Why children’s books?

In​ 1803, Samuel Taylor Coleridge sat in his astronomer’s study in Keswick, and wrote in his notebook his central Principle of Criticism:

never to lose an opportunity of reasoning against the head-dimming, heart-damping principle of judging a work by its defects, not its beauties. Every work must have the former – we know it a priori – but every work has not the latter, and he, therefore, who discovers them, tells you something that you could not with certainty, or even with probability, have anticipated.

It is the work of a writer for children to do the same for the world itself. Children have not yet built wide hinterlands: to them, the world is still opaque and full of necessary bewilderment. Those who write for children have the chance to point them towards beauty that they do not yet know exists: towards versions of joy that they have not yet imagined possible.

In being written for those to whom the world is new and strange, for those who are without economic power, and for those who need short, sharp, bold stories, children’s literature can be a form of distillation: of what it means to hope, to fear, to yearn, distilled down and down into a piece of concentrated meaning. But you cannot claim to be a magician and fail to produce the rabbit. Let us begin, therefore, at the beginning, with some beginnings:

When Mary Lennox was sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with her uncle everybody said she was the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen. It was true, too.

The night Max wore his wolf suit and made mischief of one kind and another his mother called him ‘Wild thing!’ and Max said ‘I’ll eat you up!’ so he was sent to bed without eating anything.

Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, ‘and what is the use of a book,’ thought Alice, ‘without pictures or conversation?’

Once upon a time there was …
        ‘A King!’ my little readers will say at once.
        No, children, you are wrong. Once upon a time there was a piece of wood.

All children, except one, grow up.

All children grow up: those who write for children need, therefore, to write fiction that will speak to them both now and in their future. I have two work lives – I write non-fiction for adults, and fiction for children. The question I am most often asked is: which is harder? Children’s writing is by far the work I find hardest, because it has its own urgent imperatives, and its own laws, and those laws are both the laws of writing and the laws of childhood: laws that must be taken seriously.

It was W.H. Auden who said: ‘there are good books which are only for adults, because their comprehension presupposes adult experiences, but there are no good books which are only for children.’ The great discipline of children’s fiction is that it has to be written for everyone: because if it is not for everyone then it’s not for anyone at all. It offers us the specific joy of finding our commonality: we can all meet on the pages of A.A. Milne in a way that we cannot on the pages of Jacques Derrida.

Children’s laws were not always acknowledged. The very first children’s books in English were instruction manuals for good behaviour. One of the earliest, The Babees Book, from around 1475, is a list of instructions: ‘Your nose, your teeth, your nails, from picking keep.’ It’s striking how many of the early children’s conduct manuals focused on nose-picking. The 15th-century Little Children’s Little Book orders that you should not ‘wipe your nose or nostrils, else men will say you are come of churls’, while Urbanitatis instructs Tudor children to keep their hands ‘from dirtying the cloth/There-on thou shalt not thy nose wipe.’ Urbanitatis was used in the education of the Duke of Norfolk, grandfather of Henry VIII’s most unfortunate wives, Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard, to whom he may have passed on impeccable nasal hygiene. The text does not, alas, teach how to avoid being beheaded by a king.

It wasn’t until 1744 that John Newbery published what is generally thought to be the first children’s book: A Little Pretty Pocket-Book, Intended for the Instruction and Amusement of Little Master Tommy and Pretty Miss Polly … The Use of which will infallibly make Tommy a good Boy, and Polly a good Girl. It was immensely popular in England and does make a gesture towards fiction (Jack the Giant Killer writes letters to the children), but it also contains ‘One Hundred and Sixty three Rules for the Behaviour of Children’. These include ‘Spit not in the Room, but in the Corner, and rub it with thy Foot’ and ‘Reprove thy Companions as oft as there shall be occasion, for any evil … or indecent Action.’ Children were to be tamed, disciplined, quietened.

Or, if you are Tolstoy, they were to be extravagantly harrowed. Throughout the 1870s and 1880s, Tolstoy wrote stories for the children who lived on his family estate; they went on to become popular throughout Russia and summon up the same feelings of delight and warmth that you find in Anna Karenina’s suicide scene. There is a lion who tears apart a puppy, a tree cut down ‘screaming in unbearable pain’, a dead bird, a dead hare, another dead bird. There is a disputation on ‘why there is evil’, in which a hermit tells us that ‘from our bodies comes all the evil in the world.’ The blurb on the back of my edition says the stories will ‘captivate and delight children of all ages’, always assuming that those children have a more than usually potent appetite for dead puppies. They work, like many English children’s books of the time, on the assumption that children are not to be trusted with the freedom of pleasure: they might break something with it.

Over the decades, however, children’s literature slowly uncoupled itself from strident moralising and nostril anxiety. Women’s suffrage and trade unions gained strength, childhood literacy rates soared, and children’s books became more than ways to regulate and admonish the child heart. They began to take the actual desires of actual children into account. As grown-ups came to recognise the childhood imagination as something unique to itself, something wild and immense, so the books, in turn, became wild and immense offerings. From being engines of control, they began offering visions of how various good and evil might be. They work to disprove the Anna Karenina principle that happy families are all alike: they offer a multiplicity of models for what delight might look like.

Take the Moomins. Tove Jansson published the first book in 1945, introducing readers to the collected family comprised of young Moomintroll and his parents, the Snorkmaiden, Little My, Sniff and Snufkin. The Moomins achieve something it would be difficult to find in adult literature: they are heroes, and they are deeply, profoundly strange. Their strangeness is accepted without fluster or fanfare. The tiny, perpetually irate Little My, of whom Jansson writes, ‘She was just a glimpse of something determined and independent that had no need to show itself,’ is an icon to girls made uneasy by the demand that they should charm the world. Little My bites, she tells us, because she wants to. Snufkin is a visionary who comes and goes without causing complaint or clamour, who owns both nothing, he says, and also ‘the whole world’.

In children’s books, including my own, there are many orphans – largely because adults get in the way of adventure – but for Moomintroll, the family is itself the site of adventure. The ties of family and community are not a burden or duty but a source of life. ‘Moomintroll’s mother and father always welcomed all their friends in the same quiet way, just adding another bed and putting another leaf in the dining room table.’ The Moomins would add you, however strange and ungainly your inner or outer self, to their table, without question.

I would never wish to do without the power of the orphan story, however. It has a burning warmth and clarity to it. It matters to us all, because we all become orphans in the end. The orphan story has traditionally offered a way for both children and adults to imagine their fundamental aloneness. Francis Spufford writes that, among the Hopi people of the American South-West, it is impossible to be an orphan. No child could slip through the net of family bond: if parents die, a grandparent, aunt, third cousin, someone will step in to fulfil that role. But many Hopi stories centre on an orphan abandoned in the harsh wilderness: abandonment must be imagined for certain elements of human experience – our ultimate solitude and our interconnectedness – to be understood.

The orphan story points to another possible version of heroism offered by children’s books: it opens the space for surrogacy. Think of E. Nesbit’s 1905 novel The Railway Children. The three siblings aren’t orphans, but the removal of their father and the absence of their working mother allows for other figures – Mr Perks the railway porter, the Old Gentleman on the train – to take on the role of protector and fairy godmother. To read The Railway Children is to be told: despite the spinning and chaos of the world, there will be adults who will fight for you.

British children’s books have often taught other truths – that the best thing you can be is white, upper or middle class, and if you are a girl, quiet. Many have taught children to revere the aristocracy, conquer the wilderness and condescend to the poor. Our girl heroes have nearly always been thin, and their thinness offered as a shorthand for their spare clarity of vision, as if we cannot fathom a quick mind in a large body.

I’ve been visiting schools for more than a decade, and often the children and I write a story together. In some classrooms more than half the kids have English as a second language, but the names they suggest for the story are always similar: Elizabeth, Henry, Jack. You can only be a hero, we have told children, if you have that kind of name: names licked clean by kings and queens. One of the highest compliments in Kipling’s writing is: ‘You’re a white man.’ That is changing now, albeit slowly: books such as Malorie Blackman’s Pig Heart Boy, Patrice Lawrence’s triumphant People Like Stars and Tola Okogwu’s Onyeka and the Academy of the Sun are building a library in which all children are able to find themselves in the books they read.

How, then, is children’s fiction made? I could no more summarise what’s remarkable about The Wind in the Willows or Frank Cottrell-Boyce’s Cosmic than I could sing all the parts in a hundred-instrument symphony, but there are common threads that run through the children’s books that have endured and the new books that children currently devour. If, as a practitioner, I were to draw up a list it would include: autonomy, peril, justice, secrets, small jokes, large jokes, revelations, animals, multitudinous versions of love, inventions – and food.

Food gives both solid reality and delicious longing to children’s books. Brian Jacques, author of the Redwall series about monastic chivalric mice, was a milkman when he began volunteering to read at a school for the blind. He found himself horrified by the quality of the books he was reading, and decided to write his own – and, because the children were blind, he accentuated senses other than sight: smell, sound, temperature, texture and, most important of all to children, taste. The food in Redwall is the thing most of its readers remember: it gives the story the rich shine of desire. You might, were you a Redwall mouse, have a feast of ‘tender freshwater shrimp garnished with cream and rose leaves, devilled barley pearls in acorn purée, apple and carrot chews, marinated cabbage stalks steeped in creamed white turnip with nutmeg’.

It’s easier to trust a writer who writes great food: they are a person who has paid attention to the world. Children have very little control over what or when they eat, and evolution has given them a sweet tooth far stronger than an adult’s to ensure they consume enough calories during growth spurts – of course their longings are colossal. Fictional food provokes real hunger: it makes the story into a bodily thing. Food is a way to open the door to the space in which the capacity for imaginative and intellectual freedom is built: you lure them in with real appetites.

Perhaps the best book ever written about postwar rationing is Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Published in 1964, ten years after rationing ended in Britain, it has an entire nation’s hunger for fresh tastes and wild luxury encoded in its pages. And there is The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, written in 1950, when sugar and fruit and treats were still scarce (in 1942, according to a survey, many children did not believe that bananas were real): Edmund’s Turkish Delight stands in for every lost and longed-for glory. What child forgets the seismically disappointing discovery that the English version tastes like jellied flowers dusted in soap powder?

What else did I long for as a child? I wanted action. I wanted characters brought right to the very edge of themselves. To put a child character in danger is in a way to honour them – to believe in their capacity to rise to meet it – and the child reader, in their self-identification, is honoured alongside. I loved a villain meeting a dramatic end. I loved the major chord of justice done, of the crocodile devouring Hook, of the Men in Grey vanished into dust by Momo, of Mrs Coulter falling forever through a chasm in the fabric of the universe. I craved books that said to a child: the world will demand your bravery and your endurance. Practise it here, where the imagination is the first way you experience transformation.

But I also craved domestic fiction. That is action, albeit action of a different kind. It was unimportant to me whether the action was a race around the world or the human heart shifting in a kitchen, but I needed movement. A children’s book has to have kinetic energy, but it can be inner or outer. In that sense the action of Judy Blume or Jacqueline Wilson – action that is largely invisible to watching adults, and where the peril is the peril of human relationships – is as colossal as that of Treasure Island. And books teach you to see urgent value in daily detail: it is a fundamental stupidity, they tell you, not to see that the quotidian is where truth can be both most readily discovered, and most readily twisted. Books like The Secret Garden prepared me for Middlemarch and Moll Flanders and Madame Bovary.

So I approach a blank page with the understanding that children need food, and adventure (and with adventure, the promise that an adversary can and will be overcome), and a microscope to investigate the detail of daily life. But children also have a craving for jokes. A joke is a form of cherishing as well as a form of novelty. It takes a special kind of intelligence to write Pooh becoming wedged in his door, and Rabbit asking: ‘Do you mind if I use your back legs as a towel-horse? Because, I mean, there they are – doing nothing – and it would be very convenient.’ Or when Toad of Toad Hall, disguised as a washerwoman, makes his way out of prison, declaring in high dudgeon: ‘I have a very elegant figure – for what I am.’ A good joke exposes nonsense, and looks with generous ruthlessness at our self-interest and self-contradictions. A great deal in the world is shoddy and foolish, cruel and inexplicable, but a joke is a way of slicing through it.

Yet the thing I longed for most in children’s books were stories that would salute the reader’s intelligence, acknowledging that though small and hectic and clumsy without, we were not small and hectic and clumsy within. Some of that saluting is in trusting a child to be able to bear sorrow or terror: Charlotte’s death in Charlotte’s Web; Raymond Briggs’s Snowman melting into nothing; the blood and horror of fairy tales. Children can metabolise more fictional grief than we give them credit for. There’s a death in my most recent book which led a child to send me a letter that ended in a portrait of me, and underneath it the word murderer.

Some of the salute to a child’s capacity is in tone, and language. The great children’s writers trusted children with irony and with sophisticated ideas: they trusted them to see in language a set, not of rules, but of possibilities. It was Beatrix Potter who taught me the words ‘disconsolately’, ‘ponderously’ and, of course, this: ‘It is said that the effect of eating too much lettuce is “soporific”. I have never felt sleepy after eating lettuce; but then I am not a rabbit.’ My hope would be that children, in reading books that do not defer to their youth in terms of vocabulary, will come to find in language an ally against those who would commandeer erudition in order to dominate.

At the end of my list of things I longed for is the most divisive among both child and adult readers: magic. I longed for the impossible. For as long as we have told stories, we have told of impossible creatures – cyclopes, mermaids, krakens – and impossible objects: you find rings that make the wearer invisible as far back as Plato.

What is​ fantasy for? You do not suddenly start needing philosophy on your eighteenth birthday: you have always needed it. Fantasy is philosophy’s more gorgeously painted cousin. You can’t just tell a child a blunt fact about the human heart and expect them to believe you. That’s not how it works. You can’t scribble on a Post-it note for a 12-year-old: your strangeness is worth keeping, or your love will matter. You need to show it. And fantasy, with its limitless scope, gives us a way of offering longhand proof for otherwise inarticulable ideas: endurance and hatred and regret, and power and passion and death. As Tolkien said, in an interview in 1968, ‘human stories are practically always about one thing, aren’t they? Death. The inevitability of death.’

For more than three thousand years we have been inventing mythical creatures, but the reason we have done so is less clear. One theory is that we built creatures to match the inexplicable remains we found. The Indigenous American mythological beast, the Thunder Bird, may well have stemmed from T-Rex skeletons. The historian of ancient science Adrienne Mayor has pointed to hundreds of instances where fossil discoveries map onto local mythmaking. ‘Someone who discovered a tyrannosaurid forelimb with its peculiar pair of claws, and perhaps with the elongated, birdlike shoulder blade, might well have identified the fossil as part of the skeleton of some mysterious bird.’ Shark teeth left over from Neanderthal meals have been read as dragon teeth.

I’ve spent the last few years reading about mythical beasts for my book Impossible Creatures, and what’s striking is how very blurry the line has been between real and imagined. In Pliny the Elder’s Natural History of 77 ad – a book which is often called the first encyclopedia – there is a description of the jaculus dragon. In the 15th century, the theologian Felix Fabri reported that he had glimpsed a unicorn in the Sinai desert, its horn four feet long and ‘wondrous brilliant’. And if you lived in the 17th century, you might have believed griffins were real; in 1652, King Charles I’s chaplain, Alexander Ross, said: ‘If any man say that now such animals are not to be seen; I answer … they may be removed to places of more remoteness and security, inaccessible to men.’

Not everyone loves a dragon. There are many attacks you can level at fantasy (often with justice): escapist, ridiculous, indulgent, coy, repetitive. One of the Inklings – nobody agrees which – is supposed to have groaned at Tolkien’s reading: ‘By god, not another bloody elf!’ Fantasy, with its limitless possibilities, has lured some of the worst writing around. There are books that give you nothing except relentless battles, didactic hectoring or crass sentimentalism – but then there are many very bad songs, and it does not turn us off the concept of music. There are many bad dinners, but it does not turn us off the concept of feasting.

At its best, you can turn to fantasy, and in particular fantasy for children, for the essence of things. Ursula Le Guin takes her guiding line from Tolkien, who, she said, never sought to deny that fantasy is escapist: that is its power and glory. ‘If a soldier is imprisoned by the enemy, don’t we consider it his duty to escape? The moneylenders, the know-nothings, the authoritarians have us all in prison; if we value the freedom of the mind and soul, if we’re partisans of liberty, then it’s our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can.’

Fantasy can be a bulwark against the mania of strong men and capitalist dogma, a way of laying bare the real-life fantasies that have been offered to us as actual, literal truth: rampant nationalism and war-mongering. Le Guin writes: ‘Fantasy is a literature particularly useful for embodying and examining the real difference between good and evil. In an America where our reality may seem degraded to posturing patriotism and self-righteous brutality, imaginative literature continues to question what heroism is, to examine the roots of power and to offer moral alternatives.’ Fantasy does not need, always, to be the clash of sword against sword: in the finest fantasy, it is the clash of idea against idea.

C.S. Lewis wrote that tales of the marvellous are their own, real thing: fictional, yes, but also solid pieces of knowledge. They are ‘actual additions to life; they give, like certain rare dreams, sensations we never had before, and enlarge our conception of the range of possible experience.’ The greatest children’s fantasies were worth your time when you were twelve, and they are equally worth it now. They keep the imagination sharp, and big, and hungry. They remind us that the imagination is not an optional extra, which we can humour in our children but safely discard in adulthood. It is at the very heart of everything. It is deadly serious, the necessary condition of political change, of love. It is the sharpest tool of ethics. Edmund Burke popularised the term ‘moral imagination’ to describe the ability of ethical perception to step beyond the limits of the fleeting moment and beyond the limits of a single person’s experience. It is the imagination that allows us to push beyond convention and imposed authority, beyond that which the powerful would tell you is inevitable and everlasting. ‘We live in capitalism,’ Le Guin wrote. ‘Its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.’

E. Nesbit will not make you into either a saint or a socialist. But the imagination is the primary and first site of resistance. The market abhors all values that are not the values of the market: children’s books, to a great extent because they are written for those who cannot participate in the market, can offer resistance to a vision of the good life which is a built on a hegemony of acquisition. Children’s books insist in having faith in vast truths that lie beyond consumption and display. Their utopianism is that of the Moomins and Pippi Longstocking: it offers an experiential microcosm of a more ideal world.

I do not find writing for children easy: I feel that I fail the vast majority of the time to pin down exactly what I wanted, in tone and pace and truth to the page, and, as I do not enjoy the experience of failing, the experience of writing is sharp-edged. But it is worth it, in part for the rare shock of joy when a joke or a plot line falls into place, like wooden hinges perfectly matched, and so I go on.

The other, larger reason I go on is that I believe in the necessity of offering children versions of wonder. I don’t mean the twee commodified vision of wonder we’re sold – the Instagram post of a mountain lake with an inspirational quote. I mean real wonder: the willed astonishment that the world, in all its dangers and clumsiness, in all its beauties and miracles, demands of us. Active, informed, iron-willed wonder is a skill, not a gift: you have to work at it. And you cannot remain in awe of that which is familiar, so the only way to maintain wonder is to learn: learn, and keep learning. I was taught that by Merlin, in T.H. White’s The Sword in the Stone. Learning, he says, is

the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love and lose your moneys to a monster, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then – to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. It is the only thing which the poor mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting.

G.K. Chesterton wrote that the world will never starve for want of wonders, but only for want of wonder. Children’s books, at their best, are engines of wonder, accessible to us right at the beginning of our understanding: books written to offer the still new human a vision of the world not only as it is, but as it might be.

Children’s books are, too, the great floodlit gateway to ideas. They are a way into other books: a point of entry into the chain reactions of literature. Impossible Creatures is in part based – very loosely – on an unfinished epic poem by John Donne called Metempsychosis, about a soul born from the first apple of the first tree, which eternally transmigrates into new lives. Donne abandoned the poem, it’s said, because he came to fear it would be seen as blasphemous, but the Victorian editor Alexander Grosart used it as proof that ‘as an Imaginator, it is impossible to place Donne too high.’ I stole some of Donne’s imaginating, to invent a person, a girl, who discovers that she was born with that soul inside her and so has access to all the hard-garnered knowledge of mankind. I very rarely tell children the story’s origin, because if you had told me as a child that a book had at its heart an unfinished epic poem by a Renaissance poet, I would have taken that as a watertight reason not to read it. So to children I talk about adventure and delight, flying coats and man-eating unicorns, of what it would be like to hold a restless baby griffin in your arms – but, maybe, one or two of those children will grow up to read Metempsychosis, and they will think: Yes. I have met you before. And the spark of recognition – of something fitting into a wider world of meaning, of books interweaving with books, of the past still speaking into the present – will be theirs.

It all comes down​ , I think, to this: a children’s book is not a luxury good. It is fundamental to our culture, to the grown-ups we become, to the society we build. If, as an adult, you become lost, children’s books stand waiting, with their distilled vision of that which can never be lost. But we are faring poorly in the UK: we risk battening closed the doorway to imagined lands for millions of children. Sixteen per cent of our adults are functionally illiterate. A study by the National Literacy Trust in November 2024 found that reading for pleasure was at a historic low: only a third of British children aged between eight and eighteen reported reading for pleasure in their spare time, a precipitous decline of more than 8 per cent from the previous year. But how are they to love books if they have no books? The National Literacy Trust estimates that nearly a million children in the UK don’t own a single book of their own. Between 2010 and 2020, almost eight hundred libraries were closed – and of those that now remain, a third have reduced their hours. Our government’s spending on libraries is far lower than most European countries: £12 annually per capita, compared to Finland’s £50.

Alongside our fight to get books into children’s lives, we face the eruption in social media use among the young. You can’t get a child hooked on reading when there is an alternative pastime that will eat their attention like a wolf. A quarter of three and four-year-olds in the UK own their own smartphone. It’s hard to talk about children and social media without sounding puritanical. When the pencil with a rubber at the end was introduced in 1858, there were fears that the ability to erase mistakes would cause children to become intellectually lazy. But I think that this is different: not least because there is so much money to be made from your child’s attention, and their data, and their desires.

Social media is designed to grip like iron. It will solve the panic of boredom, but it cannot take you beyond itself: its model is devised to hold you tight. And its use maps squarely onto inequality. Studies have shown over and over that the poorest children, disproportionately children of colour, and above all, those children whose parents work the longest hours, who are precariously housed, for whom quiet is a luxury, spend the most time on their phones. It’s near impossible to resist, as an individual parent, this great, uncontrolled experiment with your child’s consciousness. A young person learns far faster than an adult, is quicker to process and keep knowledge, but they are also the easiest target to exploit, discipline and manipulate for profit. If we want child readers, we will need, together, to find ways to resist.

In The Republic, Plato asks: ‘Shall we carelessly allow children to hear any casual tales which may be devised by casual persons, and to receive into their minds ideas for the most part the very opposite of those which we should wish them to have when they are grown up?’

I once heard the current children’s laureate, Frank Cottrell-Boyce, describe a conversation with the Swiss Roma novelist Mariella Mehr. Born a member of the itinerant Yenish people, Mehr had been forcibly separated from her family by the Kinder der Landstrasse programme, moved between sixteen orphanages and three reformatories, and later imprisoned. Cottrell-Boyce asked her: ‘How did you know this wasn’t all there was? How did you know that you deserved more? How did you know that life could be better?’ She said: ‘I had read Heidi.’

There’s no doubt that reading for pleasure as a child can change your life. It is a key predictor of economic success later in life. But the main reason to help children seek out books is this: if you cut a person off from reading, you’re a thief. You cut them off from the song that humanity has been singing for thousands of years. You cut them off from what we have laid out for the next generation, and the next. It’s in the technology of writing that we’ve preserved our boldest, most original thought, our best jokes and most generous comfort. To fail to do everything we can to help children hear that song is a cruelty – and a stupidity – for which we should not expect to be forgiven. We need to be infinitely more furious that there are children without books.

Impossible Creatures asks: if you could see us – humanity – from the beginning, in all our destruction and fury, and all our glories and ravishments, what would you say to us, on balance: yes, or no? The book says, over and over, yes. It is more optimistic than I am, because my dread for the world is not good meat: it will nourish nobody. Antonio Gramsci famously wrote, in Letters from Prison, three years into being jailed for his criticism of Mussolini’s fascist state: ‘I am a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will.’ There’s a willed optimism inherent in the act of writing for children. You’ll find it in murder mysteries by Sharna Jackson, in Jill Barklem’s Brambly Hedge, in dragon taming. To write those books is to insist that though the world burns, and there is more fire to come, it will always be worth teaching children to rejoice. It will always be worth showing them how to build an internal blueprint for happiness. Nothing about being alive demands joy. But, over and over, the great children’s books insist on it: on joy as a way that humans both create and are given meaning. Joy is insisted on through talking spiders, and rats in rowing boats, and in the vast promise of an opening line: ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.’