Alice to the Lighthouse: Children's Books and Radical Experiments in Art

Juliet Dusinberre, Alice to the Lighthouse: Children's Books and Radical Experiments in Art. London: Macmillan, 1987. £35.00

Juliet Dusinberre argues for a close relationship between children's literature and the development of modernist fiction, making special reference to Virginia Woolf and her contemporaries. Her contention is that radical literary experimentation sprang from the childhood reading of innovative children's literature. She discusses Stevenson, Twain, Kipling, Grahame, Nesbit and Burnett, but it was Lewis Carroll 'against whom almost every new writer in the early twentieth century formed her or his artistic identity'.

It was also Carroll who stood counter to the literary tradition that The Pilgrim's Progress had come to represent: the pious, didactic, yet sentimental children's books of Victorian Evangelicalism. The Alice books, with their loosely structured, less intrusive authorial style, aided the transition from 'the literary to the literal' discussed and documented by Dusinberre in relation to Woolf s emergent identity as a novelist. In rejecting the tradition begun by Bunyan. Carroll enabled the child readers of his day to become adult writers who would themselves engage in an attack on writing 'which claims morality while despising art'.

The Alice books, Nesbit's The Wouldbegoods and Lear's nonsense verse constitute the 'adult's revenge'...