The Haunted Wood by Sam Leith: Children’s books should be taken seriously

THE HAUNTED WOOD by Sam Leith (Oneworld £30, 592pp)

When the writer Hans Christian Andersen travelled from Copenhagen to London, Charles Dickens invited him to stay with his family for two weeks. 

Plain, gawky and socially awkward, Andersen stayed for another three weeks, ignoring all hints that it was time to go.

Having him as a guest was such an ordeal that Dickens wrote mournfully: ‘We are suffering very much from Andersen.’

Reading this erudite canter through children’s literature, it is clear that, like Hans Christian Andersen, many of our most beloved children’s writers have been distinctly weird – and some even disturbed.

Children’s literature is a relatively recent invention; before the 18th century there was little difference between what children would read and books for adults.

From 1744, publisher John Newberry produced over a hundred children’s books, but there was a great deal of preachiness. Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales From Shakespeare, published in 1807, was one of the first in which God didn’t play any obvious role.

Unusually, the book was aimed at girls. The Lambs – Mary, who was bipolar, had knifed their mother to death during a manic episode – reasoned that boys, having the run of their fathers’ libraries, would already know their Shakespeare.

In 1865, Lewis Carroll’s Alice In Wonderland took children’s literature in a new direction. This was a story ‘in which fun and silliness was an end in itself ‘. To modern eyes, however, Carroll seems pretty creepy, with his penchant for befriending children and photographing them, both clothed and in the nude. 

Beatrix Potter was both an ardent animal lover and a rather heartless natural scientist. When her pets died, she would carefully boil, label and sketch their bones. When she gave permission for a stuffed Peter Rabbit toy to be sold, she created ‘the Big Bang for children’s fiction merchandising’.

This golden age of children’s stories continued with The Wind In The Willows, a tale of unbreakable friendships and ‘messing about in boats’. Kenneth Grahame’s inspiration for Mr Toad was his beloved only son, who killed himself when he was 19.

Enid Blyton wrote 700 books during her lifetime – but, as a mother, she was a dismal failure. Her daughter Imogen said she had no maternal instinct and was ‘arrogant, insecure, pretentious as an adult, I did not hate her. I pitied her’.

Whatever her faults, at least Blyton wasn’t a Soviet spy, as Arthur Ransome probably was.

The author of Swallows And Amazons had reported on the Russian Revolution as a young man and was an enthusiastic supporter.

MI6 eventually signed him up but, says Leith, ‘it’s hard to make out whether he was spying on the Russians for the British, the Brits for the Russians, or a bit of both’. He ended up marrying Trotsky’s private secretary.

More recently, children’s fiction has become grittier and more representative of ordinary lives.

Jacqueline Wilson has amassed a devoted readership for her books about ‘realistic children who had difficult parents and all sorts of secrets and problems’. 

Malorie Blackman, the daughter of immigrants from Barbados, broke the mould by writing books where black characters and racism were central to the story. 

As for JK Rowling, Leith praises her for reimagining the classic boarding school stories and letting her imaginary world evolve along with her audience. Rowling sold the rights to her first book for £1,500.

Her new publisher told her sadly: ‘You’ll never make any money out of children’s books, Jo.’ It went on to sell more than 120 million copies.

Children’s books should be taken seriously, Leith says, because ‘what we read in childhood stays with us.. it’s the platform on which everything else is built’.

He is confident that children will keep reading, that they will still want to escape to that magical place where, as A.A. Milne wrote in The House At Pooh Corner, ‘a little boy and his Bear will always be playing’.