Visit the children’s section of your local bookstore, and chances are that you’ll come across works by those familiar from the world of entertainment. Among the celebrities who have clambered onto this bandwagon recently are Kiera Knightley and Trevor Noah, joining the ranks of others like Madonna, Jimmy Fallon, and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex.
Whether they write such books to entertain a younger generation or simply leverage their fame is another question. Most vanish without a trace: you won’t find many children curled up with Gus & Me by Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards, for example. Perhaps what motivates them is that the best books we read when young shape our hearts and minds, planting seeds of imagination, empathy, and wonder.
Rich possibilities
Martin Amis took a contrary stance. He once remarked that whenever he was asked if he’d write a children’s book, he would reply, “If I had a serious brain injury, I might well write one”. Sam Leith finds this view uncharacteristically foolish. In his The Haunted Wood (Simon&Schuster), he emphasises that what we read in childhood endures, and children’s literature offers imaginative possibilities as rich as those found in books for grown-ups.
Leith’s survey of the children’s canon is largely focused on writing from Britain. This is not due to post-Brexit chauvinism, but because “we do have a distinct tradition… rooted in a specifically British cultural and literary and social history”.
He also mentions British literature’s “outsized impact on the world,” which readers in India can certainly attest to (leaving aside for now the nature and legacy of that impact). Many in the subcontinent will come across beloved writers in these pages, including Lewis Carroll, Richmal Crompton, C.S. Lewis, Roald Dahl, and, of course, Enid Blyton.
Rooted in the times
The Haunted Wood covers many acres, from the oral tradition of tales for children to the latter-day impact of J.K. Rowling and Philip Pullman. Notably, Leith shows how children’s literature, like other forms of art, doesn’t emerge from a vacuum. He puts the classics into context, tracing how writers for children responded to their times.
Initially, there were myths, fairy stories, and folklore, but no separate children’s genre. Later, abridged versions of works such as Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels could be read without “attending to Jonathan Swift’s political satire or Daniel Defoe’s theology and economics”.
Universal education led to a recognition of children’s unique qualities, such as a love of play. It was only in the 18th century, Leith finds, that the idea gained a foothold that children should enjoy what they read rather than being given moral instruction. These worldviews continue to “tangle in the genre”.
In the Victorian age came books such as Thomas Hughes’s hearty Tom Brown’s Schooldays, renewing the boarding school story. Soon, along with Beatrix Potter’s animal tales, those growing up in the privileged heart of empire were treated to accounts of adventure on the high seas, the African jungle or the Argentinian pampas, “while at the same time affirming the glories of that history and making clear who were the heroes and who the villains in the making of it”.
Edwardian England brought about a “double movement between self-confidence and anxiety”. Shadows of this fell upon the work of Kipling, including his books for younger readers such as Kim. As Leith points out, both Kim and Mowgli inhabit two worlds, which was Kipling’s own experience “as a son of the Raj”.
Realistic portraits
In time, writers started to portray children not as they wanted them to be, but as they actually were. Edith Nesbit, for one, had the “extraordinary ability to remember what it was like to exist as a child”. Despite fantastical elements, the children in her books such The Railway Children are realistic in “their squabbling, messy, unworldly ways”.
With the world wars, traditional ways of life splintered, giving rise to stories that “embed childhood in a history from which it must have felt like it had come unmoored”. The conservatism of Enid Blyton’s works, with racist and xenophobic aspects, did little to dampen her popularity, and not just in England. Leith astutely notes that she consciously adapted adult genres: the Famous Five stories were thrillers, and the Secret Seven and Find-Outers series were golden-age crime capers.
Diversity, to an extent, arrived with the break-up of the British Empire and non-white immigration. Malorie Blackman’s Noughts & Crosses, for example, created a parallel version of Britain in which power relations between black and white people were reversed. The 21st century canon remains inchoate, despite the “unignorable effect” of Rowling and Pullman, while the Young Adult genre continues to blur the lines between children’s and adult literature.
The Haunted Wood contains many other treasures. It explores how works for children influenced each other over the ages: Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill laid the groundwork for the enchanted lands of Alan Garner and Susan Cooper, for example, and A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh series is a descendant of Carroll’s Alice books. Leith further touches upon aspects such as the vanilla nature of sanitised Disney versions, and how authors overcame tragedies in their personal lives to create vivid, immersive worlds.
The best children’s books, Katherine Rundell has argued in a striking simile, are like literary vodka: they distill emotions like hope, joy and fear in their “purest, most archetypal forms”. Leith’s The Haunted Wood is an intoxicating tour of this literary liquor cabinet. It’s also a reminder, to quote Rundell again, that reading such books as adults is to “see the world with double eyes: your own, and those of your childhood self.”
Sanjay Sipahimalani is a Mumbai-based writer.
Published – November 14, 2024 08:30 am IST