Malory’s Magic Book: King Arthur and the Child, 1862–1980 by Elly McCausland

Abstract

Reviewed by: Malory’s Magic Book: King Arthur and the Child, 1862–1980 by Elly McCausland Ashley Johnson (bio) Elly McCausland. Malory’s Magic Book: King Arthur and the Child, 1862–1980. D. S. Brewer, 2019. In her study, Malory’s Magic Book: King Arthur and the Child 1862–1980, Elly McCausland tracks King Arthur’s location at what she deems “the crossing places” that inspire adaptations of Thomas Malory’s influential Morte Darthur. In doing so, she maps both Arthur’s and Malory’s places in the development of Arthuriana for children (189). As McCausland makes clear, she is not so much interested in the children who read Malory’s Morte and its adaptations as she is in the authors who invent the child-reader for those texts. Her work, which surveys an impressive number of narratives by multiple authors, fills a substantial gap by addressing the long overlooked relationship between Arthuriana and children’s literature. McCausland begins by outlining the significance of Malory’s Morte, arguing that as a case study it suggests that “shifting conceptions of the child—as bold and adventurous, socially fragile, magical and innocent—actually manifested themselves in texts that either attempted to engage with these children or were shaped by a profound authorial interest in the realm of childness. It reveals the complexities of interacting with the child as a writer, parent, teacher, or through memory of one’s own childhood” (6–7). McCausland then breaks her discussion into five chapters and a conclusion, each of which investigates either a specific selection of texts and their corresponding illustrations or an author who has either revised or reimagined Malory’s tale. Her first chapter focuses on abridgements of Malory’s narrative, and the subsequent chapters examine adaptations. Chapter 1 surveys the works of J. T. Knowles, Sidney Lanier, Charles Henry Hanson, and Margaret Vere Farrington. Here, McCausland highlights the ways that authors emphasized the enduring, moral themes of knighthood and adventure, and expanded Malory’s definition of chivalric masculinity to involve both the physical and the moral. Significant here is McCausland’s contention that these abridgements rely on Tennyson’s Idylls. Using Tennyson as a model, the authors hoped to craft a narrative appropriate for young readers by following Tennyson’s strategy of making the Morte ethically suitable for Victorian audiences. Thus, ultimately, these texts were created as attempts to popularize and moralize the Morte. Chapter 2 continues this discussion through an analysis of the works of American author Howard Pyle (1903–10) and British author Henry Gilbert (1911). Pyle and Gilbert reinterpret [End Page 124] Malory’s knightly adventures as “an example to children, specifically boys, by reformulating [Morte’s] martial adventures to emphasise a series of social and moral qualities linked to the development of idealised manhood” (57). These authors use their narratives to consider the value of adventurous manhood in early twentieth-century Britain and America by positioning the knights as youthful. Significant here is a discussion of the late Victorian and early twentieth-century trend to offer inspirational, didactic stories that would instill manly courage in the hearts of boys, suggesting that boys could be capable of heroic deeds. In line with this, McCausland juxtaposes the rise of the Boy Scout movement with the dissemination of these texts, arguing that these mechanisms worked together to offer boys a way to indulge in fantasies of risk-taking of knighthood while remaining socially responsible in their everyday lives. McCausland returns to a survey of multiple texts in chapter 4 with a review of five adaptations that demonstrate the versatility of the Arthurian narrative. These works by Phyllis Briggs, Roger Lancelyn Green, Alice Hadfield, Antonia Fraser, and Barbara Leonie Picard are obviously influenced by Malory’s Morte, but they alter his materials drastically by embellishing the narrative extensively, changing or deleting scenes, and making the narrative relatable to mid-twentieth century readers. Here, Mc-Causland assesses the strategies shaping these adaptations, from magic and mysticism, and from spirituality and psychological drama, to reveal “unstable constructions of childhood and the child reader” (117). In addition to an extensive survey of Malory-inspired texts, McCausland focuses on the lives and writings of T. H. White...