drawn from a broader stratum, the class divide in the books themselves has become less
visible. But in spite of all efforts the aim of extending the readership base has not been
achieved as fully as might be hoped. Book buying and reading remain largely
characteristic of middle-class homes.
Oddly, perhaps, it was several years before the war itself as a subject of fiction for
children and young people gave rise to books of much interest. Ian Serraillier’s The
Silver Sword (1956), about the trek of three children across war-torn Europe in search
of their parents, was probably the first. Later came Jill Paton Walsh’s The Dolphin
Crossing (1967) and Fireweed (1969), Nina Bawden’s Carrie’s War (1973), Robert
Westall’s The Machine-Gunners (1975) and Blitzcat (1989), and Michelle Magorian’s
immensely popular Goodnight, Mister Tom (1981).
In general, the adventure story has had a hard time in the post-war years, perhaps
because of its vulnerability to competition from television. In former times, books were a
way to travel in the imagination, to see different places, meet different people; now
television puts distant lands and peoples vividly before our eyes. Similarly, the essence
of adventure is physical action, which films and TV can show with maximum immediacy.
Books still have their advantages, even when dealing with action: they can more
effectively than TV tell how it felt and what people thought about it, help the reader to
become involved rather than merely watch from outside, and raise moral, social and
philosophical issues. Writers who have explored these possibilities while at the same time
keeping their readers turning the page include Peter Dickinson, an author with an
energetic and speculative mind, in The Blue Hawk (1976), Eva (1988) and other titles,
and Gillian Cross, with Born of the Sun (1983), On the Edge (1984) and Wolf (1990).
The historical novel achieved great prestige and prominence in the early postwar years.
The dominant figure in this field was Rosemary Sutcliff, whose novel of Roman Britain
The Eagle of the Ninth (1954) was the first to appear in a sequence of books which
remained the core of her work and whose theme was the making of Britain. There were
many other writers of sound, traditional historical fiction. The Sutcliff protagonist was
nearly always male and of what would now be called ‘officer class’; but there was a new
tendency, initiated by Geoffrey Trease before the Second World War and continued after
it, to see events from a point further down the social scale and to consider their impact
on the common people. There was also fiction set in a past created by the writer rather
than reported upon: notably the highly personal eighteenth century in which Leon
Garfield set his larger-than-life novels. And there was unhistory, as in the James III
books of Joan Aiken, set in a Britain ruled over by that previously unknown monarch,
with the Hanoverians plotting to bring Bonnie Prince Georgie to the throne. ‘Straight’
historical or period novels have to some extent lost ground in recent years; there is a
self-fulfilling belief at large that ‘children don’t like history, so we won’t give it to them’.
But there are counter-instances: Jill Paton Walsh’s A Parcel of Patterns (1983) and Grace
(1992) and Geraldine McCaughrean’s A Little Lower than the Angels (1987) among them.
Fantasy, long a speciality of British writing for children, has held its place through the
post-war years. Traditional themes have continued to give good service: miniaturisation,
for instance, in Mary Norton’s The Borrowers (1952) and its successors, about the small
people who live in odd corners of old houses and survive by ‘borrowing’ from the human
occupants, and Pauline Clarke’s The Twelve and the Genii (1962) which brings to life the
676 BRITISH CHILDREN’S LITERATURE: A HISTORICAL OVERVIEW