If you are in the business of inventing fictional characters in children’s books, the graphic image, in many cases, is as important as the words. In stories that young readers have loyally taken to their hearts these characters stay around for years, even generations. Most of them remain perennially the same age.

JK Rowling’s Harry Potter and Philip Pullman’s Lyra and Will in the His Dark Materials trilogy are famous exceptions to this Peter Pan tradition. They grow and develop in fictional time. They initially emerged without a defining image on the page, this being an era in which illustrations in books for older children and adults seem to have largely and unaccountably disappeared. The great advantage to not having illustrations is that the readers who first encounter the characters and follow their adventures in print, before the all-powerful film image kicks in, get a chance to form their own personal picture of what they look like. This is, of course, one of the great pleasures of reading fiction.

Characters in stories for younger readers usually come with an image strongly attached. One of the delights of sharing a picture-book with very young children is the satisfaction they gain from spotting details and similarities to their own lives. They enjoy the doings of child characters like themselves. If these fictional boys or girls achieve longevity, the illustrator can be faced with a dilemma. You may need subtly to change the setting, and bring the toys, buggies and domestic decor up to date while the characters remain reassuringly the same.

Clothes can pose a particular problem. AA Milne’s Christopher Robin, who since the 1920s has been playing with his teddy bear Winnie-the-Pooh “in that enchanted place at the top of the forest”, wears a smock over his shorts and his hair cut in a long bob. The real Christopher Robin Milne suffered grievously from this image at school and in later life. Ernest Shepard’s illustrations are so brilliantly drawn and so definitive that no illustrator, as far as I know, has had the temerity to attempt to reillustrate these stories. But it is probably a mistake to base a child character too closely on your offspring. It is something I have carefully tried to avoid in my own books. Fictional children can sometimes hang around long enough to become an embarrassment to their original models.

The appearance of some fictional juveniles can become so dated that it comes back into fashion. Tintin, Hergé’s immortal boy detective, sports a skinny sweater tucked into calf-length baggy trousers with his hair quiffed up in front, a style that might pass as modish today. Not so Richmal Crompton’s Just William, drawn most memorably in line by Thomas Henry. William first appeared in 1922 and lasted triumphantly until 1970. His family moved with the times. His older sister Ethel is dressed as a flapper in earlier stories, and transforms in the 1940s into practical wartime chic. But William always wears the same three-piece suit with short trousers, stiff collar and tie all awry, school cap and wrinkled socks that look as though they have been carved out of concrete. Geoffrey Willans’s Molesworth, in Ronald Searle’s wonderful 1960s interpretation, wears a scruffy prep-school uniform.

My character Alfie will be 25 in real terms this year, but he remains a perennial 4½-year-old. He is not modelled on my own children at that age, or anyone else’s, although he was inspired by a combination of both. My first attempt at a picture-book was Lucy & Tom’s Day, which was published in 1960. Although the characters, too, are imaginary, the background is real. It shows the then shabby streets of Notting Hill where I pushed my unwieldy pram and where I still live. The fish shops, junk shops, bakeries and toyshops that we passed every day were far more interesting to a child than the fashionable cafes and boutiques that have now replaced them. There was also the local recreation area, which was known as “The Wreck”, with its iron swings and seesaws. These, at least, have given way to something much safer and more imaginative.

If you are reflecting real life in picture-books these days you need to be extremely safety conscious. Anxious people write in pointing out your errors. In the stories of my youth, children did things (as did we) that would make the modern parent faint with shock. Dorothy Edwards’s My Naughty Little Sister was a character I got to know extremely well from illustrating many stories about her in the 1960s and 1970s. She has the most hair-raising exploits for a five-year-old, falling into streams, getting lost at a fairground and, with her friend Bad Harry, running off and climbing into some big pipes in the roadworks.

As every writer of older children’s fiction from E Nesbit to Rowling knows, it is a good idea to get parents out of the story as soon as possible. Ideally, they should disappear, die or go into prison in chapter one and only reappear, if at all, at the finish. In books for the younger child, you are more or less stuck with at least one parent, although the more recessive they are the better. No surprise, then, that many creators of picture-books opt for anthropomorphic rabbits, bears and baby monsters who can have all kinds of adventures on their own. And perhaps the restrictions on the lives of real children today account to some degree for the enormous popularity of fantasy fiction.

In this era, children are bombarded, from the cradle, by fast-moving electronic imagery. Happily, they can still pore over storybooks that offer pictures they can fantasise about at leisure and characters they will long remember.

OXFORD LITERARY FESTIVAL

Shirley Hughes will talk about her characters Alfie, Lucy and Tom, and about illustrating books for children, at The Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival, on Sunday, March 26, at 10am (8+)

()

FESTIVAL EVENTS FOR CHILDREN

Explore Books

• Book Extracts

• Book Reviews

• Books Group

• Audio Books

Times Recommends

• The Sunday Times 100 best holiday reads
• What will we be reading this summer: the booksellers predict
• Literary festivals: a survivor’s guide