OUP (2018) h/b 336pp £80 (ISBN 9780199583478)
This is a pioneering book which opens up a new field in classical reception studies. Clearly and thoughtfully written, well organised, with several illustrations including eight fine colour plates, it is a pleasure both to read and to look at. The authors, who have a long history of fruitful collaboration, have absorbed a vast amount of primary and secondary literature which is deftly and unobtrusively deployed to support their analyses of children’s literature influenced by and/or about classical antiquity.
They begin with the most popular books of the nineteenth century, the American Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys and Tanglewood Tales and the Englishman Charles Kingsley’s The Heroes, all published in the 1850s. Later chapters focus on specific books from both sides of the Atlantic, setting them in contemporary contexts of nationalism, educational markets and the economics and technology of publishing; among the book’s many merits is the light it throws on the contrast and connections between the two traditions of writing and publishing. As we move into the early twentieth century, discussions of the use of the classical past bring together Heinrich Schliemann, Sigmund Freud, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, the accounts of books for children by adults being supplemented by explorations of the childhood reading and imagining of those adults. Andrew Lang’s colour-titled Fairy Books and his later Tales of Troy and Greece, published at the turn of the twentieth century, are discussed in detail, as are the post-WW1 books of Padraic Colum, hardly known in Britain but enormously popular in the US. These were illustrated by the émigré Hungarian artist Willy Pogany, examples of whose work are included by M. and R.
The supplementation of text by visual images—and vice versa—is a running theme in the book, where the differences between illustrated book, picture book and other genres are very well analysed. An excellent chapter on ‘ancient history for girls’ begins with Naomi Mitchison’s childhood reading before taking us through Charlotte Yonge’s work and on to the American authors Dorothy Mills and Caroline Snedeker. Once again, readers on one side of the Atlantic will learn here about authors well known on the other side, and benefit from the comparison of different writers and different social and cultural contexts. The book ends with an in-depth study of H.D.’s little-known and hard to classify The Hedgehog, titled ‘Pan in the Alps’, which picks up on the authors’ earlier discussion of Pan in the work of Kenneth Grahame, Rudyard Kipling and others. The continuity of theme is typical of the way in which M. and B. weave the central issues of the literature they study into their text to make a satisfying whole. The book is very well produced, and I noticed only a single typo.
Christopher Stray