Sam Leith stopped writing his almost-encyclopaedic history of children’s literature in The Haunted Wood: A History of Childhood Reading when he got up to Harry Potter.
Why stop at Harry Potter? Well, Sam told The Oldie Literary Lunch today it was because Harry Potter is “a great inflection point in the genre and revitalised children’s publishing” - and because he has been informed that Harry Potter has the most fantastic audio books. Sam said this, looking across at Stephen Fry, the Harry Potter audiobook reader, sitting to his left.
And it was because Sam didn’t want to talk about “David p”ssing Walliams!”
Sam told us that the original children’s stories of the 17th and 18th centuries were written on the premise that “all children were radioactive with original sin”. In the colossal bestseller James Janeway’s A Token for Children, it was basically “a snuff anthropology about the deaths of fourteen children with tuberculosis”. The goal was to “scare the willies” out of children to save them from going to hell.
Sam said, “This is what they had instead of the Gruffalo!”
All recordings of the lunch are available tomorrow on www.theoldie.co.uk
The lunch was sponsored by Noble Caledonia https://www.noble-caledonia.co...
