Popular Children's Literature and the Memory of the First World War, 1919-1939

Due to its high casualties and the deadly nature of trench warfare, the First World War was an important influence on British culture and literature in the post-war years. This is also apparent in popular children's fiction which was used as a means of instructing the future generation in the significance of the past conflict. By analysing a selection of novels published between 1919 and 1939, this article examines which images of the war were (re)created for a child readership and whether children's fiction, like many canonized adult novels, remember the war as a horrible and futile experience.