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  • The Ghostly Place of Children and Childhood in the Short Fiction of Walter de la Mare
  • Shane McCorristine (bio)

Early in his literary career Walter de la Mare (1873-1956) made his reputation as a poet of childhood, publishing the classic collection Songs of Childhood (1902) with the patronage of Andrew Lang, who commended his "fairy way of writing" (Mégroz 23). Further collections such as Poems (1906) and The Listeners and Other Poems (1912) achieved canonical status in English poetry. Yet even at the height of his creative powers in the 1920s, it was de la Mare's prose writings that critics found the most enigmatic and disconcerting (see Davison, Priestley), and it is these which this article shall focus on. Aside from some recent notable exceptions (Lurie, Vay, Pyper, McCorristine 2010) and perhaps owing to his eerily allusive and symbolic style, de la Mare's prose remains unfashionable in contemporary studies of children's literature and ghost stories. This article seeks to redress this situation by examining the ghostly place of children and childhood in de la Mare's short fiction. Such an examination of the recurring formulations and motifs about childhood reveals the wider cultural significance of de la Mare's ghost-seeing imagination and demonstrates the extent to which ghost-seeing experience was expressed through the child in the literature of the post-Edwardian era.

The wealth of de la Mare's ideas about childhood, and its connection to the ghostly, can be seen in his personal and resonant anthology Early One Morning in the Spring: Chapters on Children and on Childhood as It Is Revealed in Particular in Early Memories and in Early Writings (1935). Here, de la Mare offered a broadly post-Romantic view of childhood in opposition to the scientific approach of child psychology, consciously infusing his writing with an emotive and elegiac mood. For instance, with echoes of Christ's injunction, de la Mare wrote: "For Childhood is the name of the world's immediate future; of such, and such alone, is the promise of the kingdom of man" (Early One Morning xx). De la Mare's child is essentially a visionary being, existing in a time and place set apart—a solitary and frequently [End Page 333] sinister dream-child who occupies the margins and "may be aware of what is assumed to be preternatural—and that without alarm" (Early One Morning 288). In this he has antecedents in the great romantic poets of childhood, William Blake and William Wordsworth, who both cherished the imaginative faculty of the child. Yet de la Mare was quick to point out his sense of realism regarding the facts of childhood, emphasizing the evil done to children by adults and the cunning and cruelty that children could quickly develop. Indeed, in stories such as "In the Forest" (1904) and "An Ideal Craftsman" (1905) the actions of the child toward the adult range from the heartless to the positively evil. With this darker vision tempering preexisting romantic ideas about the child, de la Mare imagines childhood as a kind of gloaming, a transcendental developmental stage that fades as one matures into "boyhood." To be a child, de la Mare writes, "is to be an exile, and an exile haunted with vanishing intimations and relics of another life and of a far happier state of being" (Early One Morning 91), and it is this Platonism that informs the ghostly dynamics between children and adults in his fiction.

First, this article looks at the theme of the ghost-seeing child as it appeared in the late Victorian ghost stories of Margaret Oliphant and Henry James—works that influenced how de la Mare conceptualized childhood in his own supernatural fiction. Second, the concept of place in de la Mare's ghost stories is examined in order to see how this referential constant influenced the construction of childhood in his fiction. Finally, drawing upon selected examples, this article explores the idea of the ghost as a developmental theme in de la Mare's fiction.

This interpretation of de la Mare's ghost-seeing imagination demonstrates that he used the ghost as a unit of experience in a profoundly subjective and...

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