Bookworm by Lucy Mangan

Author:Lucy Mangan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2018-02-28T16:00:00+00:00

Classics

Little Women had another welcome effect too – it introduced me to the hitherto unknown world of The Classic.

I wanted to know why this book had had so much effort put into it. The red leather! The gilding! The very, very thin, very, very white paper! The introduction and biography! It seemed to fall under the heading of material rather than philosophical conundrums, so instead of running to my usual fount of book-wisdom, I presented it to my own Marmee for consideration.

It was an old book, she explained. But Grandma had only just given it to me, I pointed out. No, not in that sense, she said. In the sense that it had been written a long time ago and been printed and reprinted ever since because people kept wanting to read it. It was considered A Classic. There were lots of them – books that had endured and which everyone had either read or at least heard so much about that they had absorbed the essence of them almost by osmosis.

What was osmosis? I asked. But she had run out of time for explanations – I think the house needed repointing before our swimming lesson or something – so I spoke to empty air.

No matter. The next time Dad took me to Dillons in Bromley, I scanned the shelves until I found the title Little Women. It was part of a series which all had similar covers – the Puffin Classics livery. Over the next few months Dad would add many volumes to my shelf at home. I weeded out first anything too adventurous (Treasure Island, Journey to the Centre of the Earth, Coral Island and so on) and second, all the animal stories.

I had an early, strict and enduring rule against books in which animals – especially talking animals – were the predominant feature. Thus to the oblivion to which I had already consigned Beatrix Potter, Winnie the Pooh, the inhabitants of Brambly Hedge, Rabbits Peter and Brer and Tales of Farthing Wood I now added, with an equal lack of compunction, the likes of the Just So Stories and The Wind in the Willows. What an idiot. I do not know where or when this mindless prejudice was formed, but in the coming years it would also set me against classics like Tarka the Otter and Ring of Bright Water, and the Whitbread Award-winning The Song of Pentecost and countless less famous others. What. An. Idiot.

Never mind. What’s done is done, and even after a purge of fur and feathers, there was still a fair portion of the canon to devour. I set to work with a will.

The canon, for children, generally means books written between (roughly) the late Victorian era and the end of the Edwardian age; products of what’s traditionally been considered the golden age of children’s literature, bookended by Alice in Wonderland (1865) and Winnie the Pooh (1920). Any later and you’re into upstart, Modern Classics territory. Any earlier and you’re back in moral-tale territory and a world too different for its stories to have endured.

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