This article is taken from the October 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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We all remember our favourite childhood authors. It was Enid Blyton for me. I spurned the Secret Seven and the Famous Five in favour of her chronicles of a more recherché investigative outfit called the Five Find-Outers, led by “Fatty,” whose name would these days be unlikely to escape the attentions of the sensitivity reader.

I was also a keen follower of Blyton’s “Secret” series, comprising The Secret Island, The Secret Mountain and so on; and her “Adventure” series, The Island of Adventure, The Mountain of Adventure and er … so on. Enid was very much of the if-it-ain’t-broke-don’t-fix-it school of writing.

When Gateshead Central Library had yielded up its last of her works, I moved on to Malcolm Saville and his “Lone Pine” series — another set of books about a gang of pesky kids solving crimes and outwitting villains (a wicked woman nicknamed “The Ballinger” is the Lone Pine Club’s arch-adversary).

In his excellent book about children’s literature, journalist and literary editor Sam Leith covers Blyton but not Saville. I forgive him. As he points out in the prologue, the subject is so vast that this volume could run to thousands of pages “and there’d still be more omissions than there are inclusions”.

Although some fairytales can be linked to oral folktales that scholars believe date back to the Bronze Age, for practical reasons Leith chooses as the starting point for his history of children’s stories the fables of Aesop, possibly a fiction himself. He then takes us up to J.K. Rowling and her Harry Potter books, the world-conquering success of which, he argues, represents a definitive inflection point in the genre.

Reminding us at the outset of Martin Amis’ remark that “If I had a serious brain injury I might well write a children’s book”, Leith has no truck with the notion that children’s literature is somehow lesser than writing for adults. “Children’s literature isn’t a defective and frivolous sidebar to the grown-up sort,” he writes. “It’s the platform on which everything else is built.”

A history of childhood reading is necessarily, in part, a history of the concept of childhood. Leith suggests that the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau is the source of much of how childhood came to be understood as a time associated with happiness, innocence and freedom.

In his Émile, or On Education (1762), Rousseau urged us to “Love childhood, indulge its sports, its pleasures, its delightful instincts. Who has not sometimes regretted that age when laughter was ever on the lips, and when the heart was ever at peace?”

However, Leith also drily points out that “Rousseau’s way of thinking was blissfully uncompromised by much in the way of hands-on experience with actual children”. He bullied his mistress into placing the five children they had together into an orphanage. But his ideas about childhood as a sort of Eden caught on with the Romantics. “Heaven lies about us in our infancy!” Wordsworth wrote.

With childhood recognised as a distinctive category of existence, rather than the anteroom to adulthood, conditions were right for the emergence of a literature specially created for young readers.

There has always been a tension between the instincts to instruct and delight in children’s writing. For a long time, the preference was for the former in the form of fire-and-brimstone evangelical texts.

These are the sort of cheery tracts in which naughty children might be taken to see a rotting corpse on a gibbet as a warning not to misbehave, as happens in Mary Martha Sherwood’s The History of the Fairchild Family (1818). The Fairchild children, when not being thrust in front of mouldering human remains, are given to utterances such as “Oh! I wish I could love the Lord Jesus Christ more than I do; but my wicked heart will not let me.”

However, around the middle of the 18th century, the idea that children might read for pleasure was starting to take root. Shrewd publisher John Newbery (1713–67), sometimes called “The Father of Children’s Literature”, printed more than 100 children’s books. In 1751 he launched The Lilliputian Magazine, the first periodical for kids. The prestigious Newbery Medal, the American award for excellence in children’s literature, was named after him.

Leith shows how the appetite for books specifically written for children grew in parallel with the expansion of children’s access to education. By 1875, one publisher’s catalogue alone contained 1,000 children’s books. By 1939, nearly half of Britain’s public libraries had a dedicated children’s section. By the 1970s, every mainstream publisher in the UK had a children’s division.

The Haunted Wood takes the form of chronologically arranged essays on key writers such as Lewis Carroll, Rudyard Kipling, Kenneth Grahame, J.R.R. Tolkien, Susan Cooper and Rowling. The focus is on authors from these shores although he finds space for the likes of Tove Jansson, Astrid Lindgren, Judy Blume and a few others. (I particularly liked his description of Jansson’s Moominvalley as “a psychedelic Nordic version of Hundred Acre Wood”).

He also highlights the development of particular genres of children’s story — fantasy, the boarding school tale — and of elements of the publishing business. It was, for example, Beatrix Potter who created the first licensed character in children’s fiction merchandising when, in 1903, she gave permission for a Peter Rabbit stuffed toy. Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886) spawned a host of merchandise, including playing cards, stationery, chocolate and perfume. There was even a craze for dressing up reluctant little boys in black velvet suits and lace-collared shirts.

This is a weighty volume, but Leith’s writing is as light as a soufflé. The essays are deft and perceptive, pinpointing trends and themes and connections. Just one example: everyone knows that strange chapter in The Wind in the Willows in which the god Pan makes an appearance — “like interrupting a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta with a long acid-drenched number by Hawkwind,” writes Leith — but it had never previously occurred to me, until he pointed it out, how many Edwardian writers added a dollop of Pan-related mysticism to their books.

There’s J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, of course, and Burnett’s The Secret Garden (1906) has the pipe-playing Dickon, to whom we are introduced as he sits under a tree surrounded by animals, whilst the title character in Kipling’s Puck of Pook Hill (1906) is also distinctly Pan-like.

Leith has a journalist’s eye for a colourful detail. Mary Poppins author P.L. Travers was a disciple of the dance-mad Armenian mystic, George Gurdjieff. Enid Blyton didn’t bother going to her own mother’s funeral and, according to her daughter, was “without a trace of maternal instinct”. C.S. Lewis managed to get through 60 fags a day — in between pipes.

Leith is also funny. Of one nauseatingly saintly fictional heroine, he writes: “Gandhi himself would be tempted to slap her, were he not to suspect that she’d get an intolerable degree of satisfaction from turning the other cheek.”

His enthusiasm for his subject is truly infectious. It made me want to read those classics that I never did as a child — such as Tom’s Midnight Garden (“a proper three-hanky tear-jerker”), Ballet Shoes (“deeply interested in the nitty-gritty of theatrical practice”) and The Chocolate War (“like Stalky & Co. rewritten by Brett Easton Ellis”).

I’d be interested to know what Leith thinks of the current trend for celebrities to have a stab at writing children’s books. A handful, such as actor and comedian Charlie Higson, who has one series about young James Bond and another about life in a post-apocalyptic zombie-infested world, are excellent. Others … not so much.

However, beyond a passing reference to the attempts of David Walliams’ publisher to present him as the Roald Dahl de nos jours, he doesn’t touch the topic. Also, his cut-off point of the turn of the millennium rules out exciting writers such as Katherine Rundell.

These aren’t quibbles, simply hopes for a future expanded edition. Although this utterly delightful book is 550 pages long, every lover of children’s books will wish it were longer.