The Children's Book

Freud.

A concomitant, but not consequent, backwards stare was the intense interest in, and nostalgia for, childhood. The men and women of the Golden Age, Hesiod wrote, lived in an eternal spring, for hundreds of years, always youthful, fed on acorns from a great oak, on wild fruits, on honey. In the Silver Age, which is less written about, the people lived for 100 years as children, without growing up, and then quite suddenly aged and died. The Fabians and the social scientists, writers and teachers saw, in a way earlier generations had not, that children were people, with identities and desires and intelligences. They saw that they were neither dolls, nor toys, nor miniature adults. They saw, many of them, that children needed freedom, needed not only to learn, and be good, but to play and be wild.

But they saw this, so many of them, out of a desire of their own for a perpetual childhood, a Silver Age. One aspect of it was male clubbable behaviour, eating school suet pudding in gloomy surroundings, playing japes and jests on fellow house guests, retreating into boating expeditions, and hikes, and picnics, playing elaborate practical jokes on the unsuspecting, disguising themselves as Middle Eastern potentates (Virginia Woolf) or newspaper reporters (Baden-Powell in the army in India). They were good at playing with real children—H. G. Wells turning a nursery into a model field of war, or a series of railway junctions, Baden-Powell, again, amusing the children by pretending that his feathered helmet was a chicken. They used waggish school jokes in their letters: Tee hee! My wig! They wrote wonderful tales, also in letters, for their solemn children, of messing about in boats, of picnic baskets, of getting lost in the Wild Wood in the winter and finding a comfortable hearth underground in a badger’s holt, of tooting horns in automobiles and making idiots of the Law.

Richard Jefferies wrote about Bevis in the 1880s. In Wood Magic Bevis is a small child who could speak the languages of the woodland creatures. He can speak their language, but his vision is schoolboy and lordly, unlike that more subtle forest child Mowgli. He knows spiders are male, and the thrushes he converses with kindly allow him to collect one egg, as long as he leaves one, and tells no other boys.

In Bevis, the Story of a Boy he makes a raft, and a camp, and plays at being an explorer in the deserts and jungles of the Empire. He plays at making stockades, like Jim in Treasure Island and Robinson Crusoe, and goes home for tea and bread and honey.

In 1901 James Barrie wrote The Boy Castaways for the Llewellyn-Davies boys, Peter Rabbit was published, and Kipling published Kim, the tale of a boy scout. In 1902 E. Nesbit wrote Five Children and It, a tale where resourceful, unwise children meet a sand-fairy. In that year Barrie published The Little White Bird, in which an embryonic Peter Pan, the little boy who wouldn’t grow up, made his first appearance. This book was given by the sage naturalist W. H. Hudson to David Garnett, son of the publisher Edward Garnett, and Constance Garnett, the translator of Tolstoi, Dostoevsky and Turgenev. David Garnett, who did grow up, in some ways at least—he became a “libertine” on principle and attracted both men and women—found the book sickening, and returned it to the giver, saying he did not like it. Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up, was staged (in a primitive form) in 1904. Rupert Brooke went to see it twelve times. In 1906 Puck of Pook’s Hill appeared, and so did The Railway Children and Benjamin Bunny. It was seriously suggested that the great writing of the time was writing for children, which was also read by grown-ups.

Kenneth Grahame, who wrote for the decadent Yellow Book in its golden days, published Pagan Papers in 1893, TheGoldenAge in 1895, Dream Days in 1898 and The Wind in the Willows in 1908. He had what might be thought of as a grown-up job; he was Secretary to the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street.

He married in 1899. He was forty and an archetypal pipe-smoking bachelor. His new wife turned up to the wedding in an old white muslin dress—“dew-wet from a morning walk,” with a wilting daisy chain round her neck. She was a girlish thirty-seven-year-old.

He wrote to his wife in baby talk. “Jor me no more bout diet cos you are mixin me up so fritefly. I eets wot I chooses wot I dont want I dont & I dont care a dam wot they does in Berlin thank gord I’m British.” His son, known as Mouse, had to be sent away with his nanny to the country because his favourite game was to lie in the road in the path of approaching motor cars, causing them to halt abruptly.

In 1905 Major-General Baden-Powell, in charge of the British army in Mafeking, was fascinated by Peter Pan which he saw twice. That year, Baden-Powell proposed unsuccessfully to Miss Rose Sough. She was eighteen. He was forty-seven. He finally married in 1912, when he was fifty-five and his wife “a girl of twenty-three,” a tomboy who became a Lady Scoutmaster. He constructed camps for Boy Scouts and was moved by photographs of naked boys bathing. One of his interests was watching executions—he would travel many miles, and cross frontiers, to be present at them.

In Germany, there were theories of children and childhood. A child, according to Ernst Haeckel, was a stage in the evolutionary development of an adult, as a savage was a stage in the development of a civilised human being. A life recapitulated the history of the earth—the embryo in the womb had the gills of a fish and the tail of a simian. Haeckel had a religion of nature, finding the good, the true and the beautiful in the forms of life, from radiolarians to Goethe. Carl Gustav Jung took up this idea, and came to believe that the thoughts of children resembled those of ancient peoples. He drew a parallel “between the phantastical, mythological thinking of antiquity and the similar thinking of children, between the lower races and the dreams.” The human soul was layered, from the roots of the mountain to the conscious tip. The child lurked and cavorted in the lower levels, occasionally rising like captured Persephone, to sport in the flowery meadows.

Meanwhile, in 1905, Sigmund Freud published his Three Essays on Sexuality, including one on infantile sexuality. Infants, he said, were polymorphously perverse. Thumb-sucking, ear-stroking, pleasure in the wind in your knickers as you swung rhythmically in a swing tied to a branch, pleasure in the speed of the motor car and the pistons of trains, all these were indications of a masked and active sexuality. Children desired their mother or father, wished to marry her or him, had fantasies of slaying the other parent. An Austrian bourgeois of his time, Freud felt able to judge these propensities. Children had not constructed mental dams against sexual excesses—shame, disgust, morality. “In this respect children behave in the same kind of way as an average uncultivated woman in whom the same polymorphously perverse disposition persists… Prostitutes exploit the same polymorphous, that is, infantile, disposition for the purposes of their profession …” Freud knew that children were not sweet, or gentle, or carefree. He knew they could hate. He quoted Bernard Shaw from Man and Superman. “As a rule there is only one person an English girl hates more than she hates her mother; and that’s her eldest sister.” In England, that remark is flippant, a drawing-room witticism, an Oscar Wilde shocking paradox. In Germany, where Max Reinhardt put on Shaw’s plays along with Wedekind’s Spring Awakening and Gorky’s Lower Depths, it would be received with a difference.

Everyone went out into the tamed and changing earth, and made camps. From Ancona to Chipping Camden, where C. R. Ashbee had led his East End guild of craftsmen like Aaron into the Promised Land, and had immediately constructed a huge communal mud-bath of a swimming-pool, people went out into the air, built temporary shelters in tree roots, practised skills that in some cases were derived from the scouting and tent-building skills of Mafeking and Ladysmith. David Garnett camped with the four wild and beautiful Olivier sisters, Brynhild, Marjorie, Daphne and Noel, who climbed trees like monkeys and dived naked into rivers from ancient bridges. (Their father was a Commonwealth Office minister, Sydney Olivier, a founding Fabian who spoke out against the Boer War and was sent to govern Jamaica.) These combined with the perfectly beautiful Rupert Brooke to form the Neo-Pagans, along with James Strachey, who was hopelessly in love with Brooke. Later, the Fabians themselves ran educational summer camps, with lectures, and gymnastic drills. Baden-Powell made many rules, moral and practical, for Boy Scouts, and