Other memorable books of the two decades did not set clear trends. Hugh Lofting’s Dr
Dolittle series, beginning in 1922 and originally inspired by the sufferings of horses in
the First World War, was a popular continuance of the age-old tradition of the
humanised-animal story, neatly reshaped around the benign, innocent figure of the
Doctor himself. John Masefield brewed two rich mixtures of magic and adventure in The
Midnight Folk (1927) and The Box of Delights (1935); P.L.Travers introduced the magic
nursemaid Mary Poppins—already a figure from a bygone age—in 1934; Arthur
Ransome let some fresh open air into children’s books with Swallows and Amazons
(1930), first of a series that continued to appear until 1947 and is still in print and
widely read in the 1990s. The most influential book of the 1930s—though this could not
have been predicted at the time—was J.R.R.Tolkien’s The Hobbit (1937). In conjunction
with The Lord of the Rings, published after the Second World War on an adult list, this
gave rise to a fashion for books about wizards, dragons and other creatures of lore and
legend, set in lands far away in space and time, which has persisted and even
strengthened over many years.
Walter de la Mare was the outstanding poet writing for children in the first half of the
twentieth century; he was also a fine writer of often-haunting, often-poetic short stories.
He was at the height of his powers in the inter-war period, though his Collected Rhymes
and Verses were not published until 1944 and his Collected Stories for Children until
- Edward Ardizzone, with his gentle, traditional and instantly recognisable style,
was perhaps the most distinguished English artist and picture book creator to work in
the children’s field in the first three-quarters of the twentieth century. Little Tim and the
Brave Sea-Captain, the first of his picture-story books about the young seafarer Tim,
appeared in 1936, and the Tim series continued after 1945.
A New AgeThe stresses of war and post-war shortages restricted publishing during the Second
War, as they had done in the First, and the decade of recovery was the 1950s. In that
decade the standard of children’s books coming from main-line publishers improved
greatly. The reasons were partly institutional. School and library work with children,
benefiting from American example, were expanding, and those in charge of it demanded
work of literary merit. Publishers were appointing specialist children’s editors, some of
whom were exceptional individuals. ‘Quality’ paperbacks for children were establishing
themselves under the leadership of Puffin Books, a Penguin imprint. In the new and
more encouraging atmosphere a new generation of writers came to the fore.
At the same time—and intensifying in the decades that followed—there was a move to
widen the readership of children’s books. Traditionally children’s fiction had been
produced by middle-class writers for middle-class children and was largely about
middle-class children. Many intermediaries, especially teachers, felt that this prevented
the books from appealing to ‘ordinary’ children. There was some division between the
‘book people’ who drew attention to the excellent books available and the ‘child people’
who pointed to the large numbers of children who did not willingly read them. In
succeeding years, because divisions in society have lessened or at any rate been played
down, and because both writers and their fictional characters and settings have been
THE WORLD OF CHILDREN’S LITERATURE 675