For children of all ages

In January this year Moon’s Rare Books in Provo, Utah uploaded a video to Instagram, showcasing its collection of rare editions of The Hobbit: An unexpected journey. First and signed editions of J. R. R. Tolkien’s novel are coveted by fans and bibliophiles worldwide; a particularly scarce presentation copy sold in 2015 for £137,000. As one collector has stated, such copies are “the most precious books any Tolkien lover or collector could desire”. In the comments section below the video, however, one user politely disagrees. “Unfortunately”, they remark, “you will never have the most valuable copy of The Hobbit available: the one my mom read to me growing up.”

Such is the current state of the children’s book. More so than other genres, its commodification faces off against the fierceness with which we cling to those books from childhood – their words, but also the dog-eared pages, the dented covers, the errant crayon marks or the familiar crinkle of the plastic library sleeves. The story of childhood reading is irrevocably the story of grown-up reading, of readers negotiating how to measure the true worth and nature of the Precious. And, of course, it is the story of who is doing the reading. As Sam Leith puts it, “What, and when, is a child?”

In The Haunted Wood: A history of childhood reading, Leith begins by “considering the deep roots of a literature that is surprisingly young” while also “giv[ing] a sense of the soil in which it germinated”. Like other histories of children’s literature, the book moves chronologically, starting with the ancient fabulists Aesop and Apuleius, and progressing to the educational ideas of John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, especially as they were taken up by the Romantic movement. Later chapters examine historical and literary movements by way of specific authors: the “Golden Age” of Lewis Carroll and Charles Kingsley; interwar enchantment with P. L. Travers and A. A. Milne; present-day expansions with Malorie Blackman and Jacqueline Wilson.

This is a canon that is nonetheless overwhelmingly white, and Leith acknowledges the racial and class contours that have shaped mainstream British children’s literature. Britain, too, is his explicit focus, though non-British authors (Tove Jansson, Judy Blume) make the occasional appearance. Leith is not the first and certainly will not be the last historian of children’s literature to note that Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony for the London Olympics in 2012 held up Mary Poppins and Peter Pan alongside Shakespeare and James Bond as iconic British cultural exports.

For all the successes of The Haunted Wood’s sweeping historical scope, there is one disappointing gap. After we begin firmly in the ancient world, it is disconcerting to be ushered to the seventeenth century – more than a millennium – in the space of a few paragraphs. If anything, Leith seems to be in a rush to get us to the more traditional starting points of modern children’s literature, whether chapbooks, primers or William Godwin’s Juvenile Library. This admirable enthusiasm for the intricacies of the past three centuries risks accidentally endorsing the discredited claim of Philippe Ariès that “in medieval society, the idea of childhood did not exist”.

Here Leith’s work differs significantly from its arguable predecessor in children’s literature studies, Children’s Literature: A reader’s history from Aesop to Harry Potter by Seth Lerer. Perhaps because he is a medievalist, Lerer includes in his book an excellent chapter on English children’s reading in the Middle Ages that offers a far more detailed account of that missing millennium, including on Leith’s only medieval referent, the “Treatise on the Astrolabe” written for Chaucer’s ten-year-old son. In other respectsThe Haunted Wood is a useful companion, rather than successor, to Lerer’s project. Its tone is markedly different; Leith, a journalist rather than an academic, makes these 500 pages fairly breeze by.

Of particular interest to this reviewer, one of the generation for whom a Harry Potter launch day was tantamount to a religious holiday, both Lerer and Leith locate the present day of children’s literature in J. K. Rowling’s fantasy series. The seventh and final book had just arrived, to great acclaim, when Lerer published Children’s Literature in 2008. Sixteen years later Leith makes the case for the series’ enduring place in children’s literary history. “Love or loathe the stories as you may, the Harry Potter phenomenon provides an inflection point in the recent history of the genre”, he writes in his introduction.

Those interested in a strong opinion on that author’s recent controversies will not find one here. Leith nimbly sidesteps the issue of Rowling’s allegedly transphobic commentary, despite making Harry Potter one of his longest case studies. The Potter generation, he notes briefly, has embraced cancel culture, assigning blame as quickly as the Sorting Hat assigns Hogwarts houses. If Leith is right, then arguably they have done so, however paradoxically, in the service of inclusivity; indeed, psychological studies have shown that early readers of the series showed greater tolerance for stigmatized groups of various kinds. Leith chooses not to engage with the larger question of how readers respond to stories, and whether that response might be coloured by a sense of betrayal.

Perhaps, like the issue of separating art and artist, Leith would argue that reader responses fall outside his scope. Yet the questions still linger. What happens when readers grow up? What is the study of childhood reading if not the study of what we love, and how we reconcile it – then or later – with what we believe?

On this note, some readers might also reasonably challenge Leith’s portrayal of Rudyard Kipling, defended energetically as a “mournful, mystical, and bottom-up” patriot. The Kipling chapter opens with a quotation from “Recessional”, the imperialist poem written for Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee, failing to mention that it was a replacement for the even more objectionable “The White Man’s Burden”.

This is a surprising oversight, given the author’s vehement critiques of orientalism, Eurocentrism and racism elsewhere in The Haunted Wood. In the case of Kipling, Leith may be illustrating his own central argument: that we love the books we encounter as children in a different way than those we read as adults. We encounter them – in the modern ideal – as the “Best Beloved” of the person who reads to us. This phrase reappears throughout the book, including in its dedication to Leith’s late father. It is hard to imagine, reading the chapter on Kipling, that Leith is not also remembering the Just So Stories read in his father’s voice, as he describes in the opening pages of The Haunted Wood.

Naturally, love of a book does not require excusing its potential harms, and Leith does not shy away from the shadowy sides of the children’s literary canon: Carroll’s supposed grooming of Alice Liddell; the complicated and unconventional marriage of Edith Nesbit; the tragic later life of Christopher Robin; the vicious antisemitism and personal cruelties of Roald Dahl. He nods to the sexual undertones of Peter Pan, in which the narrative voice is “now knowing, now arch, now plangent – a jagged compound of adult-in-child and child-in-adult, just like its principal protagonists”.

From this compelling reading, scholars of children’s literature might reasonably expect an immediate segue into the psychoanalytic readings of Jacqueline Rose, for whom Peter Pan is the example of what she terms the “impossibility of children’s fiction”. But Rose does not appear here; nor does her spirited interlocutor Perry Nodelman, while relevant scholars such as Lerer, Peter Hunt and Jack Zipes make only brief appearances. The Haunted Wood is not concerned with the historiography of children’s literature as a discipline. It is interested in books and their authors, and in tracing the currents of love and grief that connect them to the children for whom they were written.

In this it succeeds. Indeed, The Haunted Wood is at its most haunting when Sam Leith lets his childhood self shine through. He loved his father’s voice; he was “besotted with the plucky, red-haired” Nancy Drew. His chapter on the later Harry Potter is drier, if longer. We cannot love all books the same; we cannot control whether we are children when we read them; we may love the same book in different ways over the course of our lives. For all its embrace of the animal cipher and the riddle, the truly valuable in children’s literature is the hauntingly particular – a particular copy of The Hobbit, a particular mum, a particular growing-up.

Lucy Fleming is a Researcher in Medieval Studies and Children’s Literature at the University of Bern, Switzerland

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