LUCY MANGAN’S passionate, amusing and nostalgic reflection upon her favourite children’s books deserves to become as much of a classic as the novels she revisits.
The magic of Bookworm lies in its evocative trip down memory lane. Mangan roams widely through the canon of children’s literature from Where The Wild Things Are to The Wombles, from The Borrowers to Ballet Shoes and beyond. She recalls countless other well-loved books, some I had forgotten and others that passed me by at the time, now top of my wishlist.
She considers each book in the context of its time and reflects upon her favourite reads from a dispassionate adult perspective. Like Mangan I was once a voracious reader of Enid Blyton but I didn’t realise she wrote as many as 760 books. (No one knows for sure because “publishers weren’t as punctilious about record-keeping then as now”.)
That ferocious output explains a lot about the author’s limitations: “To feel is to express, in thunderously straightforward manner. ‘I say Gwen/Peter/Margery – you are the most tremendous sneak/ass/rescuer of Erica from the burning sanatorium! Jolly good/bad show!’”
Mangan also makes a persuasive case for allowing children to enjoy books that now seem old-fashioned for their “unholy trinity of sexism, class snobbery and racism” and for resisting the urge to bowdlerise: “Such changes collapse time and remove all sense of history.”
She offers choice nuggets of information about the authors. I was amused to learn that after dinner parties Roald Dahl, author of Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, offered around a box containing his favourite chocolate bars “however posh a meal and however grand the guests”.
And what a pity that Richmal Crompton, the author of the Just William series, saw her adult fiction as her “real” work and dismissed the magnificent and far more successful William books as “potboilers”.
Bookworm moves chronologically through Mangan’s reading experiences rather than through the history of children’s literature, though her account stretches back as far as clay tablets dating from 2000BC and telling school stories that were precursors to the well-loved Malory Towers or Chalet School series.
She gives a bright, breezy overview into how children’s literature evolved from didactic origins into novels written to amuse and entertain. The genre hit its stride in the 19th century thanks to education reform and growing prosperity with the golden age of children’s literature bookended by Alice In Wonderland (1865) and Winnie-The-Pooh (1920).
Mangan also offers an entertaining glimpse of her childhood in the context of her voracious reading habit. She sought refuge in Dorothy Edwards’s My Naughty Little Sister series when her peaceful existence as an only child was disrupted by the birth of a baby sister. And when her beloved father underwent cancer treatment, her books offered a much-needed escape.
Books inevitably broadened her horizons. She grew up in urban south London and until she read the Milly-Molly-Mandy books, “I didn’t know that either the countryside or the past even existed”.
Books have been Mangan’s salvation and anyone who shares her enthusiasm will devour this escapist trip back to childhood, poignantly allowing you to “relive a little of those glorious days when reading was the thing and life was only a minor inconvenience”.
