The North of England in Children’s Literature

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According to Hunt, magic and danger may occur around the ‘Celtic’ fringes, but the north of England is a blank on this map: ‘England is surrounded by wild mountains and wilder men’ (Hunt 1987: 13). Hunt’s remarks connect to a widespread assumption that the nostalgic pastoral idyll is the predominant and most suitable form for children’s literature, especially in its so-called Golden Age in the first half of the twentieth century. Humphrey Carpenter’s book Secret Gardens (1985) is a prime example of this critical tendency. He characterizes the writers of the ‘Golden Age’ of children’s literature as ‘The Arcadians’, and pastoral metaphors recur in his chapter titles. In his reading ‘the whole image of the Enchanted Place, the Arcadia, the Never Never Land, the Secret Garden’ is central to the writers of the ‘Golden Age’ (Carpenter 1985: 1, 100, 209). The stereotypical associations of the ‘North’ do not seem to connect to this pastoral model. As Peter Davidson puts it in his recent book on The Idea of North in (mostly adult) literature and culture, ‘To say, “we leave for the north tonight” brings immediate thoughts of a harder place, a place of dearth: uplands, adverse weather, remoteness from cities’ (Davidson 2005: 9).KeywordsStereotypical AssociationChild ProtagonistExotic LocationModern FictionEnglish LandscapeThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.