The late [Martin Amis](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/authors/martin-amis-death-craig-raine-tribute-oxford/), when asked if he’d ever write a children’s book, scoffed that the possibility would arise only if he suffered “a serious brain injury”. That was and remains the standard view among highbrows: children’s books are kids’ stuff, not to be taken seriously. Children’s fiction is where literary novelists go slumming, where telly celebrities extend their brands, where video games and TV cartoons get spin-offs.
I beg to differ. [Children’s books](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/childrens-books/greatest-children-authors-rowling-dahl-pullman-blyton/#list) seem to me, if anything, more important than the adult sort: they are the foundation on which a lifetime of reading is built. They’re where we first hear the music of words, first learn to get lost in a story, first discover the thrill of imagining what it might be like to be somebody else.
Bookish children become bookish adults, and we remember those gateway stories with the same deep feeling we remember the songs we loved when we were teenagers. We never “put away childish things”: rather, we lock them into our hearts.
Over the past two years, whenever I mentioned to people that I was writing about the history of children’s books, they would light up (this is not, in my experience, the usual reaction you get when you tell someone about your current book). “Are you including X?” they would ask me. “What about Y?”
In our own times, the transformative success of the [Harry Potter](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/news/why-harry-potter-jk-rowling-is-a-literary-masterpiece/) stories has left its mark on a whole generation of children for whom “Slytherin” or “Hufflepuff” are now characterological shorthand, just as “Eeyorish” and “Tiggerish” were for their parents and grandparents. Early reading shapes our very view of the world.
The stakes, then, are high. Arguments rage now as they have always raged over which books and which subjects are “suitable for children”. Book-burners and would-be censors campaign for stories that they think vulgar, or corrupting, or dangerous, to be removed from shelves: a backhanded compliment to the power of children’s storytelling.
And as I discovered in writing The Haunted Wood, the stories we have loved as children tell, in aggregate, the story of childhood itself. They are, to state the obvious, written by adults – and so they reflect adult ideas about what children are, or should be, and adult mourning for childhood lost. They show us not only the psychological pressures on the individual writers – so many of whom, such as Kenneth Grahame and Hugh Lofting, create their imaginary worlds as a refuge from adult pain – but also the wider anxieties of the ages in which they lived.
You can see in the fire-breathing puritans of the 17th and 18th centuries, for example, adults writing not so much to entertain children as to save their original-sin-contaminated souls. You can see, too, under the shadow of Locke, Rousseau and the Romantics, 19th-century children’s writers turning that concept on its head and, instead, idealising childhood innocence. And as time went on, you can see children’s writing getting to grips with children as they really are, rather than as adults wished them to be.
Weird to kick out Dahl but include Rowling. I get dahl’s prejudice is more present in his work where rowling’s is more present in her public image, but still neither are figures free from controversial, bigoted opinions.
2 Comments
**From The Telegraph’s Sam Leith:**
The late [Martin Amis](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/authors/martin-amis-death-craig-raine-tribute-oxford/), when asked if he’d ever write a children’s book, scoffed that the possibility would arise only if he suffered “a serious brain injury”. That was and remains the standard view among highbrows: children’s books are kids’ stuff, not to be taken seriously. Children’s fiction is where literary novelists go slumming, where telly celebrities extend their brands, where video games and TV cartoons get spin-offs.
I beg to differ. [Children’s books](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/childrens-books/greatest-children-authors-rowling-dahl-pullman-blyton/#list) seem to me, if anything, more important than the adult sort: they are the foundation on which a lifetime of reading is built. They’re where we first hear the music of words, first learn to get lost in a story, first discover the thrill of imagining what it might be like to be somebody else.
Very few people who go on to read [Middlemarch](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/what-to-read/middlemarch-george-elliot-marriage/) or The Man Without Qualities or Gravity’s Rainbow or, yes, the work of Martin Amis, will do so without first having encountered Goodnight Moon or The Tiger Who Came to Tea. With that in mind, I’ve compiled [a list of the 12 authors that belong on every child’s bookshelf](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/childrens-books/greatest-children-authors-rowling-dahl-pullman-blyton/#list) (and six best banished).
Bookish children become bookish adults, and we remember those gateway stories with the same deep feeling we remember the songs we loved when we were teenagers. We never “put away childish things”: rather, we lock them into our hearts.
Over the past two years, whenever I mentioned to people that I was writing about the history of children’s books, they would light up (this is not, in my experience, the usual reaction you get when you tell someone about your current book). “Are you including X?” they would ask me. “What about Y?”
In our own times, the transformative success of the [Harry Potter](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/news/why-harry-potter-jk-rowling-is-a-literary-masterpiece/) stories has left its mark on a whole generation of children for whom “Slytherin” or “Hufflepuff” are now characterological shorthand, just as “Eeyorish” and “Tiggerish” were for their parents and grandparents. Early reading shapes our very view of the world.
The stakes, then, are high. Arguments rage now as they have always raged over which books and which subjects are “suitable for children”. Book-burners and would-be censors campaign for stories that they think vulgar, or corrupting, or dangerous, to be removed from shelves: a backhanded compliment to the power of children’s storytelling.
And as I discovered in writing The Haunted Wood, the stories we have loved as children tell, in aggregate, the story of childhood itself. They are, to state the obvious, written by adults – and so they reflect adult ideas about what children are, or should be, and adult mourning for childhood lost. They show us not only the psychological pressures on the individual writers – so many of whom, such as Kenneth Grahame and Hugh Lofting, create their imaginary worlds as a refuge from adult pain – but also the wider anxieties of the ages in which they lived.
You can see in the fire-breathing puritans of the 17th and 18th centuries, for example, adults writing not so much to entertain children as to save their original-sin-contaminated souls. You can see, too, under the shadow of Locke, Rousseau and the Romantics, 19th-century children’s writers turning that concept on its head and, instead, idealising childhood innocence. And as time went on, you can see children’s writing getting to grips with children as they really are, rather than as adults wished them to be.
**Article Link:** [https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/childrens-books/greatest-children-authors-rowling-dahl-pullman-blyton/](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/childrens-books/greatest-children-authors-rowling-dahl-pullman-blyton/)
Weird to kick out Dahl but include Rowling. I get dahl’s prejudice is more present in his work where rowling’s is more present in her public image, but still neither are figures free from controversial, bigoted opinions.