but for almost the first time an English writer succeeds in presenting it from within and
not as a phenomenon which has to be explained to readers.
In the later twentieth century authors increasingly choose to show children alienated
from their parents. Brian Fairfax-Lucy, drawing on memories of his own childhood, and
Philippa Pearce in their joint The Children of the House (1968) showed four neglected
and unloved children in a great country house. Edward and Jane in Penelope Lively’s
Going Back (1975) are only happy when their father is far away and they are alone with
the servants. Donald in William Mayne’s A Game of Dark (1971) hates his sick father
with an obsessive intensity that comes to take complete possession of him. Michelle
Magorian’s Goodnight Mister Tom (1981) describes how a half-starved, terrified child finds
a proper home at last. His crazed mother has beaten and abused him; it is only when he
is evacuated from London that he encounters affection. With Ruth Thomas’s The Secret
(1990) we are back with the merely feckless mother. Mrs Mitchell, a single parent, goes
off for a weekend with her boyfriend and, injured in a road accident, fails to come back.
Her two increasingly panic-stricken children are also terrified of being taken into care
and try to conceal her absence.
Fashion has now made it difficult to write unselfconsciously about happy families.
Helen Cresswell has achieved it through farce. In her Bagthorpe saga (1977–1989) the
eccentric Bagthorpes lurch from one zany domestic adventure to the next. The social
setting in fact is not dissimilar from the pre-war story— literary father, talented
children, jolly uncle, attendant dog—but the comedy has transformed it.
American family stories, certainly in the nineteenth century, had a far wider appeal
than their English counterparts. They were not bedevilled by class considerations, and
there was a sense of the domestic circle gathered round the hearth (even if the father in
fact was often missing). Children in the American home were not segregated from adult
life, they had responsibilities, and if it was a farming family, their help was vital. The
books are often full of practical detail; frequently, life centres round the kitchen—
represented as the source of warmth, comfort and food, but a region unknown to the
inhabitants of Victorian nurseries. There are lavish descriptions of food, which the
austerely reared British children brooded over with intense pleasure.
The earliest writer to celebrate American domesticity was Catharine Maria Sedgwick
(1789–1867) in whose A New-England Tale (1822) we find the charismatic female orphan
who was to become so popular with American writers. We also find the granite-hewn
spinster, a miracle of domestic skills (another very popular character). In Redwood
(1824) we can note the start of an American tradition of portraying fathers as
insignificant, if not far worse. Mr Lenox, a New England farmer, is in fact industrious
and frugal. But his wife is much his superior. She is the driving force in the home, and
this is how it was to be in the majority of American books. Sedgwick wrote several books
for children, all remarkable for degraded fathers. ‘“He a father!”’ says a son in The Boy of
Mount Rhigi (1847), ‘“He makes me lie for him, and steal for him; and if I don’t he tries to
drown me”.’ Huckleberry Finn’s father, it will be remembered, is much the same.
The fathers who show up best are the pioneers and the farmers. William Cardell (1780–
1828), of whom little is known except that he was a schoolmaster, wrote two books
which are among the earliest to describe the life of settlers. The Story of Jack Halyard,
the Sailor’s Boy, or The Virtuous Family (1825) begins on a New Jersey farm. ‘“Of all
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