Sam Leith on How the Edwardians Invented Children's Literature

I so miss A S Byatt. The seeds of my book The Haunted Wood were sown in her sunny living room all the way back in 2009, when I went to interview her about her wonderful novel, The Children’s Book. That book investigated that moment in the Edwardian period when, in her words, "it was seriously suggested that the great writing of the time was writing for children, which was also read by grown-ups". 

When I came to write my own book, a history of children’s literature, that period came to seem like the very heart of it. I felt Antonia, sometimes, on my shoulder. The period she described was the point at which not only was writing for children given a firm place of its own in the publishing industry, but children really started to be apprehended as they are – spoken about in all their complexity; and spoken to with a gleam of indulgent irony.  

The moralising of the puritan writers of the previous couple of centuries, and the saccharine cult of childhood innocence, were both decisively thrown off in this generation. Children were allowed to be children – flawed, naughty, excitable, and very human; works in progress. The way had been paved, no question, by Kipling – and E Nesbit abundantly acknowledged the debt in her work. But the Edwardians invented modern children’s writing, and we owe them everything.  

In Frances Hodgson Burnett you can see the pivot happening in a single career. She started out as a Victorian writer and became a modern one. In Little Lord Fauntleroy and A Little Princess the protagonists are holy innocents: unselfish orphans who shine as beacons of goodness in a wicked adult world. But then, astonishingly, comes The Secret Garden – and at once, those previous books looked like museum pieces. The child-protagonists of The Secret Garden are, at least to start with, spiteful, self-absorbed little brutes. They are, as I came to think of it, unsympathetic children, sympathetically understood. It’s a book about the damaging effects of trauma – Mary's abrupt orphaning; Colin's illness – and the possibility of healing. Four years before the formation of the International Psychoanalytical Association, Burnett was thinking psychoanalytically.  

Meanwhile her near contemporary E Nesbit wrote the wild fantasy of the Psammead series alongside the wry sort-of realism of the Bastable books. Those books just burst with the chaotic, irrepressible energy of childhood naughtiness; and, what’s more, with the complex dynamics of large families. They are also wildly funny – her narrator Oswald Bastable (“It is one of us that tells this story – but I shall not tell you which”) is one of the immortals. As Nesbit writes, her child protagonists were “not particularly handsome, nor were they extra-clever, not extraordinarily good. But they were not bad sorts on the whole; in fact, they were rather like you.” 

In her masterpiece, The Railway Children, we see an extraordinarily complex and poignant account of how adults and children alike deal with loss. It speaks to children and grown-up readers simultaneously; and speaks to each about the other. Nesbit’s grip on the publishing landscape set the pattern for what Enid Blyton was to do a generation later. She developed a very direct connection with her fans – answering as many as thirty letters a day – and even, as Blyton would do, started her own magazine.   

Another aspect of the Edwardian generation of children’s writers that Antonia noticed was the way in which children’s writers dealt with dark material: how children’s stories could serve adult psychological needs, and how damaging they could be for the children involved with their authors. Kenneth Grahame fled from the memory of his alcoholic father, and from the disaster of his deeply unhappy marriage, into the golden riverbank world of The Wind in the Willows. His son Alastair, the original of Mr Toad, was not able to make that escape, and walked in front of a train in his first term at Oxford. J M Barrie’s stories about Peter Pan - “the tragic boy” - worked through, in a surpassingly strange way, the grief and survivor’s guilt he suffered at the loss of his older brother David, a boy who really would never grow up. Peter’s eternal childhood is not an idyll, but a space of loss and abandonment. These fantasies of innocence came at a cost. 

And then, the final thing Antonia gave me. This great flowering of children’s writing in the Edwardian age ended with the First World War. It gave me a little jump in the throat to see Lord Kitchener – not yet the man on the recruiting posters - referenced in Toad’s song of triumph at the end of The Wind in the Willows. The children who grew up reading about Oswald, and Mole and Ratty, and Peter Pan, and the magic of the Secret Garden, would end up dying in their thousands in the mud of the Flanders fields.  

Antonia told me that, while she was researching her own book, she discovered that soldiers in the first world war named their fortifications after childhood stories: Hook Copse, Peter Pan Trench and Wendy Cottage. I owe her that haunting detail, as much else. Hers is the only novel in my bibliography. How I wish she was still here to be an early reader of my book.