Secret Gardens: A Study of the Golden Age of Children's Literature

An interesting mix of biographical information and criticism. The author examines several great children's books of the Victorian and Edwardian ages in England, plus Little Women (the only American book). He is harsh in his assessments, finding major flaws in almost every book he discusses, and being quite contemptuous of most of the books he doesn't discuss. In particular, he seemed to dismiss most female authors--L. M. Montgomery, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, and most other North American "girl's" fiction were written off contemptuously as "Pollyanna literature." E. Nesbit he labels a hack and criticizes her for writing almost exclusively about middle-class children, claiming that she influenced later English writers to do so as well, show more though she was hardly the first children's writer to concentrate on the middle or upper classes. He is particularly critical of Frances Hodgson Burnett, expressing repeatedly his amazement that she could have produced The Secret Garden, a book which he appears to hold in great esteem but discusses only in passing as it was published after the end of the movement he describes. He seems to forget his admiration of The Secret Garden in his final chapter, identifying The Lord of the Rings (!) as the next "great" children's book after A. A. Milne.

He is fair to Louisa May Alcott, and I found his discussion of her one of the better parts of the book. His overall thesis, that the books he examines represent a literary movement that first undermined the moralist/Sunday School children's literature of the past and then explored a series of Arcadias/Utopias, is sound. His psychological explorations of why these authors wrote the stories they did was interesting, and I've added several biographies or works of these authors to my TBR list. He's also inspired me to take another look at The Wind in the Willows, which I found boring as a child.

Overall: Worth reading for those who are interested in this period of children's literature, but ultimately limited by the strong opinions/prejudices of the author. show less

Useful as a collection of biographies of notable childrens' authors of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Eccentric in its assessments of the meaning and value of their works (Carpenter does not understand Tolkien, whose standard biography he wrote). Contains an extremely unfortunate prophecy in its summarizing chapter, where Carpenter explains why contemporary British writers have not and cannot succeed with children in the US.