Books & Literature
Books could be both pleasurable and appalling to the Edwardian child, if we scan the range between say, arithmetic and Latin grammar textbooks and the works of such popular writers as L. T. Meade, Beatrix Potter, Edith Nesbit, Rudyard Kipling, G. A. Henty, and Frances Hodgson Burnett.
The Secret Garden (1909) was not only Frances Hodgson Burnett's masterpiece, but in some ways gives the quintessential flavour of children's literature of the period. The adults are there as enablers, and still run the world, of course, but the children not only take the initiative but are ahead of the adults much of the time.
According to her biographer Julia Briggs, Nesbit was 'the first modern writer for children': she helped to reverse the great tradition of children's literature inaugurated by Lewis Carroll and Kenneth Grahame, in turning away from their secondary worlds to the tough truths to be won from encounters with things-as-they-are, previously the province of adult novels.
Print of Humpty Dumpty from Alice in Wonderland by Sir John Tenniel, about 1901. Museum no. E.2846-1901 (click image for larger version)
The Edwardian child's bookshelf also contained Victorian favourites such as Lewis Carrol's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (London: Macmillan, 1866); fairy tales, (Andrew Lang, Hans Christian Andersen, the Brothers Grimm) the Arabian Nights, and so on.
School text books were particularly appalling. They might ask for an example of a compound-complex sentence (one which has at least two independent clauses and one or more dependent clauses); and for the names of all the kings and queens of England in order .
Appalling of a different kind were the ghost and horror stories of the period - not written for children, but read and enjoyed by many in the older age group, and including such classics as WW Jacobs's The Monkey's Paw of 1902 (Harper's Monthly magazine) and M R James's Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (London: Edward Arnold), published in 1904. This contains The Treasure of Abbot Thomas, where the treasure-hunting Mr Somerton finds the truth of the words 'Ten thousand pieces of gold are laid up in the well …of the Abbot's house of Steinfeld by me, Thomas, who have set a guardian over them'. The narrative describes how Somerton found the treasure 'I… went on pulling out the great bag, in complete darkness. It hung for an instant on the edge of the hole, then slipped forward on to my chest, and put its arms round my neck'.
