Gentlemanly Lit Crit

How many of you, dear readers, feel a certain nostalgia for the olden days of lit crit, when you could while away an afternoon with the likes of Walter Allen, V. S. Pritchett, or I. A. Richards, enjoying the stylish prose and gentleman-scholarly tone, and encountering a challenging mix of ideas, fact and opinion without having to decode, demythologize, or deconstruct? They don't make criticism like that anymore, you say? Take heart: here is Humphrey Carpenter, fresh from his triumphs as editor of the Oxford Companion to Children's Literature, employing an engagingly urbane style and a wholly unpretentious tone, in a careful, conversational, and mildly controversial examination of some of the central classics of children's literature.

Carpenter's breadth of reference, sheer extent of information, and confident handling of background as well as foreground might almost singlehandedly convince a reader that the subject of so much graceful erudition is indeed a field, and not a window-box, of literature. Carpenter uses literary criticism, social history, psychology, and a touch of philosophy, to explore the blossoming of English writing for children from 1860 to 1930. Although the study is selective, it covers most of the major writers and refers to a number of minor ones. (The oddest slight is the puzzlingly brief consideration of The Secret Garden itself—although several suggestive points are made, typically, in passing.)

The first part of the book examines the work of Kingsley, Dodgson, MacDonald and Alcott—in Carpenter's view, writers who accomplished the necessary destruction of the old moral world of children's books, but who were unable, because of personal limits, to replace the dead value system with a positive new one. Part II, "The Arcadians," details the quest for and the construction of an Arcadia, to be discerned in the work of Jefferies, Grahame, Nesbit, Potter, Barrie, and Milne. The two pervasive themes of the book are the chosen authors' ambiguities or uncertainties about their sexual roles and identities, and the direct or indirect rejection of conventional religious faith, necessitating a search for an alternative, which Carpenter sees as motivating their writing.

Carpenter is especially good at demolishing several general stereotypes—e.g. that most children's writers of the "Golden Age" had unhappy childhoods or were social misfits—and his examination of individual writers (e.g. Beatrix Potter as an ironist) is also calculated to dispel all-too-common misperceptions. There is enough in this book to make most readers question and rethink their ideas on the books and writers of this central period of children's literature. (Although Carpenter constructs and presents his main arguments carefully, developing and supporting them painstakingly if not always convincingly, many of his most provocative judgments and opinions are dropped incidentally in the text.) Scholars will be obliged to read this book to assess the thesis Carpenter is proffering, but they, as well as the interested layman, should bless the English tradition of readable criticism for the fact that time thus spent will be pleasant as well as profitable.