The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [236]
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,