“Secret Gardens”: A Study of the Golden Age of Children’s Literature
Humphrey Carpenter plays the Curmudgeon (from the journal Children’s Literature)
by Humphrey Carpenter
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985.
Secret Gardens may become many scholars’ bête noire. Already one of my acquaintances has advised me that she learned nothing new from Humphrey Carpenter (except in his chapter on J. M. Barrie), and another wrote that she found the book appalling. My own feelings are different; despite its shortcomings, I feel the work is deliberately iconoclastic and successfully provocative.
Much previous scholarship about children’s literature has been of three kinds: the glimpse at the field as a whole, as in Roger Sale’s Fairy Tales and After; studies of a single author, such as C. S. Lewis; and discussions of a genre, e.g. Volksmärchen. Carpenter’s work takes as its subject a “period,” the “Golden Age,” an unusually fertile time (1860–1930) when England, in particular, produced an extraordinary number of writers for children.
For the most part, Carpenter interprets the major authors and works of the period in a biographical fashion, with some acknowledged but, nonetheless, notable omissions–including Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, Mark Twain, and Frances Hodgson Burnett (from whom, of course, this book takes its title). The book has a familiar…
