The Edwardian period is often seen as a time of liberation, a throwing open of
the shutters on the stifling, upholstered Victorian age that preceded it.
Stuffed birds under glass domes, corsets and veiled piano legs yielded to
Arts and Crafts wallpaper, knickerbockers and telephones. The automobile
replaced the horse-drawn carriage. A reflex social conservatism gave way,
via William Morris’s vision of a self-sufficient English craftsmen’s
paradise, to Fabian socialism. Women demanded the vote. The ideal of the
Angel in the House was routed by the sexual straight-talking of Jung, D. H.
Lawrence and Freud. There was honey for tea in Grantchester. Everyone
picnicked and bathed and messed about in boats. And childhood was invented.
The Edwardians saw, in a way that the Victorians had not, that childhood was a
distinct phase in human development, having its own challenges, demands and
special requirements that were different from those of adulthood. (We are
talking here, of course, of middle-class children; in the early 1900s the
children of the working class suffered deprivation in their millions.) The
Edwardians were sensitive, above all, to the middle-class child’s need for
play and for imaginative freedom. This was the great age of children’s
fiction: J. M. Barrie, Rudyard Kipling, Kenneth Grahame, Beatrix Potter and
E. Nesbit were all active at this time. Barrie’s Peter Pan, or The Boy Who
Wouldn’t Grow Up, was first staged in 1904. Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill
was published two years later, as was Nesbit’s The Railway Children.
Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows appeared in 1908. All consciously
celebrated the adventure of being released from the drawing room and
escaping outdoors.
Yet the attunedness of these Edwardian writers to the state of childhood
sometimes went with a reluctance to embrace adult responsibilities. Perhaps
oddest of all of them was the childlike, seemingly asexual J. M. Barrie.
Although it is now an icon of childish innocence, when Peter Pan was first
staged, Bernard Shaw immediately recognized that its fantasy of a perpetual
childhood in which the feminine and maternal are ruthlessly excluded was
really meant for the boy-men in the audience – one such, Rupert Brooke, saw
the play twelve times. The Edwardians’ fascination with fairies is amply
reflected by the popular illustrators of the time – Arthur Rackham, Laurence
Housman, Edmund Dulac – and their prepubertal sprites, knock-kneed goblins
and grotesque vegetation. At its best, the age’s penchant for the little
folk is decorative, whimsical, exhilaratingly pagan. At its worst it
suggests a profound discomfort with adult sexuality, parenthood and growing
up.
This dichotomy lies at the heart of A. S. Byatt’s hugely ambitious new novel,
The Children’s Book. If the bestselling Possession (1990) was Byatt’s
critique of the Golden Age of high Victorianism, then The Children’s Book,
in spite of arriving nearly two decades later, follows from it organically:
it is a complementary dissection of the cultural myths, peculiarities and
obsessions of the Silver Age that followed. That the Edwardian era was one
of arrested development, even before the horrors of the trenches inflicted a
lasting wound on the generation who fought in them, is a starting premiss of
the new book, whose panoramic sweep takes in the artistic and political life
of Europe from 1895 up to 1919. It is a less accessible work than
Possession, preferring explication where the earlier novel favoured a slow
poetic unfolding of theme and event, and it has a cast of hundreds: apart
from its fictional characters, Barrie, Grahame, Kipling, Brooke, Morris,
Wells, Shaw, Forster, Strachey, Wilde, Rodin, Queen Victoria, Edward VII,
the Kaiser and countless other historical figures all put in an appearance.
The novel opens in the as-yet-unfinished Victoria and Albert Museum in
Kensington, cram-full of the best examples of British and Continental
design. The human elements of the story are embedded in a richly patterned
physical setting that is so carefully detailed that, like a Rackham
illustration, it constantly draws our attention to the surface of the
canvas. The museum’s collection of ceramics, textiles and jewellery; its
lustre bowls, stone angels, coiling dragons and wide-eyed little men, frames
our introduction to four families, all friends, and all with bohemian
connections and bolt-holes in Kent: these are freethinkers, “Quakers,
Fabians, artists . . . who had evaded the Smoke, and looked forward to a
Utopian world in which smoke would be no more”. There is the household that
Prosper Cain, the museum’s Special Keeper of Precious Metals, shares with
his son Julian and daughter Florence; the rambling old farmhouse,
Todefright, inhabited by the writer Olive Wellwood, her sister Violet,
husband Humphry, and their brood of seven; the more conservative
establishment of Humphry’s banker brother Basil, his German wife Katharina,
and their offspring, Charles and Griselda; and the crumbling pottery barely
maintained by the Fludds: the sculptor Benedict, his wife Seraphita, and the
three Fludd children, Imogen, Geraint and Pomona.
Olive Wellwood, like Barrie, Kipling and E. Nesbit, is a writer of fairy
stories; even her children call her Mother Goose. She is compiling a
separate book for each of them, each with a different theme appropriate to
the developing character of the child concerned, and her fantastic tales all
have an underlying allegorical or psychological dimension. Thus the story
she writes for her stolid, taciturn eldest daughter Dorothy features a
prickly hedgehog; the more rebellious Hedda, who later joins the
suffragettes, gets a tale about caged children “in need of setting free”,
while the wild, perpetually boyish Tom, who “didn’t want to be a grown-up”,
is cast as the hero in “an apparently endless quest to find his shadow”.
Later, to Tom’s great discomfort, Olive recasts the tale she has written for
him as a stage play, Tom Underground, which, we are told, “had the magic of
Peter Pan combined with something dark and Germanic”.
While Olive’s work owes a debt to Barrie, it is more obviously influenced by
the phantasmagorical Wundermärchen of the German Romantic writers Ludwig
Tieck and E. T. A. Hoffmann – as is Byatt herself in this novel. Byatt draws
freely on Hoffmann’s eerie tale of confused identities, The Sandman, in two
subplots involving the half-German Griselda and her cousin, Dorothy. One of
the visitors to Todefright is the German puppeteer Anselm Stern, with whom
Olive once had a brief liaison. Stern is a creator of uncannily lifelike
marionettes. His marionette performance of The Sandman, in which a young
student becomes infatuated with a beautiful automaton and is driven to a
state of suicidal madness by the evil magus who poses as her father, is
recounted in detail. The impassive, doll-like Griselda is subsequently wooed
by one of Stern’s own sons, who is frustrated by her apparent lack of
emotion: “She is like a statue in a story. Or a marionette. She doesn’t
feel”. Dorothy, however, turns out to be Stern’s real daughter, a discovery
she makes after a disturbing scene in which Humphry, who has raised her,
assaults her sexually.
Byatt is also interested more widely in the layers that have gone into the
making of German and English culture, particularly in that pan-European folk
memory that is preserved in the fairy tales of both countries. German
fairy-tale motifs stud the novel. The story of Allerleirauh, known in
English as Cinderella, is equally significant – not the anodyne modern
version, but the darker folk tale recorded by the Grimms, in which the
heroine has to fend off an incestuous father, rather than an envious
stepmother. Humphry is not the only bad father in the book: more pernicious,
because more successful in inflicting his lust on his daughters, is the
Bluebeard-like Benedict Fludd, who keeps a secret hoard of obscenely painted
pots, depicting the girls in pornographic poses, locked away in his pantry.
Nor is the opposition between good and bad fathers always that clear-cut.
Prosper Cain rescues Fludd’s eldest daughter, Imogen, by taking her into his
home and offering her an education, only to find himself attracted to her
once she has grown into womanhood.
As the book unfolds, the fairy-tale patterns proliferate in ever wilder arcs,
like the brambles around an enchanted castle. Prosper Cain, Imogen’s
liberator, is a Prospero figure who also offers a new beginning to Philip
Warren, an illiterate runaway from the Potteries (when Philip is taught to
read by his sponsors, the medium of instruction is a book of fairy tales by
Grimm, Andersen and Perrault). Philip’s sister Elsie, seduced by a priapic
local Fabian, is protected by three good fairies in the form of a cabal of
sympathetic middle-class ladies who take her under their wing and care for
her and her baby. Olive’s son Tom fails to adapt to the demands of adult
life, or to leave the idyllic confines of Todefright, and commits suicide.
If he is Peter Pan, a Lost Boy, then the fair Griselda and the dark Dorothy
are Snow White and Rose Red; but Griselda is also compared to a china doll
from The Nutcracker, to Gretel in the gingerbread cottage, and, once she
enrols at Newnham College, Cambridge to embark on a formal study of the folk
tale, to Rapunzel: she is isolated in her women’s college “like the tower
Rapunzel was shut in”. The reader of The Children’s Book, no less than
Griselda at her studies, will find “much overlapping and repetition” in the
fairy-tale elements on display.
As with the fairy tales, so with the furnishings. At times the painstaking
focus on pattern and decor, on the detail of period fabrics and china, has
an almost incantatory repetitiveness. We learn that Olive Wellwood “was
looking lovely, in a tea-gown of cream Liberty lawn, covered with field
flowers, cornflowers, poppies and marguerites”; that a guest at Todefright
“was dressed in the knitted Jaeger woollen garments popularized by G. B.
Shaw”; that another, “wearing a shapeless flowing apple-green tent . . .
stared critically at the sandwich plate, which had the Three Graces dancing
on a floral meadow, surrounded by sugar-pink”; that Prosper Cain drinks from
“Minton porcelain, Sèvres-style”; and that “Anselm Stern was wearing a
soot-coloured, not-entirely-British Norfolk jacket over his dark drainpipe
trousers. He stood with his teacup (Minton, Dresden shape, painted with
pansies)”. These details, coming thick and fast, are interspersed with
brilliant lectures by an omniscient narrator on the historical context
which, though always insightful and illuminating, sit uneasily with the
novel’s ornate descriptive finish. They are reminiscent of George Eliot’s
technique of interpreting a social macrocosm for us, but but without, to
borrow Virginia Woolf's phrase, Eliot’s “energy and heat”.
The stress on china and ceramics is also a reminder that the Fabian idealism
of the Wellwoods and their circle is a brittle and essentially decorative
thing, resembling nothing so much as “Fyodor Dostoevsky’s definition of
utopian socialism . . . the pleasant and frangible vista on a teacup.
Porcelain socialism”. Paradoxically only Tom, whose refusal to embrace his
shadow comes to represent his resistance to change, is intuitively aware of
the possible cost of overhauling the existing social order, of “what the
world would be like to live in, when the desired burst of violent outrage
finally happened”. As the shadow falls on Europe in 1914, the bucolic
Edwardian dream is shown for the fragile thing it is. The younger
generation, brought up on fairy tales, “on tales of knights-at-arms and
Icelandic warriors . . . [could] not imagine blood”. When they go to war the
massacre is wholesale: they are like the children charmed away by the Pied
Piper, tricked into following a destructive force “docile, under the earth”.
By the end of the novel, all the surviving characters are to a greater or
lesser degree traumatized by the collapse of their cultural narrative. They
all have stories they survive “only by never telling”. In this, The
Children’s Book is an eloquent testament to the dangerous power of both art
and myth. The undeveloped Tom is a casualty of a particular kind of English
mythmaking: “he had sensed that the Garden of England was a garden through a
looking-glass, and had resolutely stepped through the glass and refused to
return”. But he is also, more crucially, a victim of Olive’s cannibalistic
habit of using her children’s different personalities as matter for her
fiction. Like the novelist Julia Corbett in Byatt’s second book The Game
(1967), whose adolescent daughter Deborah is both humiliated and
disillusioned by her mother’s professional commitment to writing things up,
no matter how personal, Olive fails to understand that her casual recycling,
for public consumption, of the fairy tale she has written for Tom exposes
his vulnerabilities in a way that is lethal to him. His suicide occurs after
the opening night of Tom Underground: it is a story, not the war, that kills
Tom. Stories are dangerous things. And Byatt knows that history, too, is
simply a story written on a larger scale.
A. S. Byatt
THE CHILDREN’S BOOK
614pp. Chatto and Windus. £18.99.
978 0 701 18389 9
Elizabeth Lowry’s novel The Bellini Madonna will be published later
this year.
To read Richard Jenkyns's review of Possession, from the TLS archive, click here.
