The Children's Book

The Wellwood World

The novel opens in the South Kensington Museum in 1895, where a runaway boy is discovered hiding among the pottery, and the discovery brings together the several worlds the novel will inhabit: the progressive middle-class intellectuals, the artisan potters of the Arts and Crafts movement, and the Wellwood family, who will be at the centre of everything that follows. Olive Wellwood is a successful writer of fairy stories for children — beloved, commercially productive, taken seriously in the literary world — and her house in the Kent countryside, Todefright, is a gathering place for artists, socialists, and free-thinkers of every variety.

Byatt constructs the Wellwood world with extraordinary density. The house parties at Todefright, the progressive schools, the Fabian summer camps, the puppet theatres, the pottery studios in Staffordshire — all of it is rendered with the specificity of someone who has read the actual letters and diaries and catalogues of the period. The novel’s cultural range is immense: it encompasses William Morris’s legacy, the early socialist movements, the New Women, the emergent psychoanalytic ideas beginning to cross from Europe, and the art education debates of the 1890s and 1900s.

At the centre of all this stands Olive’s habit of writing a private fairy tale for each of her children, a story that belongs to that child alone and that she adds to every year. These stories — glimpsed in fragments throughout the novel — are the book’s imaginative heart. They are ostensibly gifts, expressions of individual love for each child. But they are also, as the novel gradually reveals, something more ambiguous: a way of containing children within narratives of Olive’s own devising, of giving each child a self that is really Olive’s creation rather than their own.

The Hidden Dark

The progressive surface of the Wellwood world conceals a systematic pattern of concealment and exploitation that Byatt reveals slowly and with great deliberateness. Olive’s husband Humphry has a second family, a secret maintained for decades by everyone who knows it except the people most affected by it. Olive herself is aware of and complicit in arrangements whose costs fall entirely on women and children she has persuaded herself she cares for. The sexual freedoms that the progressive movement espoused in theory turn out, in Byatt’s rendering, to be freedoms exercised primarily by men at the expense of women who had fewer options.

The fairy tales become increasingly legible as Byatt reveals more of the adults’ hidden lives. The story Olive writes for her eldest son Tom — about a boy who lives underground with a dark mother who will not let him go — reads as pure gift until the reader begins to understand what Olive’s love actually costs Tom. The story for her daughter Dorothy — about a girl who escapes underground into a world of her own making — becomes a different kind of document once Dorothy’s trajectory becomes clear. The tales are acts of love and acts of possession simultaneously, in the precise sense that Possession gave that word.

This is the novel’s most disturbing argument: that the Edwardian progressive movement, for all its genuine achievements — women’s education, labour rights, artistic renovation — reproduced within its own households the structures of concealment and exploitation it claimed to oppose. The adults of the Wellwood world talk beautifully about freedom and sincerity and the full development of the individual. What they actually provide their children is a rich fantasy life and a set of secrets they will spend their adult lives trying to understand.

The War

The First World War arrives in the novel’s final section, and its effect is unlike almost any other war narrative in contemporary fiction. Byatt does not describe battles or trenches in detail. She records, with the precision of a census-taker, who of the large cast of young people the reader has followed from childhood is killed, wounded, destroyed, or changed beyond recognition. The cumulative weight of these notations — this one dead at the Somme, that one returned and unable to speak of what happened, another vanished into nursing and never fully returning — is devastating precisely because it is quiet.

What Byatt is arguing in the war section is something about historical causation: that the catastrophe of 1914 was not an external event that interrupted the Edwardian world but a consequence of it. The same civilization that produced the beauty of the Arts and Crafts movement, the progressive politics of the Fabian summer camps, the fairy stories of Olive Wellwood, also produced the industrial militarism and nationalist competition that destroyed the generation raised within it. The novel does not make this argument polemically. It makes it structurally, by following the same people from the aesthetic paradise of Todefright to the lists of dead.

The children of Byatt’s opening pages — the generation of the 1890s, raised in a world that believed sincerely in progress and beauty and the perfectibility of social arrangements — are also the generation of the Western Front. The Children’s Book is, finally, an elegy for them, and for the world that formed them and then consumed them.

Our rating: 3.9/5 — A vast, demanding, and ultimately moving panorama that takes the full measure of what the Edwardian world produced and what it destroyed.