, that isn't. When he turns to outside sources, there is no sense that he has done any kind of comprehensive literature review. It is as though he just happened upon one source. We do not get the point-counterpoint of experts with opposing views. There is no bibliography that would help determine where Leith found his ideas or where and how his positions have been formed. Although we are told this is a "history of childhood reading," there is not a sense that this childhood is that of the author. Apart from the prologue, Leith does not speak of his interactions with these books as a child, and I wonder how much of his knowledge of this huge expanse of literature was created in a short time during his adulthood. I do not have the sense that Leith loved books as a child. He spends more time relating a play-by-play account of the London Olympics opening ceremony than discussing his own reading.

I was heartened to see the book begin with reference to Rudyard Kipling, and Leith makes the point that Just So Stories has stood the test of time (despite the efforts of some who want to expunge all traces of the colonial empire, addressed later in the book), but although he writes, "It's handed down: generation to generation. My father to me. His father to him," what is conspicuously absent is an admission that Leith passed this on to his own children. Is Kipling something to read, or is it just something that ought to have been read? Leith does admit to having a Disney Jungle Book volume in his sons' bedroom. I'm not sure this helps his case. At the end of the full chapter he devotes to the author, he makes a very convincing case on behalf of Just So Stories. We get a wonderful sense of Kipling's relationship with his daughter, for whom the stories were written. But we get nothing of how these affected Leith when his father read them to him, and more importantly for contemporary readers, what they could convey to the youth of today. It's a missed opportunity, and unfortunately, that phrase is really what I would suggest as a more accurate subtitle for this book.

The early part of the book often does not consider actual children's literature at all. Instead we get shallow thoughts about folktales and myths, the concept of childhood, and then some intellectual history, with Locke and Rousseau center stage, complete with biographical tittle-tattle. Blake and Wordsworth are supposedly part of this chapter, but all this means is that they are mentioned in two of the final three paragraphs. Basically these early chapters seem to be summaries of the ideas of other historians: Seth Lerer, Vladimir Propp, Hugh Cunningham. I fear that later chapters may rely heavily on other experts: Percy Muir, Peter Hunt, et al. Leith also has a habit of unnecessarily broadening his scope. In the little prefaces to the larger chapters he constantly wants to address technology or politics or economics or religion. When it suits him, he seems to want to be a cultural historian at least, if not simply a general historian. But the more he expands, the less expert he becomes, and the more insignificant his words seem.

Beyond these prefaces but perhaps based on the same desire, for some reason Leith feels obligated to devote a chapter to television. When examined more closely, this cursory and thoroughly unscholarly piece (five of its six citations are to a single BBC research paper) is ridiculous. For example, with one conclusion of this report, he challenges Roald Dahl's view on television. The problem is that the BBC study was started in 1954 and published in 1958, and Dahl's purported negative position is inferred, not from statements by Dahl himself, but from the Oompa Loompas' song in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory from 1964. Surely Leith can conceive of a difference in the Britain of 1958 and 1964, at least. And perhaps the intervening years proved Dahl right? Certainly American television changed as the 1950s passed into the 1960s, and not for the better. With the benefit of more than a half-century of hindsight, does Leith really want to rely almost solely on a 1958 BBC report instead of trusting his own lying eyes? This is your expert witness? It was outdated from the moment it was published. "Television may reduce children's reading skill at first, but not in the long run." What long run? Shall we look at the children's reading achievement statistics since 1958? We could, but Leith doesn't bother to. In any event, a substantive consideration of the topic of television and its effects on children's reading is far beyond the purview of this book. It should have been totally omitted.

And for all his interest in history, Leith does not seem to have much interest in how the subject is presented to children in their literature. I was glad to see that he addressed John Meade Falkner's Moonfleet, which is often overlooked, but I was a bit shocked that historical fiction, where British authors such as Geoffrey Trease, Rosemary Sutcliff, Cynthia Harnett, and Hester Burton have made such a significant contribution, is almost entirely absent from discussion. Leith does include G. A. Henty (whom he largely disparages) and, of course, Robert Louis Stevenson, but apart from them and Robert Westall's WWII books, there is nothing, which ignores a huge portion of children's literary diets. While on the subject of diets, poetry, with the sole exception of Milne's When We Were Very Young, is also missing from the menu. For the record, non-fiction, including history and biography, will not be found here. I can, however, understand the need to restrict. What worries me more is how he has covered what is within his defined purview.

Charles and Mary Lamb are included for their classic Tales from Shakespeare, but Leith feels that eight sentences is all that it merits. Why bother? Leith spends more time on tangential quotations.

I think perhaps, in the case of series, Leith has only read the first book. For example, in the chapter shared by Ursula K. Le Guin and Madeleine L'Engle, only A Wizard of Earthsea and A Wrinkle in Time are discussed - and none of these authors' other works get a mention at all. If we are talking about the history of childhood reading, whyever not? He states that Wrinkle has four sequels but doesn't note an additional three books, which all together make up what is sometimes called the "Kairos" series, and he seems blissfully unaware of the companion "Chronos" series of five books. To be sure, L'Engle wrote more besides those two series, all of which is worthy of comment. I daresay children will have read more of L'Engle's output that Leith seems to have. Judging by the footnotes, the extent of his investigation of Le Guin's work ends with the introduction and afterword written by the author in 2018. I'm starting to wonder why one needs Leith.

Similarly, his look at Arthur Ransome only considers the initial Swallows and Amazons, and he seems to be under the impression that all the books in this series feature the same characters (in fact, those characters don't appear at all in two of the books), and there is no mention of the so-called "meta-fiction" of two other books in the series. It is as if he thinks that they are all the same and can be adequately covered by talking about just the first book. In truth, the meta-fiction is but a further aspect to the imaginative play that is introduced in the first book, upon which Leith comments. In that, their activities are make-believe, but in the meta-fiction books, their story itself is make-believe and they can do "real" things that go beyond what they pretend in their play. In the first, the Blackett's uncle Jim is imagined to be "Captain Flint" (and he gamely cooperates, though everyone involved knows he is not actually a pirate), but in Peter Duck, we get not imagination but a real pirate in Black Jake - because the whole story is imagined. Interesting? Sure - but unmentioned here.

Ditto for Lucy Boston's "Green Knowe" series of books, which are extremely varied, with the house itself being the only common thread: Leith only discusses (very briefly) the first, The Children of Green Knowe. For all his enthusiasm for trivia, amazingly he does not know (or at least does not tell) that the house in the books is based on the real Norman manor where the author lived, the oldest continually inhabited house in England. Would not readers (even child readers) be fascinated to know that so much of what is described in Boston's books comes not from the author's imagination, but from her real environment, since the environment itself is the focus of all the books?

Even authors who do not write series find themselves treated lightly. Philippa Pearce wrote more than thirty books in a career that lasted half a century, but only Tom's Midnight Garden gets a mention. I suppose these authors should be grateful. Pearce's fellow Carnegie Award-winner Joan Aiken wrote more than a hundred books and her name does not appear once. It's sadly the same for the prolific authors Mollie Hunter, William Mayne, Leon Garfield, and Peter Dickinson. I have a hard time believing that none of these would be found on many a British nursery bookshelf and have to wonder how conversant Leith is with said shelves. More recent authors such as David Almond and Gillian Cross are also conspicuous in their absence. Leith does address this matter in his prologue, but omissions are still omissions.

But back to what he does include. In his superficiality Leith can be trite and dismissive. His summary assessment of one of C. S. Lewis's Narnia series books is simply, "The Voyage of the Dawn Treader - which takes the characters to the very edge of the world - is as trippy as The Odyssey remade as a 1970s concept album." In the entire chapter, I was never convinced that Leith had any real understanding of Lewis and his works. Fundamentally, coming from a position that the mortal body is what matters most and that heaven is essentially unimportant, Leith does not grasp the entire point of the Narnia books. A Christian reader who believes that this earth is not our true home and that our brief earthly lives are but a preamble to an eternal glorified existence in the ultimate fulfillment of paradise will read Lewis in an entirely different way (which Lewis intended). Leith seems to believe that the real objective for the Pevensie children is to "find their way back out of the haunted wood," but as a Christian, Lewis would completely reject such a thought.

Surprisingly, the chapter on fairy tales makes no mention of Andrew Lang, the collector whose compilations have for more than a century been the portal to such stories for children. The versions published by Lang have often become the standard ones (to the dismay of Tolkien). While Leith addresses matters such as the historical development of the Cinderella story (most of which is entirely irrelevant to what generations of children know about the tale), his stated and very worthy goal of telling about the contents of "British nursery bookshelves" would certainly intersect with Lang, who was hugely popular and influential, both during his lifetime and after. Leith suggests that it was Hans Andersen who in some way saved European folklore by making children instead of adults the audience for fairy tales. Andersen is vital, no doubt, but his were original tales. It was Andrew Lang (and his wife) who deserve much of the credit for bringing the traditional tales to children.

For whatever reason, Leith goes all in for Americans in chapter nine. S. E. Hinton, Robert Cormier, and Judy Blume get the spotlight instead of any number of British authors of the same period, but then in the next section it's back to the Brits with Malorie Blackman and Jacqueline Wilson, with no mention of American authors who likely were read by British children just as much as those other three. The inconsistency is frustrating.

[Review continued in comments]

[Courtney Johnston]

The kind of book you can both devour with enormous satisfaction AND go through chapter by chapter quibbling “why X but not Y?” — which I guess is the inexorable fate of taking in a project as vast as “the history of children’s literature”.

I read this out of order — going through my favourite 20th century chapters first — and read the front matter & chapter on picture books last. Throughout, there is a focus on the idea of the “child” and “child reader” which Leith complicates wisely but not to the point of bogging down: from rates of infant mortality to the expansion of education to the acknowledgment that writing for children is also writing for the adults reading to them.

The biographies of writers are brought to the forefront, and especially (given his British focus) on the impact of the two World Wars on the writers’ psyches — as children in them, as combatants, as parents of children sent to fight. The highlight might be the bitchiness Alison Utterley displays towards Enid Blyton.

The shifting contexts & relationships to market in which the books are published runs through too — from the first periodical for children (started in 1751) to Peter Pan being written for stage to Beatrix Potter being the first author to licence her characters. This is one of the reasons why I’m disappointed Leith cops out on the 21st century, ending with Rowling & Pullman: I think there is much more to say about movie adaptations and merging with pop culture.

If I’m going to quibble with what’s in the book (not what’s out, because again, given the scope that seems pointless but I will say just two words: Dodie Smith) then a targeted point is that Dianna Wynne Jones is criminally shortchanged especially when you think of her influence on todays children’s writers.

More importantly maybe: Leith acknowledges that the history of children’s writing is white and middle class and starts to shake this up towards the end with a chapter on “diversity” and writers like Malorie Blackman. If he had not sliced his book off though (arguing that the past 25 years of writing any had a chance to settle enough to be distilled as he has done for other eras) he could have grappled with the flourishing of queer kids lit, of books about strained family dynamics, of the multiplicity of cultural experiences — and the market that supports them. Perhaps that felt a bit hard, or it’s all a bit untidy (it doesn’t fall into his well-established arcs) or it simply doesn’t bring him the evident joy the other eras do (you can feel how much reading had gone into thus book, and had to be digested in order to re-present without getting tedious).

[Richard Marney · Rating 5 out of 5]

A delightful and inventive survey of the literature our parents read to us or we read as young people (not to mention what we ourselves read to our own children), ranging from Aesop to JK Rowling. The book takes us into the lives of the authors, delves into the context, past and current, of the world in which the authors laboured and developed their works, and the ties amongst many titles in this genre over the centuries. Well worth the read!!!!

[Katherine Sas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wide-ranging and comprehensive (at least from the point of view of the average British child's bookshelf), though light on original analysis. The bulk of this tome is made up of interesting factoids the author has picked up about the biographical details of the various authors covered. The chapters lengths are somewhat random, and there are inexplicable copyediting errors throughout (especially persistent is the non-capitalization of the letter "v", e.g. "Lord voldemort" or "veruca Salt"). Still, this is a good primer and birds-eye view of the history of British children's literature.

[Liz · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’m not sure what I expected but definitely not so many pages!
I skipped bits on authors and books I didn’t know or weren’t interested in. And contrary to other reviewers, I had no problem with the J K Rowling section on Harry Potter.

[Nat V · Rating 4 out of 5]

Massive book, but interesting and I like the authors writing style.

[Kylan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Review to come. But let me say, this book was beyond incredible to read.

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have savoured and lived every moment I have spent with this book. Part nostalgic and part informative but most of all entertaining and well written. My favourite book of the last few years without question!

[Lucy Cat · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book - reading about books that are old friends and ones to add to the reading list. A fascinating account of the history of children’s books and one I found surprisingly funny in places too
. I’ve read a few reviews that were either furious at their favourite author only getting a few paragraphs or at J. K. Rowling being mentioned so much (and I think the author addresses this in the book), but I loved it.

[Michael Reilly · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a big book which describes children's literature from Aesop to Harry Potter. Leith first traces the evolution of children's literature from preachy churchy books to grand fantasies like the Alice in Wonderland and Kipling's Jungle Books and Just So stories.

He next profiles the most influential authors from the explosion on children's literature in the first half of the 20th century, including detailed treatments of the "Winnie the Pooh" stories by J. M. Barrie, Hugh Loftiing's "Doctor Dolittle" books and Tolkien's "The Hobbit".

Leith then surveys the post WW2 era. He discusses the realistic children's books, for example, S. E. Hinton's "The Outsiders" and the Judy Blume books and then the new fantasy blockbusters by J. K. Rowling and Philp Pullman. He finishes with a chapter on picture books.

Leith provides overviews for each period and then discusses each author in some depth. He gives biographical details, plot summaries and analysis of the books. He is very good at tracing the biography into the subject, characters and plot of the books. The analysis is usually perceptive, but at times is a bit too abstract for my taste.

Leith makes it clear that this is a book mostly about English children's literature. "The Wizard of OZ", "Tom Sawyer" "Little Woman" and "Little House on the Prairie" don't get discussed. This is also a book about literary or well written children's books. The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, Tom Swift and their English equivalents get very little coverage, even though they were a huge part of the books children read over the last hundred years. As I said, Leith makes it clear that this was a conscious decision on his part.

Leith is an elegant and witty writer. He drops some nice lines. In "the Jungle Book", "What's scary in Mowgli is not his animal nature, but his human one: the jungle is civilization, and the village is savagery.". I also learned that Pink Floyd's first album "The Piper at The Gates of Dawn" is named after a chapter in "The Wind in the Willows".

Over and over again, Leith shows how the great light happy children's stories come out of the difficult, challenging lives of the authors. It seems that happy, well-adjusted authors from stable homes don't write great children's books.

[Katy Wheatley · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this. It took me right back to the bliss of childhood reading. It was amazing to realise how many of the books in this volume I have read and wonderful to have a reading list to work through the ones I haven't. It wears its learning lightly and is an absolute pleasure to read.

[Ed · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a first rate bit of critical writing and I'm delighted to have read it; those who fondly remember reading as a child, particularly those who have read outside of their own time period's new releases, will see the various eras of children's publishing suddenly drawn together, compared, and made sense of. Sam Leith as an authorial voice is very funny, very insightful and totally successful at conveying a mixture of exactly what was interesting about these books and authors, as well as their various sticking points, failures, complications and issues. There is a beautiful insight repeated throughout this book that the authors of children's literature are usually writing with recourse to their own childhood or an idealised childhood for themselves, and so there is a delay of some decades in this writing to see the impact of changes in society e.g. the world wars or the emancipation of women in the West. While reading this I was constantly delighted and non fiction so rarely manages to straddle humour and information in this way. I hope I read another book so good as this next year.

[Flora · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed a lot of this a whole lot. It is engaging and lively - brisk, despite the book's length - and is clearly written with knowledge and enthusiasm. It is partial, but I can mostly forgive this as it doesn't pretend to be otherwise (although raising my eyebrow slightly at the complete omission of Dodie Smith and only half a page given to Diana Wynne Jones).

Once it gets further into the second half of the 20th century, it begins to flag - perhaps because it's moving away from first-hand childhood reading experience for the author, perhaps because as more books for children are written, more have to be left out.

What really brought the book down for me though was the JK Rowling section, which was both strangely forgiving of the series' shortcomings and embedded conservativism but more importantly failed to engage with (in fact, dismissed, condescendingly) the fact that former readers of her work might no longer want to engage with her given her rampant bigotry. It is a significant blot on an otherwise enjoyable book.

[Simon Pitfield · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bookworms throughout the anglophone world will enjoy reading this, and tears will assuredly be shed at the recollections of favourite reads from their own childhoods. Sam Leith gives a (nearly) comprehensive overview of the development of children's literature and provides insight into the major themes addressed - and yet it still left me a little disappointed. There are a number of omissions - Little Women seems the most glaring, that of Paddington strange because of the importance of those books in making refugees visible, that of Thomas the Tank Engine, disappointing because it doesn't fit neatly into any of the categories discusses, and I was surprised to find no mention of Margaret Mahy whatsoever. Furthermore, while he clearly loves his subject, is knowledgeable and has interesting ideas, Sam Leith's prose lacks the playfulness of Lucy Mangan or the sheer bubbling energy and enthusiasm of Katherine Rundell when they write about books. But if you're reading a review on Good Reads about a book about books you're still going to enjoy this, so buy it or borrow it and read it.