Introduction: What Happened?The Children's Bookand the Question of History, 1895–1919

Abstract

Is fiction which makes fact alive, fact too? He knew there was a good chance of him dying, and the pots dying with him. In a distinguished career spanning five decades, A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book marks her most sustained return to the world of nineteenth-century culture since the phenomenal success of Possession: A Romance (1990): a finely crafted novel that makes connections between the academic world of the 1980s and two imaginary Victorian poets. Possession, perhaps more than any of Byatt's other works, spurred the thriving scholarly industry that has developed around her expansive oeuvre.3 Like this earlier prize-winning novel, which was adapted for film in 2002 and for BBC radio in 2011–12, The Children's Book is an imposing contribution to a flourishing canon that critics have since the 1990s labelled neo-Victorian. It evinces a fascination with a wealth of information that suggests its fictional universe is historically accurate down to the smallest detail. Moreover, the narrative, which begins in 1895 and ends during the spring following the Armistice, carefully alludes to numerous real personages, including celebrity-seeking poet Rupert Brooke, homophile socialist Edward Carpenter, Carpenter's working-class lover George Merrill, as well as Oscar Wilde and countless others, in the course of weaving together the stories of several artistically inclined main characters. These protagonists, too, bear more than passing resemblances to real-life figures. In particular, The Children's Book is haunted by the life stories of children's writer E. Nesbit, Nesbit's unreliable spouse Hubert Bland and sexually abusive designer Eric Gill. Since the mid-1980s, many of these individuals have been the subject of substantial biographical studies that open readers' eyes to the creative, intellectual, and, notably, sexual shifts that took place in circles linked with progressive movements such as the Arts and Crafts Movement (dating from 1884), the Fellowship of the New Life (founded in 1883), and its influential splinter group, the Fabian Society (established a year later).4 Especially strong is the guiding presence of Julia Briggs's biography of Nesbit, whose life story at times parallels that of Olive Wellwood, the talented children's writer whose fairy stories in part account for the novel's generational title.