The stories we encounter as children are the most important ones we ever read. They may not always be the most sophisticated or profound, but they are the ones we remember most deeply – and everything in the reading life that follows is built on them. GK Chesterton said that the children’s story The Princess and the Goblin had “made a difference to my whole existence”. Not everyone who reads The Very Hungry Caterpillar or Goodnight Moon goes on to read Gravity’s Rainbow or Middlemarch; but everyone who reads Gravity’s Rainbow started out reading children’s stories. And they only carried on reading because they did so.
It is in childhood – first through nursery rhymes, then picture books – that children learn to delight in the way the sounds and rhythms of words can be made to bounce off one another for pleasure. And childhood reading is part of the formation of a moral imagination: reading helps us to imagine what it might be like to have agency, to act in the world; and what it might be like, indeed, to be somebody else. In reading, we find models for ourselves.
Children’s writing forges a connection between the past and the future. On one level that is a literary and social connection. Children’s stories borrow from their predecessors like mad: E Nesbit draws on Rudyard Kipling; Willard Price draws on GA Henty; Alan Garner and Susan Cooper draw on JRR Tolkien and Arthurian legend; Philip Pullman is in dialogue with CS Lewis; JK Rowling draws on everybody. School stories, fantasy adventures, animal stories, portal fantasies, seafaring adventures, tales of exploration – these subgenres cascade through the canon, with tropes and motifs recurring across decades and centuries.
They remain close, I came to believe as I wrote a history of them, to the aboriginal forms of storytelling that emerge from the oral tradition: to folk tales, fairytales and myths. Sophisticated as they may be, they don’t shy from heroes and villains, quests and tests, fantastic beasts and magic objects; from the archetypal forms of narrative. Saints’ lives, classical mythology, Aesop’s fables and the fairytales of Perrault and the Brothers Grimm are the mulch out of which children’s stories grow.
There’s a connection to the past at the level of families, too: the canon is passed down generation to generation. When we read to and with our children, we introduce them to our own childhood favourites – not least because of the deep joy of revisiting them. That’s one of the reasons, I suspect, that the children’s books of the past have more staying power than all but the most hallowed instances of its literary fiction. You can be sure more people now read AA Milne than Arnold Bennett. Those stories mingle with the new ones you discover together. The Just So Stories, Pippi Longstocking and Where the Wild Things Are are joined on the bookshelf by The Gruffalo and I Want My Hat Back.
They offer a personal, psychological connection between the past and the future. The magic of children’s stories is that they look both ways, that they speak to a double audience. The child reader meets the adult writer coming the other way. For children, the stories open imaginative spaces in which they enjoy the positive liberty of freedom to: agency, adventure, the chance to safely break the rules, at least in imagination. For the adult writers it’s freedom from: again and again you encounter portals to enchanted worlds into which writers escape from the trials and sorrows of adulthood, or reimagine their own childhoods as happier, more adventurous, more free.
In the early 21st century, though, we’re at a peculiar point in the history of the genre. On the one hand, in the post-Harry Potter world, children’s publishing is bigger business than perhaps ever before. Yet on the other, it’s fraught with anxieties. We worry about the children’s books of the present. Are celebrity cash-ins choking “proper” children’s writers out of the market? Is this buoyant publishing environment more and more about marketing and less and less about reading? Given the baked-in nostalgia that suffuses our feelings about children’s writing, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that things have never been what they used to be. Way back in 1802, Charles Lamb was moaning that “Mrs Barbauld’s stuff has banished all the old classics of the nursery”.
We worry, too, about the children’s books of the past. The books we loved as children: were they … bad, actually? No question, for most of their history in this country children’s stories have been about and for white, middle-class children; and the treatment of non-white people has been at best othering and at worst outright racist. Even nice, progressive E Nesbit, stalwart of the Fabian Society, has wince-making Jewish and Chinese stereotypes in her otherwise benign books. Classism, fatphobia, sexism, lookism, homophobia, lowkey endorsement of bullying and violence – you name it, you can find instances through the canon.
Do we need to simply turf the old stuff out wholesale? I think, here, it’s possible to be judicious. You don’t destroy the sacred integrity of a text, it seems to me, by snipping out the odd bit that might now be offensive; but nor do you serve literary history or childhood pleasure by categorically memory-holing everything written before about 1990. And that’s not a new problem, either. We’ve been grappling with this question for years. There’s a whiteface subplot in the first Doctor Dolittle book – and it has been quietly excised in reprinted editions for decades. It’s no great loss. Enid Blyton lost her golliwogs. Even in his own lifetime Roald Dahl (subject of the most recent iteration of this row) tweaked Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to make the Oompa-Loompas a bit less racist.
It tells you something about how important children’s stories are, though, that the arguments about their moral content – the “suitability” of the subject matter; their implied attitudes; and the question of who they represent and who they exclude – are so fierce. Of course they’re a site of contestation! Children’s writing, in every context, tells you something about what adults believe children are like, or should be like. The idea that children are impressionable – that what they read will be determinative of who they turn out to be and how they conceive the social order, and that it needs anxiously to be policed – never goes away.
Eighteenth-century puritans, convinced that their charges were radioactive with original sin, used storytelling to bring children to Jesus – ideally, by scaring the wits out of them. The late Victorians went quite the other way, instead sacralising childhood as a state of quasi-divine innocence. In the postwar period Enid Blyton provided a very conservative model of pluck and wholesomeness. In the early 1980s Judy Blume came under attack for talking to children about things – sex, above all – that adults of the time decided were inappropriate; and the battles she fought with the book-banners are still going on.
Movere, docere, delectare: to move, to teach and to delight. Children’s stories have always, in variable mixtures, done all three. Even the most sternly didactic of writers can’t lay down the law without providing something to sweeten the pill. John Locke, in his 1693 treatise Some Thoughts Concerning Education, recognised that “a child will learn three times as much” by learning through play than when “dragged unwillingly to it”. And books written, as they increasingly came to be, directed purely at the enjoyment of their young readers, also contained a strain of instruction. In stirring the heart, you teach something about what hearts can do.
Maybe the biggest anxiety of our age is that children are going to stop reading altogether: that boring old dead-tree books and the slow-burn pleasures of words on a page are struggling to compete with the extraordinarily immediate and moreish excitements of screens. That Fortnite, in other words, has fragged Winnie-the-Pooh.
There are some reasons to be encouraged; or, at least, not to panic. An ancestor of this anxiety attended the arrival of television. In 1954, when just one UK household in five had a telly, the Nuffield Foundation commissioned a report called Television and the Child. It discovered that though at first the bookshelf gave way to the screen, most children went back to reading; and, indeed, did so with redoubled enthusiasm: “Book-reading comes into its own, not despite television but rather because of it. Television stimulated interest in reading.” Adaptations of books on screen directed viewers to the books; and in due course original TV turned into books. Nerds of my generation will remember fondly the Terrance Dicks novelisations of Doctor Who.
That isn’t to say the analogy is exact. Screen-based entertainments, social media and video games are wickedly addictive – as every parent knows. It would be complacent to see their ubiquity as precisely analogous to the early days of television. But there’s reason to think that they can and will – with proper encouragement – sit alongside and even cross-fertilise with children’s writing of the traditional kind.
There are things that books can do, in terms of interiority and complexity, that can’t be reproduced on screen. In an age when social media encourages self-projection, fiction can encourage self-reflection. Reading a book, unlike curating an Instagram feed, is not competitive. It lets you proceed at your own pace. I firmly believe that once the hook is set – whether it’s by Charlotte’s Web or Diary of a Wimpy Kid; whatever first turns a child on to what books can do that nothing else quite can – it’s in for life.
But getting that hook set isn’t necessarily a straightforward process. Children’s stories have an extraordinary vitality. They have always spilled out of their containers and hopped from platform to platform. In the late Victorian and Edwardian periods, they went from page to stage and back again. Peter Pan’s story was a chapter in a novel, then it was a play, then it was a novel again. Mention is made within E Nesbit’s Bastable stories of current theatrical productions of The Water Babies and Shock-Headed Peter. Children’s stories even turn into children’s games – again, in Nesbit, we find the children turning The Jungle Book into a game of make-believe on the lawn. Peter Rabbit was a character in a book who turned into a toy; Winnie-the-Pooh was a toy who turned into a character in a book. There has always been a free flow back and forth between playground games of pirates, explorers, knights in armour and their literary representations.
We’d do well to encourage, and mimic, that fluidity. If you put chapter books on a pedestal, and insist that comics, or the forms of storytelling to be found in games or on television, are illegitimate or dumbed-down, you erect a fence that need not be there. In 1943’s Mary Poppins Opens the Door, a statue in the park (which comes alive, this being a Mary Poppins story) describes reading comics over the shoulders of kids on a park bench: “Best of all are the coloured comics, especially the one called Lot-o’-Fun”.
Children, like talking statues, are culturally omnivorous. They don’t make the highbrow/lowbrow distinctions adults have been taught to make. Let kids fall in love with a video game mythos; let them read “trash”: let them come to pleasure first. Work with the grain rather than against it. Middlemarch will come.
• The Haunted Wood: A History of Childhood Reading by Sam Leith is published by Oneworld. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
