The first thing to say, O Dearly Beloved — in case you are in a hurry, as adults are all too often wont to be — is that this book is a delight. 

Do not delay. Hand over and slightly upwards, your carefully counted, unaccountably sticky coppers and shillings and buttons, with confidence and indeed mounting excitement..

If, as a child, you enjoyed reading stories — or better still, having them read to you — then you will love this book, if only for the once familiar groves down which it will lead you, though it offers a good deal more than that. 

And if you didn’t, then your alighting on The Critic at all, at this stage in your life, is something of a miracle, bordering on the suspicious. 

But whether you are the product of a quasi-Athenian parthenogenesis, or are perhaps a surreptitious AI Parent-Bot 2000 filling in a few programming gaps, then I still commend the work, while nervously keeping my distance.

So yes, do buy a copy, excitedly, at a proper book shop counter. In fact, buy two copies — one for yourself, and one for your Mother, if you are lucky enough to still have her, and if it was she who, as with mine, first kindled the fire, and cast the shadows on the cave wall. I cannot think of another book I’ve read in a long, long time that reminded me so much of her. 

This is not, so far as I can tell, a new addition to an established field. Whether it is quite “the first general history of canonical literature written for children” might be disputed, but it certainly seems to be the first since Humphrey Carpenter’s Secret Gardens in 1985 — and there have been several new arrivals in the canon in that time, not only of Wizards and Dust but of Mice and Gruffalos too.

So, the standard work needed updating. And Leith is just the man to do it. Anyone who chooses “Questing Vole” as his twitter handle can be trusted to sniff out the juicier treats from the wider, plashy fen of wannabes and also-rans. 

Leith really does stick to the canon. This is the Harold Bloom approach and he makes no apologies, not for selecting so much as acceding, for acknowledging only the greats to whom Time, the only critic that matters, has nodded. They are more than enough.

Even with the highest bar in place, it remains a very generous heap. This Haunted Wood is over 500 leaves high, and having surveyed the prehistoric, anonymous and anthropological era in the first hundred of these — the gathered field shouts of the Brother Grimm and the theoretical reflections of Rousseau, Propp and Blake — Leith is into the Golden Era that begins with Carroll’s White Rabbit, a pre-digital avatar of domain transgression so iconic that it resonated through the acid trips of The Jefferson Airplane all the way to The Matrix, and will no doubt one day be the anxious, time-hounded yet still elegantly waist-coated figure to finally lead us out of this godforsaken Simulation once and for all. 

In an era when even reforming rock bands are judged by the moral standards of the 2020s instead of their own, I was particularly grateful that Leith is never sniffy, judgmental or guilty of “presentism”. He is a literary editor by day and he maintains admirable clarity and literary cool. His wider reading embellishes his appreciation, such as when Toad is a “little warty Falstaff” (he doesn’t mention Donald Trump though I can almost sense his fingers itching to) or when Tolkien is admired for his “epistrophe” (rhythmic, rhetorical repetition) in a palpably disgusted description of goblins. (He is later brilliantly scathing of the young Alan Garner and his attempts to emulate Tolkien’s sententious syntax as “That Giblet-son-of-Gimlet nonsense.”)

But he clearly loves this stuff with his inner child, as much as any grateful reader must. He was even born in Paddington, for Goodness’ sake. (Though that station’s namesake is one of the very few omissions from this work at whose absence I might frown, and hard.)

Still, this is a book for adults. There are certain themes here of a darker nature. The price — or perhaps the necessary and sufficient cause? — for writing great children’s lit all too often seems to have been paid either in the author’s own childhood, or later by their own children. 

Not always, by any means. Kipling — whom Leith clearly cherishes as a connection to his own late father, to whom the book is dedicated — was a doting parent.  The loss of his daughter Effie at just six years of age, and her immortal echo as the Best Beloved in the Just So stories, is as heart-breaking as anything in his or anyone else’s fiction. 

But AA Milne, Kenneth Grahame and Enid Blyton certainly carried some scars, and left some on their young, while E. Nesbit — perhaps my favourite, for a few years at least — had a home life so complicated that not even AS Byatt could quite do it justice in her novelised account, The Children’s Book. 

Leith deals with this stuff with well-judged restraint and respect for actual lives, some indeed still being lived. There is mercifully little armchair analysis, and nothing remotely prurient. On the great TH White’s reputedly tortured homosexuality, he characteristically concludes “let’s just leave it with the traditional ‘he never married’”.

But the great joy of this book is rather more simple. It comes with walking, arm-in-arm with a fellow pilgrim, back between the fur coats, back down the rabbit hole, back through the very walls, that became the world all around, and into the Hundred Acre Wood, where all your old friends have been waiting for you, like the guests on the Titanic, or Maximus’s wife and son, all this time. 

Even browsing the contents page and registering quite what a glorious canon this is, carries an emotional charge. It is like contemplating the extraordinary wealth of great sitcom characters from one’s youth, or screen stars of the golden age. Whether it is because the imagination is more fierce when young, or because the confounding obstacles of truth and reality are less hardened and insistent, the great stories we encounter at a certain age fuse with us and leave tattoos, next to which adult fiction rarely provides more than a change of clothes. 

These stories usually arrive at a time when it is just beginning to dawn on us that the world is largely discovered, if not a built environment, but there might, there just might, be a few cracks left where the dark gets in.  

We want to think that as we slip off to sleep, we might just slip, not so much between the sheets as between the days, out of one and not quite into the next… and Phoomf! Gone. No longer apparent to those in loco parentis.

We are not fools, when we are young. We will not be fobbed off. We want the world to be full of potholes, not plot holes. But construct the magical toy well and we will take it and make it fly. 

Is there a secret? Having contemplated the field as assembled by Leith, I think the key is partly perspective; partly invention, and bravery with it; and partly an awareness of the dull acquiescence of grown-ups to disenchantment, endured by aggrieved or bewildered children, and how desperately they yearn for that to be suddenly enlivened by the sighting of one who turns out to be a parrot in a trench coat and a hat, that turns and gives you a beckoning wink. 

And also, I think it is a question of density. 

Density of colour, scent, pattern, detail, pleasure and threat. By comparison with the featureless carpet tiles and double maths of daily life, the world between these leaves is tapestry, fresco and Arabian rug. Flat surfaces that turn out to have a secret third dimension. Something is alive. 

Is a dream a lie, if it doesn’t come true? Not when it’s a book

Now, sadly, we know better. The attic contains nothing but a few rolls of leftover insulation. At the bottom of the garden, you are lucky enough to find a real hedgehog, let alone one that takes in washing. The wardrobe might have a name that comes from an Icelandic Saga, but its back is all too visible, plasticated and slightly bowed, behind the rows of furless coats. 

Is a dream a lie, if it doesn’t come true? Not when it’s a book. Then it’s something much closer to the indeterminate state that quantum physics boffins like to pretend is now their sole domain. 

Whether The Haunted Wood is a deliberate play on the idea that, by imprinting dried wood pulp with various esoteric black squiggles, we do indeed inhabit it with spirits, I don’t know. But this one certainly re-awakened some ghosts for me. I have devoured my review copy with an almost unseemly relish. And on publication day, I will be waiting at the counter of my local bookstore, with my sticky handful of coins, to buy a second copy, for my Mum.