Abstract
One of the most frequently cited studies of modern children’s fiction and its relationship to the making of Edwardian society is Humphrey Carpenter’s Secret Gardens: A Study of the Golden Age of Children’s Literature (1985). The title, however, is double-edged. It is not only an account of a canonical set of writers, including J. M. Barrie, Kenneth Grahame, and E. Nesbit, but it is also an analysis of how these writers posited a ‘Golden Age,’ a ‘secret garden,’ in their works. Carpenter plausibly argues that these writers constructed an Arcadian facsimile of childhood, a fantasy world into which they could project their own personal, spiritual and psychological anxieties, an emotional haven into which they could retreat. Following Carpenter’s lead, historians of the period, such as Hugh Cunningham (152–8), have shown how the efforts of educational and social reformers became interlinked with the sentimentalized childhood of children’s literature. At the root of both child welfare and children’s novels, such as Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1908), lay a vision of England as Albion that has been re-explored in recent years, most notably by Peter Ackroyd.
Published Version
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