The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt

Author:A.S. Byatt [Byatt, A.S.]
Format: epub
Published: 2010-04-13T18:54:04.218000+00:00

At the time of the old Queen’s death, she had a popular success with a collection of tales, which included the tale of the wraiths and puppets at the Grande Exposition, and the sinister and sly tale of The People in the House in the House, in which a child imprisoned some tiny folk in her doll’s house, and was in turn imprisoned by a giant child.

A fashionable magazine sent a young woman to interview Mrs. Wellwood, and a photographer, who posed her, sitting by the fire in a rocking-chair in a velvet gown, reading to the assembled younger children, from Phyllis, now fourteen, and Hedda, now eleven, in smocked dresses and black stockings, their long hair, Phyllis’s fair, Hedda’s dark, shining on their shoulders, to Florian, now nine, and Robin, now seven, and Harry, now five, in sailor suits. Violet handed round cocoa and biscuits, and did not appear in the picture. The interviewer, whose name was Louisa Catchpole, wrote reverently of the shining heads of the listeners—“you could have heard a mouse squeak, or a beetle scurry,” she wrote, entering into the style. She asked the children which was each one’s favourite tale, and was slightly baffled by their answers. This meant that Olive found herself explaining that each child had his or her very own story, which was continually added to, and kept in the glass cupboard in a specially decorated book. Louisa Catchpole said this was a charming idea, and begged to see the books. The photographer took pictures of the cupboard, and of the imaginatively decorated covers of the individual tales. Miss Catchpole said to the children that they must feel they were very special people, having their own stories in this way. It was Phyllis who replied solemnly, oh yes, they did feel special.

The interview and pictures appeared under the headline “A Modern Mother Goose.” The article spoke of Mrs. Wellwood’s calm motherly presence, and her expressive voice, spicing the stories with mystery, thrills and dangers, all by the flickering firelight, in which more magical creatures could be seen. Mrs. Wellwood, Miss Catchpole said, held strong beliefs about the imaginative lives of children being just as important in education as verbs and triangles. Her grateful family extended far beyond the pretty children clustered round her, into all sorts of homes, privileged and plain, wherever a book of tales could be bought or borrowed. People in the present age, she opined, did not leave their childhoods behind them, as the earnest Victorians had done. Tales for children, like Mrs. Wellwood’s, were read and discussed with delight, by old and young. There is an eager young child persisting in every lively grown-up, and Mrs. Wellwood knows how to address these children, as she knows how to entrance her own.

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