‘Can you remember the first time you fell in love with a book?” That’s the question posed by Sam Leith’s The Haunted Wood. We bookish types all remember our first literary loves – the books that made us hunker down with a torch in that airless liminal space under the covers, reading just one more chapter.
The Haunted Wood returns the adult reader to that spot beneath the blanket, transporting them back to their own childhoods, and further – a 578-page journey through stories told, written or translated into (mostly British, sometimes American) English, from fireside Aesop to this decade’s Katherine Rundell.
The book could easily lose the “Reading” in the subtitle, because it is just as much a history of childhood itself, which wasn’t always as delineated from adulthood as it is today. It puts stories into a rich historical and social context as well as a literary one, citing such significant markers as world wars, shifts in rights (such as Britain’s 1908 Children Act) and education (in late-Victorian times, children were “coming down the proverbial chimney, scrubbing up and going to school”), which all shaped the literature of its time.
It also gives us a delicious selection of biographical deep-dives, the “often strange and often troubled and sometimes sad lives of the people who have written for children”, which also make up the complex well from which stories are drawn.
The very best writers are the ones who don’t talk down to children. Edith Nesbit observed that to write for children, to understand them, you can’t merely observe them, and that “only by remembering how you felt and thought when you yourself were a child can you arrive at any understanding of the thoughts and feelings of children”, a sentiment that has echoed down the years. The Haunted Wood revels in understanding writers as much as it does their audience.
It’s also a cracking good read. Favourite sections include the one on the Brothers Grimm, who Leith argues weren’t strictly children’s authors (the shocking How Some Children Played at Slaughtering supports this) but professional folklorists, taking oral traditions and turning them into literary ones, with a sense of “something feral being tamed”.
Hans Christian Andersen was bullied by his peers, and socially awkward, with unrequited crushes on men and women alike. When visiting Charles Dickens, Andersen overstayed his welcome by three weeks. Dickens lamented to a friend: “We are suffering very much from Andersen.”
The sanitisation and commodification of children’s stories for “the pantomime world” of Disney comes up a lot, from Charles Perrault (who gave us the pumpkin-and-glass-slipper version of Cinderella, much less gory than the Grimms’), through Hans Christian Andersen (Frozen, anyone?), to Mary Poppins, Peter Pan and Pinocchio.
The Jungle Book is also more bloodthirsty than the Disney film – Mowgli’s nemesis Shere Khan doesn’t “[slink] away with a scorched tail” as today’s children would believe; rather, the conflict ends with Mowgli killing and skinning the tiger and setting fire to a village. “The original stories,” Leith writes, in typically lovely prose, “are more sinewy, more austere and vastly richer thematically.”
Leith touches on the fact that Kipling has fallen out of favour, but in general he is gentle on the mores of the writers from times gone by – and from this century. JK Rowling’s comments about trans people are not “a debate for these pages”. He does imply, however, that her own books may have created her fiercest critics, with their “central moral message” of fighting against othering and bullying.
Hugh Lofting, whose Doctor Dolittle is described as “unsurprisingly … ahead of his time on animal rights”, created his cosy stories as a reaction to a brutal wartime experience, insisting that it was time to leave behind children’s books that glorified the battlefield.
While Doctor Dolittle is an environmentalist, anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist before his time, Leith acknowledges that Lofting did lean on problematic stereotypes, with racist and antisemitic language having “not aged well”.
Almost all of the usual pre-1950 suspects are here (Lewis Carroll, Beatrix Potter, Anna Sewell, JRR Tolkien, Frances Hodgson Burnett – you get the picture), and there are frequent stops along the way. The post-World War II authors like CS Lewis and the surprisingly liberated Enid Blyton (whose biography would make Noddy blush) wrote comforting food-laden stories, with “lashings” of this and “slabs” of that, after rationing-induced periods of culinary austerity.
In the 1960s and 1970s, writers who were affected by the war as children start to emerge. Susan Cooper and Alan Garner, says Leith, offer “a sense of the way that deep time and old magic are buried just beneath the surface of our own world”. Their contemporary, Diana Wynne Jones, is only discussed briefly, which is a pity when you consider her huge influence on writers today, notably Rowling and Rundell.
As we gallop towards current times, we encounter more fantasy, science fiction, mysteries and gritty realism, where children finally see themselves as they are, with faults and desires and violence in their lives, rather than how adults think they should be. Roald Dahl makes his inevitable appearance, and we get a look at the more diverse writers of the 21st century (with an acknowledgment that this history is overwhelmingly white), and a chapter on picture books (the sole New Zealand book to get a mention is Hairy Maclary from Donaldson’s Dairy, with its “cavalcade structure”).
There’s a beautiful warmth and intimacy to Leith’s writing, and he frequently addresses the reader (“You may disagree. I hope you do”). Many of the footnotes are a delight, with wry asides (“I hope the reader will appreciate the strength of character it has taken to avoid punning on [the Grimms’] name”).
Of course, you could fill another whole volume with the books that Leith doesn’t include. The personal nature of The Haunted Wood (it’s a history not the history), which is one of its strengths, has no doubt shaped which writers make the cut, so I won’t say much about that, except that one of the dominant genres for girl readers – the pony novel – is absent. Terrance Dicks’ Doctor Who novel (in a great chapter about the cohabitation of books and television) gets a mention, but Monica Dickens does not.
In this way, the choices do seem quite gendered, but it would be impossible to include everything, and Leith, who is this reviewer’s contemporary, does confess to being more smitten with Nancy Drew than The Hardy Boys, and Judy Blume receives a fair amount of attention.
The Haunted Wood is a fantastic book, one that I will treasure and reread forever (more slowly), and a review of this length only touches the edges of its dragon’s hoard of gold. It gives a sense of the immense value and importance of children’s books in creating shared understanding and collective memory.
I’m sad to say these qualities are not as recognised today. Children’s reading for pleasure – the single-biggest marker for future success – is in decline. It’s frustrating that a book about children’s books has received significant media attention in the UK while actual children’s books (and their authors) struggle to get any space at all. Hopefully this book will change that.
The Haunted Wood: A History of Childhood Reading, by Sam Leith (Oneworld, $55 hb), is out now.
