Book name- THE HAUNTED WOOD: A HISTORY OF CHILDHOOD READING
Author- Sam Leith
Published by- Oneword
Price- Rs 635
The world of children’s literature is a thicket of both moralists and mischief-makers, haunted woods as well as nursery tables, and fairies and frogs. Sam Leith, in The Haunted Wood: A History of Childhood Reading, hacks through this thicket with passion, exploring the enchantments that have drawn generations to these children’s stories. Leith, however, prefers to describe his subject as “childhood reading” rather than children’s books, thus widening his arc to include everything, from Aesop’s fables to Harry Potter and Malorie Blackman to Rousseau.
The book is at its best in its anecdotal portraits of authors — P.L. Travers coped with loneliness by pretending to be a chicken and Hubert Bland, the husband of E. Nesbit, challenged H.G. Wells to a fight for the honour of his daughter. Besides adding a lightness to the text, such miniature biographies of children’s authors also remind us that many of them had traumatic childhoods themselves — Kenneth Grahame, the author of the seemingly untroubled The Wind in the Willows, lost his mother to scarlet fever when he was five and a son to presumed suicide. Leith is also quick to spot the irony in the fact that writers who celebrated innocence often neglected their own children: Rousseau abandoned his infants; Christopher Milne endured bullying for being immortalised as Christopher Robin.
When he ventures into criticism, Leith is lively if occasionally tentative. His reading of Goodnight Moon is a masterpiece of imaginative criticism. His comment on Beatrix Potter’s dreamlike animal logic is convincing if less decisive than his take on recent controversies. Bowdlerising Roald Dahl, he argues, strips away “something absolutely fundamental”. With J.K. Rowling, he separates the novels’ literary sophistication from the author’s contested politics, reminding readers why Hogwarts cast such a spell in the first place. What emerges is a spirited tribute to the literature that shapes the future of man in which Leith avoids the trap of sentimentality without ever dismissing the wonder that children’s books can evoke.
