The Haunted Wood: A History of Childhood Reading, Sam Leith, Oneworld, £30

Children eat books up. Often, when they are small, they literally eat them. One of the many (delicious) asides in The Haunted Wood, Sam Leith’s new ‘history of childhood reading’, tells the story of a child who wrote to Maurice Sendak, author of Where the Wild Things Are, and received a drawing of a ‘Wild Thing’ in return. The boy’s mother wrote back: ‘Jim loved your card so much he ate it.’ Sendak took it as a compliment. The boy was a first-rate critic: as Leith notes, Where the Wild Things Are wraps eating, love and consumption together in ‘excellently Freudian fashion’. When Max makes to leave, the Wild Things threaten to eat him:

‘Oh please don’t go – We’ll eat you up – we love you so!’

As a child, I always read that line as a kind of invitation. It’s scary, too, as invitations often are. The best children’s authors know how to capture those mixed feelings and Leith is a brilliantly acute guide to the pleasures, fears and heartbreaks involved, as well as the skill which it takes to pull off lines like this. Never stuffy, he takes the texts and images seriously, which is no more than the best children’s books deserve. Time and time again, Leith gets them just right: Julia Donaldson has ‘one of the best ears for prosody since… Auden’. The key line in Judith Kerr’s The Tiger Who Came to Tea is the moment – almost sublime for the child reading – that the tiger drinks ‘all the water in the tap’.

As the subtitle suggests, Leith wanted to do more than revisit the classics. ‘I wanted, in the role of literary historian, to see how these books have shaped each other; in the role of literary critic to ask whether they’re any good, and why; and in the role of social historian to understand how these books are involved with the story of childhood in Britain.’ The three modes are connected: one of Leith’s themes is the way in which children shaped the genre through their own tastes and preferences. Naughtiness gets the upper hand, with a little help from Just William.

At times, The Haunted Wood also reads like a joint biography. Leith is bashful about this, though needlessly so. Children’s books are personal. ‘Often’, he writes, the authors ‘are writing from a wound – whether a wound sustained in childhood, or the wound of having had to leave it behind in the first place.’ They are psychologically complex, too, ‘a document not of how children are, but how adults imagine children to be, or how they imagine they want them to be’.

The selection is personal as well. Once the origins stories are out the way, Leith largely focuses on British literature, which, he argues, is one of the country’s great exports. Children’s writing, Leith observes, has a ‘baked in nostalgia’ (perhaps that is one reason why the English are so good at it) and I came away from The Haunted Wood with a nostalgia for the genre’s high watermark, that long hot summer before the First World War. Leith delivers superlative readings of the Alice books, Peter Pan, The Wind in the Willows, the world of Beatrix Potter and the life and work of E. Nesbit.

Another key theme for Leith is the way in which children’s books draw on the energy of the oldest kind of narratives, of myths and fairytales. This primal, storytelling energy, Leith argues, means they are always spilling out of books into playground games, retellings and other genres, television, film and even video games. I wondered if some of this energy wasn’t encoded in the act of storytelling itself: adults rarely tell or perform stories to each other in person anymore – there’s TV for that – but we’ll still sit down with a child. So many of these stories begin in private, for particular children: Alice Liddell of the Alice stories, Rudyard Kipling’s ‘best beloved’ Effie, George and Jack Llewyn Davies, who first heard Peter Pan from J. M. Barrie, Richard Adams’s daughters. We only have The Wind in the Willows because Kenneth Grahame’s editor overheard him putting his son to bed. Treasure Island crossed generations. Robert Louis Stevenson’s stepson, Lloyd, and Stevenson’s father: ‘I had counted on one by: I found I had two… My father caught fire at once.’

Children eat books up, and it didn’t take long for people to notice there might be money to be made. One early entrepreneur was Enid Blyton, who ‘was banging out several dozen books a year’ by the 1950s (‘You don’t so much analyse Enid Blyton’s work as weigh it.’). Blyton cultivated her readership, publishing her own magazine, assiduously answering letters from her admirers and encouraging them to meet each other. The Famous Five Club ‘had 30,000 members within a year of its inception’. Here, if you like, is the start of fandom.

Leith also highlights the ‘intertextuality’ of children’s literature. Like the myths and fairytales they draw on, these books borrow from one other, and that is part of their appeal. He defends J.K. Rowling from charges of derivativeness: Rowling is the magpie who managed to bring all the shiny pieces together. The genre is ‘an inexhaustible resource of… characters and situations: orphaned protagonists with portentous desires, portals to other worlds, exotic monsters and talking animals, midnight feasts… perilous journeys, enchanted objects, dark forests, thuggish bullies and evil wizards’. He is surely right about Rowling (though I wish Diane Wynne Jones got more credit). Two of my friends shared a copy of Harry Potter – literally reading the same book at the same time, with the faster reader always one page ahead. You can’t explain that kind of enthusiasm away as a marketing trick.

Equally, all this ‘intertextuality’ is awfully convenient for publishers and their authors. Children, as Leith notes, are conservative. Like Bilbo Baggins, they want their adventure and they want to come home for tea. They also want to come home to the same stories, again and again. Books turn into franchises, franchises never end. Perhaps we should be a little more cynical on the kid’s behalf. Some of the best children’s stories of the last 50 years have been one-off performances, quietly stunning in their brevity, but Leith understandably doesn’t have room for many. I would, for what it’s worth, want to put a word in for Clive King’s Stig of the Dump.

Towards the end of Leith’s story, the authors start making a particular claim: that they are not children’s authors at all. The great Alan Garner is ‘writing for anybody who cares to read, after I have written for myself’. Philip Pullman resists the title. Leith suggests there’s an air of things coming full circle here: children’s books were the medium which fantasy, fairy tale and adventure – originally for everyone – were smuggled through to the present, while fiction was busy making itself ‘respectable’. On this reading, the rise of the ‘young adult’ genre (which Leith wisely puts beyond his remit) is just a righting of the scales in favour of the fantastical. Ursula Le Guin, who Leith quotes, makes the claim explicit: her work draws on ‘the tradition of fantastic tales and hero stories, which comes down to us like a great river from sources high in the mountains of myth’, but ‘modernist literary ideology shunted it all off to children’.

Le Guin’s story about ‘modernist ideology’ is faintly conspiratorial. There is no sense here that adult readers make choices, too: that there might be something about Middlemarch that wouldn’t work in a book about dragons (now that’s an idea) or that writers might have good reasons for looking askance at the ‘high mountains of myth’. After all, there is plenty of modern adventure for ‘adults’ – Conrad, Melville, Du Maurier, McCarthy – it just tends to forgo the heroes and the villains. The endless battle between ‘YA’ and ‘literary fiction’, in this sense, is only an argument between two pretty healthy monopolies who both want more of the cake.

Children, however, don’t want adventure for the sake of adventure. They also have what Katherine Rundell calls a ‘thirst for justice’. The only genuinely amoral children’s book I can think of is Treasure Island. Not only does Silver get away with murder, but as Leith points out, there aren’t really any good guys in Stevenson’s story: the goal is treasure. Stevenson pulls it all off with a wink, but few writers have dared follow him. Leith wonders whether the rift between J.K. Rowling and a section of her fanbase is the result of readers taking the Harry Potter stories to heart, but surely in writing about a cataclysmic battle between pure good and pure evil Rowling was only, again, accentuating something central to the genre.

Still, as Rundell’s argued elsewhere, we go back to children’s books because they remind us that ‘hope counts for something’. Perhaps the real issue with Le Guin’s account – with the idea that we should be glad to do away with distinctions between books for adults and books for children – is that it loses sight of one of the most important facts about an adventure: they come to an end. Children’s books know this, which is why they are so sad. Enjoyable as The Haunted Wood is – and it is great fun – Leith’s wood is still haunted. ‘To be a child is to know that you have to grow up. To be an adult is to know that you have to die. And to be a parent is to be in a permanent state of mourning.’ Ultimately, as Leith shows so well, what defines childhood reading is the intensity of its relationship with time itself.