Pages of delight

Charming survey of children's literature throughout the centuries should be treasured and reread.

- BY RACHAEL KING

Can you remember the first time you fell in love with a book?" That's the question posed by Sam Leith's The Haunted Wood. We bookish types all remember our first literary loves - the books that made us hunker down with a torch in that airless liminal space under the covers, reading just one more chapter.

The Haunted Wood returns the adult reader to that spot beneath the blanket, transporting them back to their own childhoods, and further - a 578-page journey through stories told, written or translated into (mostly British, sometimes American) English, from fireside Aesop to this decade's Katherine Rundell.

The book could easily lose the "Reading" in the subtitle, because it is just as much a history of childhood itself, which wasn't always as delineated from adulthood as it is today. It puts stories into a rich historical and social context as well as a literary one, citing such significant markers as world wars, shifts in rights (such as Britain's 1908 Children Act) and education (in late-Victorian times, children were "coming down the proverbial chimney, scrubbing up and going to school"), which all shaped the literature of its time.

It also gives us a delicious selection of biographical deep-dives, the "often strange and often troubled and sometimes sad lives of the people who have written for children", which also make up the complex well from which stories are drawn.

The very best writers are the ones who don't talk down to children. Edith Nesbit observed that to write for children, to understand them, you can't merely observe them, and that "only by remembering how you felt and thought when you yourself were a child can you arrive at any understanding of the thoughts and feelings of children", a sentiment that has echoed down the years.