Of Rabbit-Holes and Secret Gardens

Abstract

The century reaching forward from about the 1850s marked a golden age in children’s literature, an age in which we see the child’s world first begin to truly widen and the parameters of both space and being redefined. This period would also see a literature for children in which a fruitful balance between enclosure and exposure would eventually emerge after long resistance. Gertrude Stein observes that ‘[f]or a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts. In the history of the refused in the arts and literature the rapidity of the change is always startling.’¹ This is perhaps nowhere more true than with reference to the history of the fantastic in children’s literature. Before the advent of Alice in Wonderland fantasy was an uneasy guest in the house of children’s reading. 1865, however, marked the beginning of a shift in attitude towards it. Alice, in falling down the rabbit hole, had discovered the way into the empire of the imagination where the notion of boundaries itself would unravel. Through this route, the child (both fictional and reader) was enabled to escape out of the enclosures of nursery and schoolroom into the realm of Wonderland where ‘being’ could find an added dimensionality. Where much of early children’s literature may be seen as authoritarian in its emphasis on moral didacticism and factuality — didacticism working upon the presumption of its own certitude — the incursion of the fantastic into literature for children was to disrupt and subvert all that.

A genuine work of art must mean many things: the truer its art, the more things it will mean.

George MacDonald, ‘The Fantastic Imagination’