POST-WAR CHILDHOOD AND CHILDREN'S LITERATURE

At the end of the nineteenth century the issues dealt with in children's literature were controlled by adults’ images, needs and expectations of childhood. Accordingly, children in children's books were for the most part beautiful, innocent, and the source of every kind of salvation. This version of literary childhood persisted more or less unchallenged throughout the Edwardian period and between the wars, and for many of the same reasons. Where the adults of that fin de siécle felt anxious about the changing world and reluctant to face its possible demands, adults living between the wars also required that their image of childhood provide a sense of hope, purpose, cleansing and continuity to alleviate the disruption and futility of war. The uncertainty of the future perpetuated the same need to return to origins and try to discover where things had gone wrong which had been preoccupying children's writers for the previous halfcentury. Accordingly, the most remarkable developments in juvenile fiction came in the period following the Second World War.

This post-war period reflected a number of social pressures. Of most interest here are its responses to the family, to gender, and perhaps pre-eminently, to the sense of living in a postatomic age (the incorporation of the new youth culture of the 1950s is conspicuously absent from writing for children and young adults in this period and for a long time to come). Within the confines of this study it is not possible to discuss in detail the range of children's books produced at this time, but close examination of three representative texts from this period provides a good picture of the dominant trends in juvenile fiction and the ideology underpinning them. The texts I have selected are Mary Norton's The Borrowers (1952), Lucy M. Boston's The Children of Green Knowe (1954), and Philippa Pearce's Tom's Midnight Garden (1958). Readers wishing to know more about the children's literature of this period will find some interesting discussions of other texts in Margaret and Michael Rustin's Narratives of Love and Loss (2001).

UNHAPPY FAMILIES

Although all three books were written within six years of one another, they demonstrate the rapidity with which ideas about the family and its place in society were being redefined – and of course within this new definition an altered understanding of childhood was included.