Children’s literature is a Snarky beast: hunt for it and you’ll find a Boojum. Texts written for adults, like J R R Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, snuck into children’s hands; editions of J K Rowling’s Harry Potter books appeared with ‘adult’ covers to spare their grown-up readers’ blushes. It’s an unstable, intertextual field, with books referring to and borrowing from each other endlessly. Critically, it’s a battleground, with some swooning at the symbolism of castles and princesses, and others finding power struggles and colonialism under every enchanted stone. Many children’s books address an adult reader above the child’s head, so who are they really aimed at? Some academics even insist that true children’s literature can only be written by children. Those academics, incidentally, are off their rockers. 

Amid all this, it’s undeniable that when it comes to what we serve up to the young, the dulcis (‘sweet’) and the utilis (‘useful’) have been in tension for centuries. Should we pander to the little rotters’ desires (BURRRP!) or should we give them impossibly pious characters Doing Good? The answer, of course, lies somewhere in between.

Sam Leith, in The Haunted Wood, plots a clear course through the thickets, in what he dubs a study of ‘childhood reading’ rather than of children’s books per se. He employs a (generally) chronological structure, identifying the links that connect the British canon (including one or two Americans whose influence on our shores is undeniable). He begins with oral storytelling, and canters right up to the present day and the works of Malorie Blackman et alia, emphasising the continued kinship of children’s stories with the earliest forms, and the role of the ‘haunted wood’, with its wonders and mysteries, in so many of them (although he eschews an explicitly Freudian reading). 

Leith manages all this in a supremely engaging style (‘Nuts to the Mr Men’), dotting the survey with lively vignettes. When E Nesbit’s philandering husband, Hubert, intercepted H G Wells as he was about to elope with Hubert’s daughter, he ‘offered to punch the author of The Time Machine’s lights out’. And it is pleasing to discover that, as a child, P L Travers coped with loneliness ‘by pretending to be a chicken’.

The book rattles through the major elements that any thorough survey of children’s literature should include. Leith identifies the extraordinary influence of the shadowy Aesop, whose legacy stretches down to Julia Donaldson, largely because of the ‘stripped-down, vernacular style’ of his fables (though verna doesn’t mean a ‘female’ slave, simply one of either sex born in the household). There are summaries of the theories of Vladimir Propp, who identified the morphology of folktales, and of Joseph Campbell, whose book on mythic structures George Lucas imbibed before he wrote Star Wars. Here too are the usual suspects: Locke, Rousseau, with his theories on education, and the Romantics, blazing their novel conception of children not as trainee adults but as ‘trailing clouds of glory’.

Like Rousseau, who abandoned his children (so much for his theories), children’s authors don’t have a great track record when it comes to their own progeny. As Leith says, many write as a result of trauma, because they are either trying to retreat to an idealised childhood or attempting to create one they didn’t have. Pity their offspring, velveted and frilled, stomping behind their single-minded parents: Vivian Burnett, eternally identified with Little Lord Fauntleroy; Christopher Milne, bullied for being Christopher Robin; the cosseted ‘Mouse’ Grahame, who laid his head on a train track and was killed. We like to think of children’s books as originating from the bedside, whereas too often they spring from psychodrama. Such are the paradoxes of children’s fiction.

Myths gather around children’s authors, and Leith is good at correcting misapprehensions, as with Charles Dodgson, whose Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was a watershed in the field. Many assume he must have been a paedophile, on opium, or both; in reality, he never went further than making sure the Christ Church wine cellar was full. Leith also places Dodgson’s photographs of children in their proper Victorian context. There’s nothing sexual there. It’s welcome to find an appreciation of Rudyard Kipling’s ‘titanic’ influence on children’s fiction, and his ‘mournful, mystical’ patriotism, though I would have liked more on the extraordinary, proto-modernist Puck of Pook’s Hill. 

Recent controversies are tackled. Leith suggests that if you take the ‘nastiness’ out of Roald Dahl to avoid offending people, as Puffin have recently done, you’re ‘removing something absolutely fundamental’. He’s thoughtful in his treatment of J K Rowling, whose young readers have risen up against her, thanks to her views on gender. Leith successfully demonstrates the literary and intertextual sophistication of her novels. There is nothing, though, on William Mayne, a children’s writer of extraordinary power, who killed himself after being convicted of sexual assaults on minors and whose books were systematically removed from libraries. 

Leith’s analysis of Goodnight Moon, a multilayered picture book by Margaret Wise Brown, is a masterclass of imaginative criticism, both hilarious and erudite. But if anything, he can be too tentative in his opinions. On the strangeness of Beatrix Potter’s animals, sometimes human-sized and sometimes not, he writes that their existence ‘doesn’t follow the orderly logic of our own, but a more dreamlike one. Is that maybe an analogue to the world of the child?’ Yes, I cried, it is! 

The brisk prose contains the odd error. Frances Hodgson Burnett didn’t simply dabble in Christian Science; it was a central tenet of The Secret Garden. Leith writes of The Wind in the Willows that ‘there are no women’ in it, before immediately mentioning the jailer’s daughter and her mother, the washerwoman, who help Toad escape. He describes the version of Pan that appears in the same book as ‘sexless’; others see his ‘splendid curves’ and ‘rippling muscles’ somewhat differently.

What of the place of children’s fiction in our technologically advanced world? Leith is optimistic about the symbiotic relationship between computer games, the internet and children’s books. I am much less so. Who will make up a story to amuse a child distracted by Fortnite? The dead hand of utility is also ubiquitous. Parents concerned about their baby’s sense of social justice can buy an alphabet book called A is for Activist. 

While The Haunted Wood doesn’t offer up anything new, Leith has synthesised a vast amount of material and produced a marvellously charming and enjoyable history for the general reader, as well as a spirited polemic on the importance of children’s literature.