Introduction

Abstract

Historians of children’s literature in Britain, and of publishing for children in general, are broadly agreed that the late Victorian years, leading up more or less to the outbreak of the First World War, were a golden age. These were the years of Kipling and Carroll, Nesbit, Grahame, Potter and Barrie — the definitive classics of children’s literature, which were by any standards a hard act to follow. Historians of children’s literature are also broadly agreed that what came after, in the years between the wars, significantly failed to live up to the promise of that golden age. They are, almost without exception, dismissive of the period in their haste to speed past these seemingly barren years towards the 1950s, the next acknowledged great age of publishing for children. John Rowe Townsend covers everything he finds worthy of note in the inter-war years in a scant 27 pages (Townsend, 1990); Robert Leeson dubs it the ‘age of brass’ (Leeson, 1985: 110); Peter Hunt borrows his title for the chapter covering this period from Robert Graves’s and Alan Hodge’s social history of the time, The Long Weekend, which manages to imply a sense of frivolous time off from the real work of ‘serious’ publishing (Hunt, 1999).