I have a confession to make.

I have been having a love affair with another woman, and it has been going on since I was seventeen years old. I first met her on a trip to London from art college in the early nineteen eighties, and I have guiltily snuck back to see her more times than I can remember.

Yet my love has never said a word to me.

Always, she looks past me, her gaze fixed on something far off, her mind elsewhere. She is committed to a journey that she knows will be her last. Yet still I pine for her and the age in which she lived. I do not know her real name, only that she is the Lady of Shalott, and the Lady lives in a painting that has dwelt in the Tate Britain gallery in London for the last one hundred and thirty years.

A little history.

The artist John William Waterhouse painted The Lady of Shalott in 1888. It is a magnificent piece of work. The lady sits in a wooden boat draped with tapestry, one hand still resting on a chain, three candles guttering at the prow – two already spent, the third about to die. Her mouth is slightly open, as though she has just stopped singing. Her red hair falls loose around a face that questions, and asks ‘What have I done?’ The lady is floating downriver to Camelot, and she is dying, and for me on seeing her for the very first time, it was love at first sight.

The Lady of Shalott is probably one of the most recognised paintings in the world. It adorns a thousand posters, prints, greetings cards, jigsaws, bookmarks, and mouse mats. It is so familiar that most people have stopped seeing it at all, and I nearly made the same mistake myself.

In those teenage years, I loved that painting the way one loves a face across a room – intensely, but without understanding. I knew nothing about the lady in the boat, nothing about where she was going or why, and nothing about the poem that put her there. The painting was enough – or at least I thought it was.

Due to this one painting, Waterhouse is often associated with the Pre-Raphaelites – Rossetti, Millais, Holman Hunt, Burne-Jones – and it is easy to see why. The painting, with its medieval subject, its dream-like atmosphere, its richness of colour and feeling, sits comfortably in that company. But Waterhouse was not a Pre-Raphaelite, he was a classicist, closer in training and temperament to Lawrence Alma-Tadema and Lord Frederic Leighton, painters of marble and antiquity, sun-warmed stone and draped linen. The fact that this one painting has relocated him in the public imagination so completely, tells you something about its power. It is so thoroughly romantic, so completely saturated with the Pre-Raphaelite spirit, that it has in many ways, rewritten its artist’s biography.

And then, years later, something happened that changed the way I saw my Lady.

I was in my twenties and visiting the Watts Gallery in Compton, Surrey, for the first time. (you can read about that here) If you have not been, it is a remarkable place – the home and studio of the Victorian painter and sculptor George Frederic Watts, tucked into a Surrey hillside, just to the south of Guildford. It’s a beautiful gallery, quiet and unhurried and full of enormous canvases in half-light.

In the gallery, there is a sculpture of Lord Tennyson, modelled in gesso grosso – a rough, chalky, deeply textured medium that seems to hold the very act of making visible in its surface. It is a memorial statue and was created by Tennyson’s close friend, artist GF Watts. Watts sculpted it after Tennyson’s death in 1892, and the finished bronze stands in the grounds of Lincoln Cathedral. The statue is monumental in scale, yet there is something quite delicate about it. Watts wanted to demonstrate his friend’s love of nature and drew inspiration from Tennyson’s poem ‘Flower in the crannied wall’. The figure ponders the flower in his hand, while his dog Karenina peers up at him.

Like Tennyson’s poetry, the sculpture says much about the man – the bowed head, the weight of thought in the shoulders, the sense of a man carrying an entire mythology inside him – that made me want to know more about the man it depicted.

I had heard of Tennyson, of course. Everyone has. But until seeing that sculpture, I had never read any of his work. The Poet Laureate was a name on a school syllabus I had cheerfully ignored, as school boy, poetry left me cold.

But standing in front of that sculpture, in the gallery of a man who had known Tennyson personally, who had studied his face and worked it into clay with his own hands, I felt a pull. Not to the biography, not to the era, but to the words. What had this man actually written?

The first Tennyson poem I read was The Lady of Shalott.

And I realised, with a kind of slow, delighted shock, that I had been in love with a painting inspired by that poem for years without ever knowing that the poem underneath it was the real thing. The painting was the mirror. The poem was the world.

I suspect that most people who love Waterhouse’s painting have never read the poem it illustrates.

This is worth pausing over, because the irony is almost too perfect. A painting of a woman who has spent her life seeing the world only through a reflection has itself become a reflection – an image so widely reproduced, so thoroughly familiar, that the original work of art that inspired it has become almost invisible. The painting consumed the poem. The mirror replaced the real thing. And most of us never noticed, because the reflection, the painting is so very beautiful.

I have written before about what I call the chocolate-box problem – the way familiarity erases the thing it celebrates. Cicely Mary Barker’s Flower Fairies were reproduced on so many biscuit tins and jigsaw puzzles that the woman behind the images became invisible. Helen Allingham’s cottage watercolours were so thoroughly domesticated that a serious artist with a serious career disappeared behind her own prettiness. The same thing has happened to The Lady of Shalott, and the loss is greater, because the poem Tennyson wrote in 1832 is not merely good. It is one of the most extraordinary pieces of writing in the English language.

The poem has its roots in Arthurian legend, and Tennyson drew loosely on a thirteenth-century Italian novella, the Donna di Scalotta, which tells the brief tale of a young woman who dies of unrequited love for Lancelot and is carried by boat to Camelot. But the Italian story contains almost nothing of what makes Tennyson’s poem extraordinary – no mirror, no curse, no weaving, no tower, no song. Tennyson took a skeleton and gave it a soul. The Lady’s isolation, her craft, her fatal choice – these are entirely his.

He wrote the poem first in 1832 and revised it substantially a decade later, publishing the version we know today in 1842. The name Shalott itself is his transformation of Astolat – the castle of Elaine in Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur – softened through the French, made musical and made his own.

Let me take you through it. If you wish, you can listen to the full poem below and read by me.

The Lady lives alone on an island in the middle of a river that flows down to Camelot. She has a loom, a mirror, and a curse.

The curse forbids her from looking directly at the world outside. She may only see it through the mirror that hangs before her, and she weaves what the mirror shows her into a tapestry – a web of colours, endlessly growing, endlessly reflecting a world she cannot touch.

The lady does not know who placed the curse upon her, and she does not know what will happen if she breaks it. She onl knows that she must not look, and so she weaves.

And through her mirror she sees everything.

Shadows. Not the world itself, shadows of it.

She sees the road winding down to Camelot. She sees the river eddying. She sees market girls, the red cloaks of riders, a page in crimson clad, a funeral procession winding its slow way toward the towers. She sees young lovers walking in the starlight, newly wed. She sees all of life pass before her, and none of it belongs to her.

The lady is watching the world the way a child watches a screen – perfectly, vividly, and at an absolute remove. Every detail is clear, but nothing is real. The mirror shows her everything and gives her nothing.

And then Tennyson writes one of the most quietly devastating lines in English poetry.

Half-sick. Not furious, not despairing, not raging against her imprisonment. Half-sick. It is the weariness of someone who has lived at one remove for so long that she can barely remember what direct experience feels like. She is not in agony. She is in a fog. The shadow-life has not destroyed her – it has slowly drained her, and she names it with a tiredness that is more heartbreaking than any scream.

Tennyson wrote that line in 1832. He had never seen a screen, never imagined a world in which a people might spend hours watching their life pass slowly by in a glowing rectangle held inches from their face. But the human truth he identified – that a life lived through reflections is a life half-lived – has not aged by a single day.

And then Lancelot comes.

Tennyson gives him the most extraordinary entrance in English verse. Every other figure the Lady has seen through her mirror has been a shadow – riders, lovers, funerals, all of them passing and distant. Lancelot arrives like a fire.

Everything about him blazes. The sun on his shield, the gemstones on his bridle, the rings of his armour flashing in the light. He is not a shadow. He is the most intensely, overwhelmingly real thing the mirror has ever shown her. He rides past her tower singing, and his voice carries across the water, and Tennyson’s verse shifts – it quickens, it catches fire – and the Lady does the thing she has been forbidden to do.

She turns.

Look at the precision of that. She sees the water-lily first. Not Lancelot, not the burning armour – a flower. The first thing the direct gaze falls on is something small and beautiful and ordinary, something the mirror could never quite give her. Then the helmet. Then the plume. Reality arriving in pieces, each one sharper than the last.

And then the consequence.

The tapestry she has been weaving – her life’s work, the beautiful, careful, painstaking craft made from shadows – flies apart. The mirror shatters. Everything she built from the reflected life is destroyed in the moment she chooses the real one. The cost is absolute.

She knows it, she says so yet leaves anyway.

The lady then finds a boat beneath a willow, writes her name upon the prow,
lies down in her white robe, and lets the current carry her toward Camelot,
singing as the river takes her. The landscape darkens around her, the leaves fall and the evening deepens.

She dies before Camelot can see her. She arrives as a body in a boat, and the knights and ladies come down to the water and read the name on the prow, and are afraid. Only Lancelot – the man whose blazing reality drew her from her tower – pauses and speaks.

Lancelot never knew her. He never knew she existed. He rode past her tower singing, and his passing destroyed her, and all he can offer at the end is a stranger’s courtesy and a prayer. It is unbearably tender, and Tennyson does not explain it, moralise, or tell you what to feel – he trusts the reader

I have a second confession.

The Lady of Shalott led me to Tennyson’s Idylls of the King – his twelve-poem Arthurian epic that he worked on for twenty-five years and that Charlotte Mason placed, unabridged, on her reading lists for children. I have read passages, fragments, famous lines, but the complete work has eluded me, and I suspect it has eluded most people, because the Idylls asks for a commitment of months, and modern life has a way of stealing months before you notice they are gone, so I have never got around to reading it in its entirety.

But this is the thing I have come to understand, standing in front of Waterhouse’s painting all those years ago and then finally reading the poem beneath it.

You do not need the full Idylls to fall in love with Tennyson’s poetry.

In my view, you need ten minutes and this single poem.

For those of you who are new to my writing – and to the woman who has quietly been shaping a great deal of it – Charlotte Mason was a Victorian educator, born in 1842, who spent her life fighting for the idea that children are born persons. Not blank pages to be written on. Not vessels to be filled. Whole human beings who deserve the same honesty, beauty, and seriousness that adults expect for themselves.

She died in 1923, and her philosophy lives on most vigorously among the American homeschooling families who have adopted her methods and her conviction that children deserve the best – the very best – in everything they read, see, and encounter. I have written about her extensively, and if she is new to you, you will find the full story here.

Mason put Tennyson on her reading lists. Not simplified Tennyson, not Tennyson retold for children, not selected stanzas with a glossary – Tennyson. She trusted that a child could hold the language, feel the weight of the ideas, and draw their own conclusions without being told what to think.

I have spent my last two essays examining what Charlotte meant by a living book – a book written by a single mind with genuine passion, offering real ideas in real language, with an absolute refusal to condescend. And I have been testing books against the four questions that define a living text.

Does it have real ideas? Does it have real language? Is there a living mind behind it? Does it trust the reader?

The Lady of Shalott poem passes every test.

Real ideas – the cost of choosing reality over comfort; the difference between living and observing; the courage to turn from the mirror even when turning destroys you. These are not children’s ideas or adult ideas. They are human ideas, and Tennyson trusts every reader – regardless of age – to feel their weight.

Real language – this is Tennyson at the height of his musical power. The rhyme scheme alone is extraordinary, building and building and resolving each stanza on the tolling repetition of her name. The vocabulary is rich and demanding. A child who reads this poem is being stretched, and Mason believed that stretching was the entire point. A child grows into language. A child does not need to be protected from it.

A living mind – one poet, returning to this poem across a decade, revising and deepening it from the first version of 1832 to the version of 1842 that we know today. Not a committee or corporate focus group, just one man who saw something true and spent years learning how to say it.

And trust, above everything, trust – in the reader. Tennyson never explains the curse. He never tells you what the mirror represents. He never stops the poem to say that choosing reality over comfort is brave, or foolish, or tragic. He shows you a woman who turns from the shadow to the real thing, and he lets you decide what it means.

That is what Charlotte Mason demanded of every book she placed in front of a child. Not instruction. Not moral commentary – trust.

I have been visiting the Lady of Shalott for over forty years. I have stood in front of Waterhouse’s painting so many times that I know every brushstroke – the chain slipping from her fingers, the crucifix at the prow, the darkening trees, the three candles and their trailing smoke. I thought I knew her.

I did not know her at all until I read the Tennyson’s wonderful poem.

The painting is magnificent, but the poem is greater still. Tennyson’s words are the world outside the tower, and when I finally turned to look at them directly, I understood – with the same slow, delighted shock I felt at the Watts Gallery all those years ago – that the real thing had been there all along, waiting patiently for me to stop looking at the reflection and turn around.

Tennyson wrote the final version of The Lady of Shalott in 1842. The poem was there my entire life — through art college, through the Watts Gallery, through every visit to the Tate — and it waited. That is what real beauty does. It does not chase you. It does not shout. It does not compete for your attention with noise and colour and movement. It sits quietly, and it trusts that one day you will find it.

Charlotte Mason knew this. She called it spreading the feast. The feast does not demand that the child eat. It should simply be there – beautiful, nourishing, real – and the child comes to it when they are ready.

If you have never read The Lady of Shalott, then I urge you to do so. It will take you ten minutes. Better still, read it aloud if you can, because Tennyson wrote for the ear as much as the eye, as all poetry is, and the music of the verse – the tolling repetition of her name at the close of every stanza, the quickening rhythm when Lancelot rides past, the slowing, fading cadence of her last journey downriver – transforms the poem in a way that silent reading cannot.

And if you have children, read it to them. Do not explain it. Do not tell them what it means. Trust them. Tennyson did. Charlotte Mason did.

The Lady chose reality over the mirror, even though it cost her everything. Her craft was destroyed. Her song ended. She never reached Camelot alive.

Was she right to turn?

Tennyson does not say, the poem does not answer the question. It simply shows you a woman who could no longer bear the life of shadows, and it trusts you – as Mason trusted the child – to sit with the weight of it and decide for yourself.

That is what a living poem does. It does not resolve. It holds the question open and lets you bring yourself to it. And every time you return – as I have returned, again and again, for over forty years – you are rewarded with a little more.

I still do not know whether the lady was right to turn, but I know that I love her, and that I will return and keep returning to her until my eyes close for the very last time.

For any new readers to my Substack — who is Charlotte Mason?

Born in 1842, Charlotte Mason was a Welsh born teacher who spent her life educating children. She founded a teacher-training college in the Lake District town of Ambleside and developed a philosophy of education that has outlived her by a century. Surprisingly, her philosophy and teaching methods are better known in the USA than here in the UK.

Crucially, Charlotte believed above all things that children are born persons – not blank pages to be written on, not vessels to be filled, but whole human beings who deserve the same honesty, beauty, and seriousness that adults expect for themselves. She applied this thinking to every aspect of children’s education, but in my view nowhere more fiercely than to the study of nature, art and books.

Charlotte chose one word to define anything that she thought was too simplistic or condescending for children. That word is:

Twaddle.

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines Twaddle as ‘silly idle talk, drivel or something insignificant or worthless.’

Charlotte saw twaddle as diluted, watered down. There might be a single grain of actual knowledge, but it was lost in an ocean of worthless talk.

She very much saw it in the lesson-books of her time, and in her view these books were:

‘written in a style of insufferable twaddle, probably because they are written by persons who have never chanced to meet a child.’

She saw it in the ‘pretty books’ that arrived the moment a child could read – books in which the page was ‘nicely broken up in talk or short paragraphs.’ Designed to be pleasant, easy and utterly forgettable.

And she traced, with devastating precision, what happened next.

Pretty books for the nursery give way to pretty books for the schoolroom. Pretty books for the schoolroom give way to the lightest novels at Mudie’s lending library. And before long the habit is set.

‘We have no time for works of any intellectual fibre, and we have no more assimilating power than has the schoolgirl who feeds upon cheese-cakes.’

Cheese-cakes. That is Mason’s image for a mind raised on twaddle. Fed, so not starving, but fed on something with no nutritional value.

She saw twaddle in the goody-goody story books that girls were given and in the highly-spiced tales of adventure that were given to boys – sensational, exciting, and like the goody-goody books, equally vacuous. And she saw it in the stale, predictable writing in the many hundreds of books that filled the shelves of every nursery and schoolroom in England.

‘We give them second-rate story books, with stale phrases, stale situations, shreds of other people’s thoughts, stalest of stale sentiments. They complain that they know how the story will end! But that is not all; they know how every dreary page will unwind itself.’

She put it most plainly in a single sentence that could have been written yesterday.

‘That children like feeble and tedious story books does not at all prove that these are wholesome food; they like lollipops but cannot live upon them.’

In my view, far too much – but by no means all – of children’s literature today is pure twaddle.

That is quite a claim to make, so let me make my case.

Children’s book publishing in the English-speaking world is controlled by five corporations. Just five.

Between them – Penguin Random House, Harper Collins, Hachette, Macmillan, and Simon & Schuster – they hold more than eighty per cent of the trade book market.

Penguin Random House alone publishes fourteen thousand new titles a year and sells seven hundred million books.

These five companies, through roughly five hundred imprints, determine what gets published, what gets marketing spend, what gets placed on the front tables in bookshops and what gets reviewed or selected for libraries. If your child is reading a book that was published in the last ten years, there is a very good chance it passed through the hands of one of these five companies, and those hands are remarkably similar.

Since 1990, seventy-one per cent of all political contributions from the books and publishing sector have gone to one side of the political spectrum. The editors and agents who staff the Big Five are drawn overwhelmingly from elite universities whose faculties are themselves heavily liberal and left leaning.

Nobody has directly surveyed publishing editors on their politics. Nobody needs to. The children’s books that have been published quite literally speak volumes about the gatekeepers and who gets to decide what types of children’s books are published.

This essay is not about criticising any individual editor, agent, or publisher, or a comment on anyone’s politics. I am sure all these people love books and genuinely care about children’s publishing. But when the vast majority of the people making decisions about what children should read are drawn from the same demographic, educated at the same universities, living in the same cities, and sharing the same broadly progressive cultural assumptions – something inevitable happens.

Published books all become the same. The same themes recur. The same moral lessons are embedded. The same types of stories are commissioned, and an entire generation of children is offered a narrower and narrower window onto the world, all while being told that the window is getting wider.

This is not a conspiracy. It is something far more ordinary and far more difficult to fix. It is a monoculture.

A monoculture business does not need to be coordinated to produce uniform results. It simply needs to be staffed across the board by people who share enough similar assumptions that they no longer notice what they are not publishing, rather than what they are.

A literary agent who advertises that they are looking for books by and for ‘marginalised and underrepresented communities’ is not doing anything sinister. They are responding to the culture they work in, the conversations they have with their colleagues, the books that win awards, and the reviews that generate attention. But the cumulative effect of a thousand such agents, a thousand such editors, and a thousand such marketing meetings, creates an industry in which certain kinds of stories are published, and others are not.

Adventure stories with male protagonists have become harder to find. Historical fiction that treats the past on its own terms rather than through the lens of modern identity politics has thinned. Fantasy that draws on the Western literary tradition – on Tolkien, on Lewis, on the Norse myths and the Arthurian legends – has been displaced by fantasy that foregrounds contemporary social concerns. Books in which children encounter genuine danger, genuine moral complexity, and genuine consequences have given way to books in which the primary drama is the protagonist’s journey toward self-acceptance.

None of these newer books are necessarily bad. Some of them are very good. But when an entire shelf of recommendations cannot produce a single title that would appeal to a boy who wants to read about courage, honour, danger, and sacrifice without also being asked to examine his privilege – something has gone wrong.

Not because the new books should not exist, but because the old books, the kind of books that set children’s imaginations on fire for centuries, are no longer being written.

Or if they are being written, they are not being published.

Or if they are being published, they are not being promoted.

And then there is the matter of the books that already exist.

In 2023, Puffin Books – the largest children’s publisher in the world, owned by Penguin Random House – hired sensitivity readers to revise the works of Roald Dahl.

Hundreds of passages were altered across Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, The Witches, James and the Giant Peach, and Fantastic Mr Fox. Words were changed, sentences rewritten, descriptions of characters amended to align with contemporary sensitivities around weight, gender, mental health, and race.

Dahl himself, during his lifetime, had explicitly instructed his publishers not to change so much as a single comma.

Salman Rushdie – a man who knows something about the consequences of other people deciding what should and should not be written – called the revisions ‘absurd censorship.’ Puffin eventually agreed to publish the original texts alongside the revised editions, but did not withdraw the changes.

Similar revisions have since been applied to Enid Blyton, Agatha Christie, and Ian Fleming.

The sensitivity reader is the modern equivalent of Mason’s

‘persons who have never chanced to meet a child.’

The impulse is the same: to place a layer of institutional judgement between the author’s voice and the child’s mind, on the assumption that the child cannot be trusted to encounter the original. Mason fought this in 1886. The mechanism has not changed. Only the justification has.

Beneath all of this lies something simpler and perhaps more damaging than any ideology.

Money.

The Big Five are corporations owned by larger corporations – Bertelsmann, News Corp, Hachette Livre, Holtzbrinck.

Netflix bought the Roald Dahl Story Company for six hundred and eighty-six million dollars. The revisions to Dahl’s texts were made under Netflix’s ownership. When a dead author’s words are altered not by a fellow writer or a thoughtful editor but by a corporation that paid nearly seven hundred million dollars for the right to exploit those words across every media platform on earth, we are no longer talking about sensitivity.

In my opinion, we are talking about greed and the bottom line. A sanitised Dahl is a Dahl that can be licensed globally without risk. A Dahl who calls Augustus Gloop fat is a Dahl who might generate a headline, so get rid of the word, but that decision is based on commerce, not morality.

And so the children’s bookshelf in 2026 is shaped by two forces that Charlotte Mason would have recognised instantly, because she fought them both.

The first is condescension, Tweedledum – the belief that children cannot be trusted with real language, real ideas, real darkness, or real moral complexity without an adult hovering over them to ensure they draw the right conclusions.

The second is commerce, Tweedledee – the reduction of children’s literature from a living art to a product category, optimised for the widest possible market with the smallest possible risk.

The greatest enemies of quality children’s literature today are identity politics and corporate greed, and the result today is as it was in Charlotte Mason’s time. Twaddle.

Coming in part 2 Living Books. (You can read part 2 here).

The Victorian educator and pioneer Charlotte Mason, had one test to define a quality, living book for children. That test is as valid today in 2026 as it was in her time. She said a living book is a book written by a single mind, with genuine knowledge and genuine passion, speaking to the reader — child or adult — as one person to another. It refuses to condescend and offers real language, real ideas, and real emotional weight, and then trusts the child to do something with them and consider it on their own terms.

I have been thinking a great deal about children’s fiction, and long before I started my Substack.

I don’t mean children’s books that already exist, although there are plenty of those worth talking about, I have been thinking about the book that doesn’t exist. Well, at least not yet.

What should that new living book be like?

I have strong preferences on this one. There's a story waiting in England's past that hasn't been told yet. Not a retelling, but something genuinely new, and rooted in something very old. I love the idea of a fantasy story set in England, that straddles time and features amazing creatures, from ghosts to fairies, castles, knights and quests, and that features a child hero. It would be a living book that doesn’t preach or patronise, but that is also morally sound, a great adventure, and most importanly, a really enjoyable read. But these are my preferences. What are yours?

Below are five polls — simple questions about what you would want in a children’s book if you were writing it from scratch. Not which books already do this well. Just what matters to you, or you think should matter to children.

There are no wrong answers and there isn’t a correct combination. I’m just curious as to what people think.

Answer as many or as few of the questions as you like. And if none of the options quite captures what you’re thinking, or you want to add your own thoughts, please do so in the comments.

One more thing before you start: this article isn’t going anywhere. The article will stay open indefinitely. If you come back to it in three months with a thought you didn’t have today, add it in the comments, and do feel free to share if you wish to.

I live on the Sussex coast, and history and beauty is everywhere. From the stunning South Downs and Arundel Castle, to Watts Gallery and Memorial Chapel. (You can read about Watts Memorial Chapel here.)

I have visited these, and many other beautiful places, many, many times.

But there is one place to which I have not yet been, and I am desperate to go, and in my mind’s eye it has become a kind of pilgrimage yet to be undertaken – Buscot Park in Oxfordshire.

Buscot is a National Trust house, but it is not the house that is the destination of my pilgrimage. It is just one room within – the Saloon. This room contains four beautiful, iconic paintings by Edward Burne-Jones. The paintings tell the story of Sleeping Beauty – The Legend of the Briar Rose – a subject that consumed Burne-Jones for nearly twenty years, from his first painted version in 1871 to the completion of the Buscot canvases in 1890.

Lord Faringdon purchased the paintings in 1890, shortly after their highly successful public debut at Agnew’s Gallery in London, specifically for this one room.

When Burne-Jones was staying with his great friend William Morris at nearby Kelmscott Manor (another place on my pilgrimage list), he visited Buscot and was disappointed with how the paintings looked in the room. He went on to paint additional panels and designed carved gilt frames to complete the panorama.

William Morris – who my great-great-grandfather knew, (you can read about that here) – wrote some beautiful verses to go with the paintings.

I have seen the paintings in reproductions; I have read about them, but I have never stood in front of them, and I long to do so, and I recognise that longing, that ache, and it is not simply about seeing the paintings.

Even though I have not yet seen them in the flesh, they are to me the embodiment of the romantic fairy tale.

Those paintings always wake up a dormant, but ever-present feeling that I have had for my whole life – the sense of something beyond this world, a world that I desperately want to reach and become part of.

Burne-Jones spent his whole life reaching for that world, a world beyond – and he brought it to life with paintings of luminous enchanted forests, sleeping princesses, and knights frozen at the threshold of something they could not quite enter. He painted that reaching, that longing for the world beyond, over and over again.

In my view, Burne-Jones is using fairy tale as a metaphor for the divine world we all hope for, and I wonder if that is why the Briar Rose paintings are, for me, more than beautiful. In them, Burne-Jones transforms the fairy tale from stories of darkness and terror to stories of light and divine hope, of the world yet to come.

But fairy tales were not always like this. They were not always enriching and beautiful. For most of their history they were dark, brutal, and often horrific stories with terrible endings. Somewhere between those ancient fireside warnings and the luminous world that Burne-Jones painted, the fairy tale was transformed.

How and why did this happen?

To understand, you have to go back further than you might expect – not to the stories themselves, but to the children, or rather the lack of them. There weren’t any.

On the face of it, this sounds absurd, but it is historically precise. There were young people – small humans who grew into bigger ones – but the idea of childhood as a distinct and protected phase of life, separate from adulthood, simply did not exist.

Children dressed as adults. They worked as adults. They were tried and punished as adults. A seven-year-old was not a child in the way we understand the word. He was a small man, and he was expected to fully understand the world in the way a fully grown man understood it.

And the oral fairy tales of that world made perfect sense. They were not children’s stories, because children, and in turn children’s stories, did not exist. They were dark stories because the world was dark. Forests were genuinely dangerous. Wolves were real. Famine was common. The tales carried the weight of all of this – warnings dressed in metaphor, survival lessons wrapped in narrative, and they did so because they were needed.

Little Red Riding Hood gets eaten because in the world that produced those tales, girls who wandered into forests alone did not come back.

It would be easy to assume that the darkness in these tales was moral – that the wolf punishes disobedience, that the forest swallows the wicked, that the old stories carried the same message as the Sunday school primer: behave or suffer. But that is to read them backwards, through a lens that did not yet exist.

In many cases, these folk tales were older than Christianity itself. The wolf in Little Red Riding Hood is not a symbol of divine judgement. It is a wolf – or a predatory man. The forest that swallows Hansel and Gretel is not a metaphor for the consequences of sin. It is a forest, and behind it stands the spectre of famine, parents who could not feed their children, and used abandonment as a last resort. These tales helped people navigate a genuinely dangerous world. They gave shape to real dangers so that the listener might recognise those dangers when they encountered them.

The moral tract tradition of fairy tale emerged from a different direction entirely, beginning in the seventeenth century with books like Janeway’s Token for Children in 1671 – a deliberate product of Puritan England, stories and catechisms written specifically to frighten children into piety and obedience, drawing their authority from the doctrine of Original Sin.

Sherwood’s Fairchild Family carried the tradition well into the nineteenth century, and the Religious Tract Society, founded in 1799, industrialised it. This was the tradition that Charlotte Mason would later call twaddle at its most fire-and-brimstone. It ran alongside the folk tales, drew on some of the same fears, but for its own purposes. It is the worst kind of allegory – the kind that Tolkien himself hated and warned against.

The older folk tales were darker, stranger, and more honest than the moral tracts. They did not pretend that obedience would save you. Sometimes the wolf wins. Sometimes the forest does not give the children back. Those old stories were terrifying, and deliberately so, to serve as a warning.

Charles Perrault, writing in the salons of Louis XIV’s France in 1697, was the first to commit these oral tales to paper for a literary audience. He took peasant stories – tales he had heard from servants and nurses – and rewrote them for the aristocratic salons of Versailles. He polished the language, added wit, attached neat verse morals at the end. His Cinderella got her glass slipper. His Sleeping Beauty got her prince.

But his Little Red Riding Hood also got eaten, because a hero does not come to the rescue. The wolf wins.

A century later, the Brothers Grimm collected tales in Germany – a scholarly project to record the oral folk tradition before it vanished. The first edition of Grimm’s Fairy Tales in 1812 was faithful to what they had heard, and what they had heard was horrific. Snow White’s mother – her biological mother, not a stepmother – orders a huntsman to bring back her daughter’s lungs and liver so she could eat them. Cinderella’s stepsisters hack off parts of their own feet to force them into the slipper. Rapunzel’s repeated visits from the prince leave her visibly pregnant.

So how did these horror stories become the gentle fairy tales we know and love today?

The fairy tale changed because the world changed. The dangers that had produced the tales – famine, wolves, plague, the vulnerability of the powerless – were receding. An increasingly literate Europe no longer needed survival stories.

And at the same time, the man who would go on to transform how Europe thought about, and defined, children published a book about education.

In 1762, Jean-Jacques Rousseau published Émile, and his argument was revolutionary. Children are born innocent and good – they are not fully formed, already morally corrupted adults in little bodies.

This was a direct assault on the doctrine of Original Sin, which had shaped European thinking about children for over a thousand years. And it changed everything – not just education, but the stories that a culture soon came to believe its children deserved.

Rousseau’s idea travelled from France into English Romanticism, and the Romantic poets carried it further. Wordsworth wrote of children arriving in the world ‘trailing clouds of glory.’ Blake saw innocence and experience as two fundamental states of the human soul, and innocence was the one closest to the divine. Childhood, for the first time in European thought, became not a deficiency to be corrected but an innocent, sacred condition to be protected.

And once you accept the fact that children are innocent, that their imaginative life is closer to God than an adult’s weary rationalism – then the stories you tell them must change. You cannot give an innocent child a tale in which the wolf wins and the girl is eaten. That story belongs to a world in which danger was real and children needed warning. In a world that had started to believe that children are born whole yet innocent, you need a different kind of story.

The Brothers Grimm felt this shift in attitudes towards children in real time. After the first edition of their collected tales in 1812, they were criticised – not for the quality of their scholarship, but for publishing material that was unsuitable for children. And over seven editions, spanning forty-five years, they responded. Biological mothers became stepmothers – because a world that now sentimentalised motherhood could not bear the idea of a mother ordering her own child’s death, and so the wicked stepmother was born. Sexual elements were quietly removed. Christian morality was threaded throughout, violence softened and endings sweetened. By the final edition of Grimm’s Fairy Tales in 1857, the tales were recognisably the versions we know and love today.

But something crucial was also happening. In the middle of the nineteenth century, a new market was emerging for the first time in history.

Books made specifically for children, designed to delight rather than instruct, to enchant rather than warn. The conditions were all in place – rising literacy, a growing middle class with money to spend, the emerging Victorian conviction that childhood was precious and must be furnished with beautiful things – and publishers responded.

They needed content. They needed illustrations. They needed beauty. And they needed a way to get these new, gentler tales into the hands of children, beautifully illustrated. But how?

The answer came in London in 1865. Edmund Evans, a colour printer, worked out how to do it for sixpence.

Evans developed a technique called chromoxylography – colour printing from wood blocks – to a level of quality and affordability that nobody had achieved before. His ambition was simple and radical: he wanted to produce children’s books that were beautiful and cheap. Not beautiful for the wealthy and cheap for everyone else. Beautiful and cheap, together, in the same book for all children – the sixpenny toy book.

In 1865, Evans hired a young artist called Walter Crane – and between them they lit the fuse that would ignite the Golden Age of Illustration.

Crane was twenty years old and had just completed an apprenticeship under W.J. Linton, where he had studied the work of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Everett Millais. He had absorbed the Pre-Raphaelite conviction that beauty was not decoration but a moral imperative – the same conviction that John Ruskin had been preaching for decades and that William Morris was about to build an entire movement around. Crane would go on to found the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society in 1888. He would work with Morris at the Kelmscott Press. He was, in every sense that mattered, a Pre-Raphaelite artist for the nursery.

And Evans put him to work illustrating fairy tales.

Between 1865 and 1886, Crane and Evans produced over fifty toy books – short, beautifully illustrated children’s books of nursery rhymes and fairy tales, sold for sixpence each. Sixpence. Before Evans, a colour-illustrated book was an expensive luxury object. After Evans, it was something most middle-class families could afford. The technology did not simply reproduce the art – it democratised the dream.

Crane brought to these little books the same romantic, medieval-inflected sensibility that Morris brought to his wallpaper and Burne-Jones brought to his paintings. His fairies had the grace of Botticelli. His forests had the density of a Rossetti illustration. His princesses existed in a world that owed more to the Middle Ages than to the Victorian nursery. And because Evans could print in colour – real colour, faithful to what Crane had painted – children could see that world for the very first time.

And this is where the fairy tale finally evolves into the fairy tales we know today.

Before Crane and Evans, a child encountered a fairy tale as a told thing – heard from a parent or a nurse, imagined privately, coloured by whatever the child’s own mind could supply. After Crane and Evans, a child encountered a fairy tale as a seen thing – illustrated, coloured, made visible by an artist who believed that what children saw mattered as much as what they heard.

And what Crane showed them was not the dark forest. It was the enchanted bower.

Perhaps the surest proof that the revolution was complete is that in 1870s, even the Religious Tract Society – the organisation founded to frighten children into piety – Mason’s fire-and-brimstone twaddle – was publishing sixpenny toy books. The world had changed so thoroughly that the tract publishers themselves had to change with it.

And so this essay comes back to Burne-Jones who understood the enchanted bower better than anyone.

His Briar Rose series – the four paintings waiting for me at Buscot – took the story of Sleeping Beauty and turned it into something that no fairy tale had ever been before: monumental art. Each canvas is over two and a half metres long. The sleeping princess, the frozen court, the knights tangled in thorns, the prince standing at the threshold – all of it painted with a luminosity that makes the everyday world outside the frame feel like the illusion.

Burne-Jones drew his inspiration from the Grimm version and from Tennyson’s 1842 poem ‘The Day-Dream,’ but what he painted was neither a warning nor a moral. It was a vision. The thorns in the Briar Rose are not a punishment. They are a threshold. The prince is not defeating danger – he is entering a dream. The sleeping princess is not a victim awaiting rescue. She is beauty itself, held in suspension, waiting for someone brave enough to cross over.

That is what happened to the fairy tale. It evolved into a place you longed to enter, not a dangerous place to run from.

Crane, Morris, and Burne-Jones were all part of the same movement – men who looked at what industrial England had built and found it spiritually bankrupt, and who reached back into the medieval world to find what their own age had thrown away. Beauty. Romance. The conviction that making something with care and devotion was itself a moral act. And when they turned their attention to the fairy tale, they remade it in that image – not illustrating the dark horrific stories as they had been, but reimagining them as visions of the world they believed in.

Then came the generation that inherited both their sensibility. Arthur Rackham, Edmund Dulac, Kay Nielsen – the great triumvirate of the Golden Age of Illustration, working roughly from 1880 to 1930. By now, photozincography had replaced the wood block. An artist could paint in watercolour and know that the printed reproduction would faithfully capture what they had created – every wash, every gradient, every translucent layer of colour. For the first time in history, the child holding the book also saw what the artist saw.

Rackham gave fairy tales their twisted trees and moonlit glades, of ancient forests alive with watching things. Dulac gave the tales jewelled colour and an orientalism borrowed from Persian miniatures. Nielsen kept the shadows – his illustrations of Andersen and the Grimms are among the most melancholy and beautiful ever created, full of love and loss and the darker edges of enchantment.

None of them painted warnings, they painted dream worlds.

And every one of them was steeped in the same traditions – Pre-Raphaelitism, Art Nouveau, the Arts and Crafts movement. The line runs directly from Ruskin through Morris and Burne-Jones, through Crane and Evans, to Rackham, Dulac, and Nielsen. It is a line of conviction: that beauty matters, and most importantly, that children deserve it, and that the fairy tale is the vessel that carries it from one generation to the next.

And of course, Charlotte Mason knew this.

Charlotte Mason – the Victorian educator whose philosophy of education has become the foundation of the homeschooling movement on both sides of the Atlantic – placed fairy tales at the centre of her curriculum for young children. Grimm. Andersen. Perrault. She included them all. And she wrote with clarity:

‘Let children have tales of the imagination, scenes laid in other lands and other times; heroic adventures, hairbreadth escapes, delicious fairy tales, even where it is all impossible, and they know it, and yet they believe.’

But here is the thing that I find remarkable. The fairy tales Charlotte championed were not the dark originals. They were the fairy tales that had already been transformed – softened by the Brothers Grimm across forty-five years of careful revision, made visible by Crane and Evans in their sixpenny books, made luminous by Burne-Jones and Rackham and all the artists who believed that what children saw shaped what they believed was possible.

Charlotte Mason arrived at the end of that evolutionary chain. She saw fairy tales as living books – stories that treated children as persons capable of wonder, not as problems requiring correction. And she was right to see it that way, because by the time the fairy tale reached her schoolroom, it had been shaped by a century of people who held exactly the same conviction she did: that beauty is a birthright, not a luxury, and that children deserve the real thing.

A Beautiful Book.

One of my favourite books that contains fairy tale illustrations is by Kinuko Craft.

Craft is a Japanese-born American artist who paints fairy tales in oil over watercolour – layer upon luminous layer, with a precision and devotion that belongs to the Renaissance as much as it does to the Golden Age of Illustration. Her Sleeping Beauty is a direct descendant of Burne-Jones’s Briar Rose – the same enchanted stillness, the same conviction that the dream is more real than the waking world, the same refusal to treat the fairy tale as merely a story for children.

The line that runs from Burne-Jones through Crane and Rackham runs directly to her – a woman that painted Sleeping Beauty in the twentieth century with the same care that a Victorian artist brought to four enormous canvases in a room in Oxfordshire over a hundred years before.

I hold her book in my hands and I think about what I am actually looking at. Not just illustration – a tradition. A chain of conviction that stretches back through a century and a half of artists, craftsmen, writers, and printers who believed that fairy tales should be beautiful, and that children deserved fairy tales.

The dark forest is still there, underneath. It always will be. The wolf is real. The thorns are real. But someone – many someones, across many generations – decided that the fairy tale could be more than a horrific warning. Fiary tales could become a beautiful threshold, a door into a world that never was and never will be, in a light better than any light that ever shone.

I would go further. For me, the greatest fairy tales have become doorways into something beyond even the artists’ intention – a glimpse of divine truth, the merest sliver of the world yet to come, offered quietly to anyone willing to look.

I have not yet walked through the door at Buscot. But I will. Burne-Jones painted not just a sleeping princess, but longing itself – the longing that drives us to reach for beauty even when we cannot quite touch it, and to place that beauty in the hands of children, because they deserve nothing less.

Ultimately, the fairy tale learned to dream because we did.

For any new readers to my Substack — who is Charlotte Mason?

Born in 1842, Charlotte Mason was a Welsh-born teacher who spent her life educating children. She founded a teacher-training college in the Lake District town of Ambleside and developed a philosophy of education that has outlived her by a century. Surprisingly, her philosophy and teaching methods are better known in the USA than here in the UK.

Crucially, Charlotte believed above all things that children are born persons – not blank pages to be written on, not vessels to be filled, but whole human beings who deserve the same honesty, beauty, and seriousness that adults expect for themselves. She applied this thinking to every aspect of children’s education, but in my view, nowhere more fiercely than to the study of nature, art and books.

In Part 1 – Twaddle, (you can read that article here) I looked at what Charlotte would call twaddle – the books that condescend, that dilute, that treat children as less than they are.

But Charlotte Mason did not just criticise, she offered solutions, and she built a reading list so ambitious, so uncompromising in its faith in children, that it puts modern curricula to shame.

She called the books on that list living books, and living books are the subject of this essay.

A living book as defined by Charlotte Mason.

‘They (children) must grow up upon the best. There must never be a period in their lives when they are allowed to read or listen to twaddle or reading-made-easy. There is never a time when they are unequal to worthy thoughts, well put; inspiring tales, well told.’

There is never a time when they are unequal.

She is not saying that children will one day be ready for proper books. She is saying they are ready now, as children, from the very beginning.

The best books are not too good for children, and anything less than the best is not good enough.

And she set the bar at a height that would make most modern publishers flinch.

‘Let Blake’s Songs of Innocence represent their standard in poetry; Defoe and Stevenson, in prose; and we shall train a race of readers who will demand literature – that is, the fit and beautiful expression of inspiring ideas and pictures of life.’

Blake. Defoe. Stevenson. These are not easy writers for a child.

Blake’s Songs of Innocence are deceptively simple poems, but with extraordinary spiritual depth.

Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe is a long, demanding novel with complex vocabulary, and with a man’s solitude at its centre.

Stevenson gave us Treasure Island, a book that does not slow down for its reader, does not explain its nautical language, and does not flinch from murder.

This is what a living book is. Not simply a well-written book. Not a book that ticks the right boxes or earns a gold star on a recommended list. A living book is a book written by a single mind with genuine knowledge and genuine passion, speaking directly to the reader – child or adult – as one person to another.

If there is one word that expands on twaddle and summarises a book consisting of twaddle, it is condescension.

A living book – a book that trusts and is not twaddle – is a book that refuses to be condescending.

Condescension in a children’s book occurs when the author becomes intrusive, explicitly explaining what characters are feeling as the author thinks the child does not yet have the mental capacity to understand.

Condescension in a children’s book occurs when the author purposely avoids complex or rich vocabulary, as the author thinks the child does not yet have the mental capacity to understand.

Condescension in a children’s book occurs when there is blatant, deliberate and forced moralising taking precedence over character development and plot – identity politics.

A living book trusts the child to deduce meaning through context.

Children are every bit as perceptive and discerning as adults, and can spot condescension a mile away.

Author and publisher alike – take note.

And Charlotte Mason was precise about what trust in a living book looks like. She wrote:

‘Let them (children) get at the books themselves, and do not let them be flooded with diluted talk from the lips of their teacher.’

And again:

‘What a child digs for is his own possession; what is poured into his ear, like the idle song of a pleasant singer, floats out as lightly as it came in, and is rarely assimilated.’

The living book trusts the child to read, digest and interpret the ideas, feelings, emotions and morality for themselves, and if the book does so effectively and memorably, the child won’t forget it.

I would argue that first and foremost, the living book engages the curiosity of the reader.

This means real language – language that stretches the child rather than staying safely inside what the child already knows or expects, or more importantly what the author, publisher and focus group thinks they already know.

When Tolkien writes ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit,’ he does not add a footnote explaining what a hobbit is. The child must read on and discover it for himself.

When Stevenson puts Billy Bones in the Admiral Benbow inn, he does not pause to explain eighteenth-century coastal taverns or the drinking habits of sailors. The child absorbs the world from the story itself. The prose does not compromise and dumb down to meet the expectations, not of the child, but what the author or publisher thinks the prose should be for that child.

A living book means real ideas, encountered without moralising, and Charlotte was fierce on this. She insisted that children must be allowed to draw their own conclusions.

When Plutarch describes Coriolanus turning against Rome, he does not append a paragraph explaining that betrayal is wrong.

When Lewis sends Edmund to the White Witch for Turkish Delight, he does not stop the story to tell the reader that Edmund is being greedy and foolish. The child knows this.

The narrative allows key elements to become known naturally – not by instruction, but by placing the reader inside the situation and trusting them to see it for themselves, and that is why the foundation of a living book is one of trust.

And trust means living books with real emotional weight, unshielded and unsoftened.

Charlotte dies at the end of Charlotte’s Web.

Thorin Oakenshield dies at the end of The Hobbit.

The Velveteen Rabbit is thrown on a bonfire.

These books do not protect the child from grief. They trust the child with it. They place the child inside the narrative and let them feel what the character feels, let them experience what the character experiences, without telling them what they ought to feel.

That is the act of trust that separates a living book from a dead one, and the test is not complicated.

Does this book have real ideas?

Does this book have real language?

Does this book have a living mind behind it – an author who cared about the subject, not a committee who saw a gap in the market?

Does this book trust the child enough to let them do their own exploration of the narrative and draw their own conclusions?

If the answer is yes, it is a living book.

If the answer is no, it is twaddle, no matter how attractive the cover or how far up the bestseller list it is.

In the 19th century, Charlotte’s own reading lists make this devastatingly clear.

She put Plutarch’s Lives – in Sir Thomas North’s Elizabethan translation, unabridged – in front of twelve-year-olds and expected them to read it, narrate what they had read, and engage with the moral and political ideas of the ancient world.

Not a summary of Plutarch. Not Plutarch retold for children. Plutarch.

She gave children Froissart’s Chronicles – a medieval eyewitness account of the Hundred Years’ War, vivid, dramatic, partisan and alive.

She gave them Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, written by a monk in Jarrow in the eighth century.

She gave them Shakespeare, not as a school exercise to be studied and annotated, but as living literature to be read aloud, enjoyed and inhabited.

She gave eight-year-olds Kipling and Bunyan in the original.

She put Thackeray in front of older students.

Charlotte Mason saw no ceiling on what a young mind could encounter, provided the language was worthy and the ideas were real.

Look at the authors she championed and a pattern emerges. Almost every one of them was a single person with genuine expertise and genuine passion.

Defoe was a journalist and adventurer who wrote Robinson Crusoe.

Kingsley was a clergyman, a Cambridge professor and a naturalist who wrote The Water-Babies and The Heroes.

Froissart was a court chronicler who witnessed the Hundred Years’ War and wrote his Chronicles from the midst of it.

Arabella Buckley spent eleven years as secretary to Charles Lyell, the father of modern geology, and wrote The Fairy-Land of Science because she believed the natural world was more wondrous than any fairy tale.

These were not people who had been commissioned to write a book for the Year 3 curriculum. They were people who knew something deeply and burned to tell a story.

The living book, in Mason’s view, is not defined by its subject. It is defined by the presence of a living mind behind it.

And at the other end of the bookshelf she saw exactly what was missing.

She saw lesson-books written by committees, textbooks that had been diluted and simplified until nothing of the original knowledge remained. She saw pretty books designed to be pleasant rather than nourishing, goody-goody stories designed to improve rather than inspire, and reading-made-easy books that removed every difficulty and left the child with no challenges and nothing to grow into.

She described the whole sorry system with a question that still gets right through to the core.

‘Why in the world should we not give children, while they are at school, the sort of books they can live upon – books alive with thought and feeling and delight in knowledge – instead of the miserable cram-books on which they are starved?’

Charlotte Mason died in January 1923 – long before The Hobbit, long before Narnia.

But her philosophy did not die with her, and neither did the kind of books she championed. In the century since her death, a remarkable body of children’s literature has appeared that she would have recognised instantly as living books that pass her test.

Trust the child. Offer real ideas, real language and real emotional weight without a trace of condescension.

In my view, the first of these new living books came from two men who arrived at almost exactly the same conclusions as Charlotte Mason did without ever having known her. She at Ambleside, they at Oxford. Different worlds. The same conviction.

J.R.R. Tolkien delivered a lecture at the University of St Andrews in 1939 – later published as the essay On Fairy-Stories – in which he argued that fairy tales are not inherently for children. They are for human beings. The common assumption that fairy tales belong in the nursery, he wrote, comes from people who tend to think of children as ‘a special kind of creature, almost a different race, rather than as normal, if immature, members of a particular family, and of the human family at large.’

A special kind of creature. Almost a different race. That is the assumption behind every piece of twaddle ever published both then, and especially now.

It is the assumption behind the sensitivity reader, the graded vocabulary list, the book designed to deliver a message rather than tell a story. And it is the assumption that both Tolkien and Mason, independently spent their lives fighting.

Mason said children are born persons. Tolkien said children are not a separate species.

The Hobbit, published in 1937, is the living book made manifest. It begins as a fireside tale and ends as something approaching epic. It trusts children with complex moral ideas – Bilbo’s mercy towards Gollum, the corrupting power of treasure, the moral ambiguity of the Battle of Five Armies – without once stopping to explain what the child is supposed to think. The prose is beautiful, demanding and never condescending.

Charlotte Mason would have recognised The Hobbit from the first page.

C.S. Lewis, Tolkien’s closest friend, wrote the Chronicles of Narnia because he believed children deserved the same philosophical and theological seriousness that adults received, wrapped in story rather than argument. Lewis once wrote that a children’s story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children’s story in the least. Mason would have agreed. She would have put The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe beside Plutarch and Froissart and expected her students to narrate it.

Both Tolkien and Lewis understood what Mason understood: that the best stories do not lecture. They trust. They place the child inside a world and let the child draw their own conclusions. Far more often than asking ‘Is it true?’, Tolkien observed, children ask: ‘Was he good? Was he wicked?’ They are not looking for facts. They are looking for the right side and the wrong side, and they are perfectly capable of finding it for themselves.

This tradition did not end with the Inklings. It runs forward through the twentieth century and into our own time, and wherever you find it, you find the same thing – a single author writing from conviction rather than commission, trusting children with real ideas, real darkness, real beauty and real moral complexity.

You find it in Katherine Paterson’s Bridge to Terabithia, a book that gives children death – sudden, senseless, irreversible death – and trusts them to feel it without being told how.

You find it in Ursula Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea, which hands a child a story about the consequences of pride and the necessity of facing your own shadow, told in prose of such spare, luminous beauty that many adults cannot match it.

You find it in Jeanne Birdsall’s The Penderwicks, which does something increasingly rare in modern children’s fiction – it writes a family that is loving and functional and still utterly compelling, without a single crisis of identity or self-discovery driving the plot.

And you find it, with particular force, in a group of authors who have emerged over the last two decades from precisely the community that Charlotte Mason’s philosophy now serves – the homeschooling families of America.

S.D. Smith’s The Green Ember and its sequels are adventure stories with moral weight, written by a father who told these tales to his own children before he ever wrote them down.

Andrew Peterson’s Wingfeather Saga is a work of genuine literary ambition – a fantasy epic that takes evil seriously, treats sacrifice as costly, and writes prose that rises to the level of its ideas.

Smith and Peterson did not come out of the Big Five publishing houses. They came out of small presses, homeschool conferences, kitchen tables and the quiet conviction that children deserve better than what corporate was offering. They are living books in Mason’s exact sense: single authors, genuine passion, real ideas, and an absolute refusal to condescend and produce twaddle.

Bugle

At the edge of the woodland,
Where good fairies dwell,
Stands, on the look-out,
A brave sentinel.
At the call of his bugle
Out the elves run,
Ready for anything,
Danger, or fun,
Hunting, or warfare,
By moonshine or sun.

I was born in London, and my strongest early memories as a toddler are of long walks with my grandmother in the great London parks. Actually, she did all the walking. I was in a pushchair enjoying the ride.

For this essay, one park in particular springs to mind – Kensington Gardens. In the gardens there is a statue of J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, created in 1912, but it is not the statue I remember. What caught my attention was an old dead oak tree, except to me it was far from dead. It was teeming with life. And I am sure that my fascination with fairies was born from that old tree.

The tree is the Elfin Oak. The Elfin Oak is the stump of a nine-hundred-year-old oak tree, covered in miniature, painted figures of elves, gnomes, fairies and small animals. The enormous hollow log came from Richmond Park and was moved to Kensington Gardens in 1928. Over the following two years, the illustrator Ivor Innes carved dozens of figures into it – Wookey the witch with her three jars, Huckleberry the gnome carrying berries up the Gnomes’ Stairway, Grumples and Groodles the Elves being woken by brownies stealing eggs from a crow’s nest. The comedian Spike Milligan was a lifelong fan and in 1996 personally financed its restoration, repainting much of the tree himself. It was granted Grade II listed status in 1997.

I remember being fascinated by it, but also somewhat nervous. Those little figures, carved from wood, were to my toddler eyes rather scary.

As I got older, the fascination with fairies never quite left me, although it went underground for a while, as these things do when you are a teenager.

It resurfaced in my first year at art college. West Sussex College of Art and Design, Worthing, 1979. I was sixteen, and I bought a first edition of Faeries by Brian Froud and Alan Lee. I still have it.

That book changed everything. Froud and Lee took fairies out of the nursery and into the landscape – into the mud and the moss and the tangled roots of old trees. Their fairies were not cute, they were wild, ancient, unpredictable, and rooted in the same English and Celtic folklore that had produced the stories I had grown up half-knowing, and without understanding where they came from – the English countryside.

That book opened a door. Through it I found my way to Tolkien, Lord of the Rings and the Elves, and I loved them. Not the battles, not the quest, not even the Ring – it was the Elves of Lothlórien and Rivendell that I liked the most. The Elves of Middle-earth are tall, ancient, luminous, and profoundly sad creatures. There is a beauty in Tolkien’s Elves that aches, because you know it is passing. And of course it was Alan Lee who went on to define the visual world of Middle-earth for Peter Jackson’s films, so the thread from that first edition of Faeries in a Worthing bookshop runs all the way to the screen.

But the older tradition kept pulling me back. The Victorian fairy painters – Richard Dadd’s impossibly detailed and disturbing The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke. Joseph Noel Paton’s tangled fairy courts. These artists were not making art for children. They were looking at the natural world and seeing something behind it, something half-hidden in the bark and the undergrowth, something that would vanish if you looked at it directly.

And then there was Arthur Rackham, especially his trees. Rackham’s trees are alive – literally. His trees have faces, they have fingers, they are watching you. His forests are places where the boundary between the natural and the supernatural has dissolved completely. A gnarled oak in a Rackham drawing is not a tree with a fairy sitting on it. The tree is the fairy. The roots and the magic are the same thing. I have spent hours with Rackham’s illustrations, and they have never once lost their power. I think that is because Rackham understood something essential: that enchantment is not prettiness. It is strangeness. It is the feeling that the world is deeper than it looks.

So when it came to Cicely Mary Barker and her Flower Fairies, I was dismissive.

Barkers fairies were twee and too cute. They were not fairies, they were children playing dress-up. I had Rackham’s gnarled forests and Froud’s wild creatures and Tolkien’s luminous, grieving Elves. What did I need with pretty children sitting on flowers?

I held that view for over forty years, until a holiday in Wales in 2023.

On the journey to Wales, we stopped at Port Sunlight to visit the Lady Lever Art Gallery. I had always wanted to see its Pre-Raphaelite collection, and one painting in particular – A Dream of the Past: Sir Isumbras at the Ford by Millais. Port Sunlight itself is a remarkable Disney-like place, a model village built by William Lever for his soap factory workers, and founded on the conviction that working people deserved beauty in their daily surroundings. That is an Arts and Crafts principle if ever there was one.

Quite by coincidence, there was an exhibition of Cicely Mary Barker’s original Flower Fairy paintings. I almost walked past it, but I’m glad I didn’t. Sometimes the things that change your mind arrive not through argument but through circumstance.

The originals are not what you expect. They are not the soft, slightly faded images you know from the printed books and the greetings cards. They are precise and they are still luminous and bright. The botanical detail is extraordinary – every petal, every stamen, every leaf painted with a care and attention that reproductions cannot easily convey. And the children that I had dismissed as playing dress-up are not idealised cherubs. They are real children, caught in real poses, with weight and character. You can see the personality in their faces. I wandered around in that gallery for a long time. Much longer than I had intended.

What I had dismissed for prettiness was precision.

What I had dismissed as sweetness was devotion.

I had been looking at Cicely Mary Barker’s Flower Fairies through the wrong end of the telescope. I had confused gentleness with lack of depth, the same mistake that art critics have spent a hundred years making about Helen Allingham’s cottage paintings – technically accomplished, undeniably appealing, and dismissed as chocolate box. Too pretty. Too safe. Too easy to love. That accusation – chocolate box – deserves a moment’s thought, because it reveals more about the accuser than the accused. When we call something chocolate box, what we really mean is that it is beautiful without being difficult, and we have somehow decided that beauty without difficulty is not to be trusted.

We will forgive Rackham his beauty because his trees are frightening. We will forgive Dadd because his fairies are hallucinatory. But Barker’s beauty is gentle, and quiet, and grounded in the real – real flowers, real children, and most importantly real faith, and we do not quite know what to do with it. So we put it on a biscuit tin and move on. I dismissed her work for decades, and it took the originals to open my eyes.

Cicely Mary Barker was born in West Croydon, London on 28 June 1895. She suffered from epilepsy as a child and was physically frail for most of her life. She could not go to school, so she was educated at home, spending much of her time on her own, reading and drawing. Her father was an artist – he carved the pulpit at their local church and played the organ – and he recognised his daughter’s talent early, enrolling her at the Croydon Art Society at thirteen.

At sixteen she was elected a life fellow, the youngest person ever to receive the honour. Her father died when she was seventeen. The family were left in difficult circumstances. Her elder sister Dorothy opened an infants school – kindergarten – in the back room of their house. Meanwhile Cicely began to sell her paintings. She sent her Flower Fairy illustrations to several publishers before Blackie accepted them. She was paid twenty-five pounds for twenty-four paintings and their accompanying verses. She was only twenty-eight years old. Flower Fairies of the Spring was published in 1923, and was well received by a public weary of war and tired of the horror and pointless slaughter.

Seven more Flower Fairy books followed. But the illustrations were only part of what Barker made. She wrote every one of the poems herself. The paintings always came first – she painted the flower and the child before she wrote the verse – and the poems were crafted to match, each one a small, precise observation of the plant’s character and its habitat. They are not great poetry, and she would not have claimed they were. But they are true. They carry real botanical knowledge lightly, in a form a child can hold in memory, and they were written by the same hand that painted the pictures. The Flower Fairies are not illustrated poems. They are not poems about nature. Each illustration and poem needs to be considered together. Her method was extraordinary in its care. She painted every flower from life. When she could not find the specimen she needed, she wrote to the staff at Kew Gardens, who would visit her, bringing plants for her to study.

The children who modelled for the fairies were real, and most of them from Dorothy’s infant school. Cicely made the costumes herself, stitching them from scraps of fabric, fashioning wings from twigs and gauze. She asked each child to hold the actual flower, because she wanted to be certain of its shape, its texture, its weight in a small hand. Her only alteration was to scale – she enlarged the flower to match the size of the child. Everything was real except the fairy. In the foreword to Flower Fairies of the Wayside she wrote:

‘So let me say quite plainly, that I have drawn all the plants and flowers very carefully, from real ones; and everything that I have said about them is as true as I could make it. But I have never seen a fairy; the fairies and all about them are just “pretend.’’

The flowers were true. The children were real. The craft was meticulous. And the fairy – the enchantment, the wonder, the thing with wings – was honestly declared as imagination.

She did not ask anyone to believe in fairies. She asked them to look at flowers and the wonder of childhood. This matters, because in the very same years that Barker was painting real children holding real flowers, two girls in a Yorkshire garden were propping up paper cutouts with hatpins and saying the photographs were of real fairies. The Cottingley hoax fooled Arthur Conan Doyle, whose son Kingsley was wounded at the Somme and died of pneumonia, and who was desperate to believe that the material world was not all there was. He published the photographs in The Strand Magazine in 1920 and wrote The Coming of the Fairies in 1922. Barker’s Flower Fairies of the Spring appeared less than a year later. I would argue that the hunger that made both the Cottingley Fairies and the Flower Fairies were one and the same thing. But where the Cottingley fairies offered false evidence of the supernatural, Barker offered something more honest and more profound – real beauty, made by hand, grounded in nature, and openly declared for what it is. The fairy was pretend. The flower was real and sacred.

And the faith behind Cicely Barker’s work is genuine. The Barkers were a deeply religious family, and Cicely was a devout Christian all her life. She was described as one of the pillars of St Andrew’s Church in Croydon. Her faith was not a private matter kept separate from her art – it was the foundation of everything she made. She painted church murals, altar panels, and triptychs. She illustrated Bible stories with her sister Dorothy. In 1926, Queen Mary purchased one of her religious paintings, The Darling of the World Has Come. And towards the end of her life, she designed a stained glass window for St Edmund’s Church, Pitlake, in memory of her sister and mother. A stained glass window. Made in grief and love for a dead sister.

If you have read any of my other essays, then you will know why that stops me in my tracks. My great-great-grandfather Robert made stained glass windows for Morris and Company and knew William Morris. The only surviving examples of Robert’s work are in a church around the corner from my home, windows I did not know existed until I went looking for them. Barker’s window was installed in 1962. Unfortunately, the church no longer exists and the window has disappeared. Robert’s windows survived by accident. Barker’s was lost. But the impulse behind both was the same – the belief that making something beautiful with your hands, for a sacred space, was itself an act of faith.

Barker saw no contradiction between her fairy paintings and her religious art. The Flower Fairies are not pagan. They are a celebration of the natural world made by a woman who believed that world was God’s creation, and that painting it truthfully was a form of praise. I would argue that the fairy is simply the device that invites a child to look more closely and to learn to appreciate nature. Which brings me once again to Charlotte Mason.

Charlotte Mason believed that children are born persons – complete human beings capable of receiving real ideas, real beauty, and real difficulty from the very beginning. She called the alternative ‘twaddle’: the watered-down, oversimplified material that adults produce when they do not trust children to appreciate the real thing. Two of the cornerstones of her method were picture study and nature study. In picture study, a child is shown a single painting and asked to look at it carefully, to notice what is there, to hold it in memory. No analysis. No art history. Just looking, attending, receiving. Mason wanted every child to leave school with ‘whole galleries of mental pictures’ hanging in the halls of their imagination.

In nature study, Mason sent children outside to directly encounter the living, natural world, which she argued is itself a form of knowledge. She encouraged children to keep nature journals and draw and note what they saw. Children learned the names of flowers and trees not from textbooks but from the things themselves, held in their own hands and studied with their own eyes. Art and nature. The trained eye and the living world. Mason understood that these were not separate disciplines but two expressions of the same conviction – that beauty is a birthright, and the capacity to see it belongs to everyone.

This was Ruskin’s conviction before it was Mason’s, absorbed through her friend Julia Firth’s weekly picture study sessions in Ambleside, where Firth showed students how to look at paintings the way Ruskin had taught her to look. (You can read about Ruskin and Julia Firth here.) Cicely Mary Barker never met Charlotte Mason. Mason died in January 1923, months before Flower Fairies of the Spring was published. There is no evidence they knew of each other, yet they arrived at the same truth independently, just from different directions.

Mason said show a child real art. Barker made art for children that was botanically precise, honestly observed, and painted from life. Mason said send a child into nature. Barker took nature and made it the foundation of her work. Mason said children are not lesser beings who need lesser things. Barker was paid twenty-five pounds for twenty-four paintings and she painted every one as though she were painting for a gallery, because she did not believe that work made for children deserved less care than work made for adults. And both of these women believed that the natural world was not merely beautiful but sacred, and that showing a child its beauty was a moral act, not a sentimental indulgence.

The connection runs through geography too. Charlotte Mason taught for more than ten years at Davison School in Worthing before she moved to Ambleside. Cicely Mary Barker moved to Sussex in her final years and died in Worthing Hospital on 16 February 1973. I started art college in Worthing six years later in 1979 when I was sixteen years old and brought a first edition of Faeries by Alan Lee and Brian Froud. Three people separated by only time, who believed that making things with care matters.

Right now, as I write this, thirty of Barker’s original Flower Fairy watercolours are on display at the Russell-Cotes Museum in Bournemouth, a couple of hours along the coast from me. The exhibition runs until October 2026 and includes preparatory sketches and rarely seen studies – the working process laid bare, the craft visible beneath the finished surface.

As a side note, Charlotte Mason’s teaching method and homeschooling is very much alive today in Bournemouth and nearby Poole.

In any event, I dismissed Cicely Mary Barker for decades because I thought her work was twee and simply too pretty. I was wrong. Past the ‘chocolate box cuteness’ there is a deeper truth to be found. The flowers are real, painted from life with a precision that any botanist would respect. The children are real, from the infant school in the back room, dressed in costumes made by hand.

The faith is real, expressed in every brushstroke of every fairy painting. Both the flower and the child are created by God, and I would argue that each one of her paintings and poems is a devotional piece and an act of faith.

Charlotte and Cicely would have understood one another completely.

The fairy is pretend. The flower is real. And the act of painting one to help a child see the other is, I think, as close to Charlotte Mason’s vision as any illustrator has ever come.

I have been thinking about Connections recently because I had stumbled into a series of connections of my own. It begins with stained glass windows in my local church (and made by my great-great-grandfather who knew William Morris), and it ends in Ambleside, the Lake District, where Charlotte Mason spent years teaching children how to look at art. Every link connects to the next. And at the heart of it all stands a man whose name runs through Victorian England like a thread through cloth: John Ruskin.

But let me start at the beginning with the windows.

A few years ago, an elderly aunt told me that my grandmother had been given a gold sovereign by William Morris. I burst into tears on the spot. I had spent my whole life drawn to the Pre-Raphaelites, to Edward Burne Jones, to King Arthur, to the Arts and Crafts movement and everything Morris stood for, without knowing that my own family had actually been part of that movement. (You can read the essay Stained Glass and Tears here.)

It turned out that the gold sovereign did not come from Morris himself but from my great-great-grandfather Robert, who owned and ran a stained glass company in Marylebone London, and who undertook work for Morris and Company. His sisters lived above the very first Morris and Company shop at 449 Oxford Street. Both of them worked for the firm as cloth stainers.

And the only surviving examples of Robert’s stained glass windows are in my local church, not ten minutes away, windows that I did not know existed until I went looking for Roberts’ work.

That discovery changed me forever. It connected me to a world I had always admired and desperately wanted to be a part of, but what I did not understand then, and what I have only recently begun to see, is that Robert’s windows are not the end of the story. They are merely the entrance hall to a palace with room after room crammed full of Victorian art and culture.

Entering the palace.

In the autumn of 1856, two young men arrived at a set of rooms in Red Lion Square in London. They were Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris, both in their early twenties, both recently arrived from Oxford University, both on fire with a conviction they could barely articulate but could not ignore: that art and beauty were not merely decoration, they were an essential expression of truth. That making things with your hands, with care, with devotion, was a moral act, and that the industrial world grinding away outside their windows was destroying something essential.

They were not alone in thinking this. But they might never have found the courage to act on it without the man whose books had opened their eyes and imaginations - the books of John Ruskin.

John Ruskin was thirty-six years old in 1855 and already the most influential art critic in England. He was writing Modern Painters, and had written The Seven Lamps of Architecture and The Stones of Venice. Ruskin had defended Turner when the art establishment dismissed him. He had championed the young Pre-Raphaelites, Rossetti, Holman Hunt and Millais, when their work was attacked as ugly and naive. Ruskin’s defence not only secured their reputations, more importantly, it had given them the confidence and permission to believe that what they were doing mattered.

But Ruskin did something more important than simply champion individual painters. He argued, with a force and eloquence that Victorian England had not heard before, that the ability to see beauty was itself a moral faculty. That looking at a painting properly was not a pastime for the leisured classes but a discipline that made you more fully and completely human. Ruskin argued that a society which could no longer see or embrace beauty was a society that was in danger of losing its soul.

William Morris.

William Morris read Ruskin’s work whilst at Oxford and it changed the course of his life. Before Ruskin, Morris, (and Burne-Jones) had intended to take Holy Orders. After Ruskin, Morris understood that his vocation was not the Church but the workshop. The making of beautiful things, things made by hand with care and skill, things that honoured both the material and the maker, was not a lesser calling. It was the same calling, expressed through craft instead of liturgy.

The rooms in Red Lion Square, London was where it all began. Morris and Burne-Jones furnished their rooms with medieval-style furniture they designed themselves, because nothing available in the shops met their standards. Rossetti was a frequent visitor, painting, arguing, filling the rooms with his enormous personality. It was chaotic and earnest and sometimes absurd. Young men playing at being medieval craftsmen in a London lodging house, but it was also deadly serious. They meant every word. And they had Ruskin’s words and encouragement, the most respected art critic in England, in their ears, telling them to believe in and express their vision.

It would be easy, from this historical distance, to think of Ruskin as a man of words only, a critic who wrote about art but did not make it. That would be a mistake. Ruskin was a fine draughtsman and watercolourist. He drew obsessively, recording buildings and landscapes and geological formations with a precision that came from looking, really looking, at the world in front of him. He believed that drawing was a form of attention, that you could not truly understand something until you had tried to draw it, and that this discipline of close observation was available to everyone, not merely to the talented.

Ruskin taught drawing to working men. He gave lectures to audiences who had never been inside a gallery. He wrote not for scholars but for anyone willing to open their eyes and look. The Elements of Drawing, published in 1857, was written not just for art students but for ordinary people who wanted to learn to see. It remains one of the clearest and most generous books on the subject ever written.

Ruskin believed, and this is the thread that runs through everything, that the capacity to see beauty was not a gift given to a few but a birthright belonging to all, and not just adults, children too. The child in a slum school deserved the same access to great art as the child in a country house. The difference was not ability but opportunity. Give a child a great painting to look at, really look at, and the child’s mind would do the rest.

He said this in the 1850s. He said it in the 1860s. He said it in the 1870s and 1880s, as his health deteriorated and his mind began to fracture under the weight of grief and frustration that nobody was listening to him anymore.

But in Ambleside, in the Lake District, someone was listening.

Ruskin spent the last twenty-eight years of his life at Brantwood, a house on the eastern shore of Coniston Water. He had bought it in 1871 because of its view across the lake. He filled it with art, with Turner watercolours and Pre-Raphaelite paintings and the minerals and shells he had collected all his life. He experimented in the gardens, creating different ‘rooms’ of planting as a kind of living laboratory for his ideas about the relationship between nature and human cultivation.

As he aged, his health declined, and from the 1870s onwards, he suffered repeated breakdowns, episodes of delirium and confusion that left him weakened and withdrawn. By the 1890s, he had largely stopped writing and sat in his turret room overlooking the lake, visited by friends and admirers, attended by his cousin Joan Severn and her family, a great mind slowly dimming in one of the most beautiful settings in England.

Among his visitors, and among his closest friends, was a woman called Julia Firth. Mrs Firth lived at Southwaite Rayne in Ambleside, not far from Brantwood. She was Ruskin’s friend and pupil, a woman who had absorbed his teaching about art with a seriousness and devotion that went far beyond admiration. She shared his conviction that art should be open to everyone. She shared his belief that looking at a great painting was not a matter of technical expertise but of attention and humility: you did not need to understand brushwork or perspective to be moved by a painting. You needed to look, and to keep looking, and to let the painting do its work.

And from 1895, Julia Firth opened her home.

Every week, she invited students to Southwaite Rayne. She spread out her collection of photographs and reproductions of great paintings, and she talked about them. Not as an art historian, not with technical vocabulary or academic apparatus, but in the light of what she had learned from Ruskin: that a great picture is great because it has something true to say, and that a child, or anyone, can receive that truth without needing to be an expert first.

The students who came to Julia Firth’s parlour were not art students. They were teachers in training, young women preparing to work in schools. And the school they were training at was the House of Education, founded and run by a woman who lived just up the road, and who would go on to become a close friend.

That woman was Charlotte Mason.

Until a few weeks ago, I had never heard of Charlotte Mason, and since finding her I have not been able to stop thinking about what an incredible woman she was, and the chain that connects her to everything I have not only been writing about on this Substack from my very first article, but everything about Victorian art and culture that I have loved my entire life.

Charlotte Mason believed that children deserved real beauty. Not simplified versions, not summaries, not what she called ‘twaddle,’ but the real thing: great literature, great music, and great art, presented with the confidence that a child’s mind is strong enough to receive it.

One of the cornerstones of her method was something she called picture study. A child would be shown a single painting, one painting, and asked to look at it carefully, to notice what was there, to describe it, to hold it in memory. No technical analysis. No art-historical context. Just looking, attending, receiving. Mason wanted every child to leave school with, in her words, ‘whole galleries of mental pictures’ hanging in the halls of their imagination.

And here are the connections, (if you haven’t spotted them already of course.)

Charlotte Mason’s picture study method evolved from the teachings of Julia Firth, who created her method from the philosophy of John Ruskin. Charlotte’s method evolved from Julia Firth’s weekly sessions in her parlour in Ambleside, where she showed students how to look at paintings in the way Ruskin had taught her, and so on back. Ruskin to Morris, Morris to stained glass, stained glass to my great-great-grandfather and from there to my local church.

In 1952, a woman called Rose Amy Pennethorne, who had been a student at the House of Education and later became the organising secretary of Mason’s Parents’ National Educational Union, wrote an article tracing the connections. From Ruskin to Firth. From Firth to Mason. From Mason to the schools. From the schools to the children. Each one passing it forward, hand to hand, the same conviction: that beauty is not a luxury reserved for the privileged, but a birthright belonging to every child.

Pennethorne wrote that the great picture is great not because of its technique, but ‘because it has a great thought to convey, or a flash of insight to make available.’ A child, she said, can love El Greco without being troubled by his perspective. A child can receive Fra Angelico without knowing his theology. The door into the palace of art is wide open for anyone willing to walk through it.

That is Ruskin. That is Mason. And it is the same conviction that would drive Tolkien to argue that fairy stories are not nursery furniture, and Lewis to warn that a society which teaches children that nothing is truly beautiful will produce men without chests.

I keep finding these threads, these connections. Morris and my great-great-grandfather. Mason was once local to me and walked the same streets. And now Ruskin, at the centre of all of it, the man who taught Morris to see beauty as a moral calling, whose pupil Julia Firth, taught Charlotte Mason and her students that art matters, that the capacity to see truth and beauty is a birthright and not a privilege. That belief runs through everything I passionately believe in and everything that I have been writing about here on Substack.

James Burke would have enjoyed this. One connection leading to another, room by room, each door opening onto something you could not have predicted but which, once you see it, feels entirely inevitable.

From my great-great-grandfather’s stained glass to Morris. From Morris to Ruskin. From Ruskin to Julia Firth’s parlour. From that parlour to Charlotte Mason’s schools. And from those schools, across more than a century, to every homeschooling family that still believes a child deserves real beauty, real art, and the trust to receive it.

I have been digging into the local history of my area and I have found someone remarkable.

Her name is Charlotte Shaw Mason, (no relation). She was born on New Year’s Day 1842 in a hamlet near Bangor in North Wales, an only child, educated at home by her parents. By the time she was sixteen both her parents were dead and she was alone in the world, without means or relations. She enrolled at the Home and Colonial Training College in London, earned a First Class Certificate, and was sent to a school by the sea to continue her training.

That school was the Davison School in Worthing, my brother and mother still live there and I went to art college there in the 1970’s

Charlotte taught there for more than ten years – over a decade of her life. During those years, something began to form in her mind. She looked at the children in front of her and saw something that the educational establishment of Victorian England did not see, or did not wish to see. She saw that every child, regardless of class or background, was a person. Not a vessel to be filled. Not a blank slate to be written upon. A person, already whole, already capable of engaging with the finest ideas that human civilisation had produced.

From Worthing she went to Bishop Otter College in Chichester – ten minutes from my home – where she lectured for five years, training teachers in her methods. The lectures she gave there became the foundation of her first book, Home Education, published in 1886. She eventually moved north to Ambleside in the Lake District, where she founded the House of Education, a training college for teachers, and spent the rest of her life building a network of schools devoted to what she called ‘a liberal education for all.’

She died in January 1923, at the age of eighty-one. On her gravestone in Ambleside they carved a line from the book of Isaiah: ‘Thine eyes shall see the King in His beauty.’

I had never heard of her. I suspect most people in Worthing and Chichester have never heard of her either. But in the United States, among many homeschooling families, Charlotte Mason is not merely known; she is highly respected and understandably so. Her philosophy of education – living books, narration, nature study, short lessons, the conviction that children are born persons – has shaped the way hundreds of thousands of American families educate their children at home, particularly through Ambleside online. Here there are curricula built on her principles, conferences devoted to her methods, podcasts and book clubs and online communities that study and very much follow her foundational six-volume series on education.

And I knew nothing about her until a few weeks ago, when I started researching the history of Bishop Otter College and her name appeared.

The more I read, the more something uncanny began to happen. I kept hearing clear, distinct, unmistakable echoes – of voices I already knew well. Tolkien and Lewis.

Charlotte Mason believed that children are born persons. That they are not lesser beings to be managed but whole human beings to be respected. That children deserve the best ideas, the finest literature, the most beautiful art and music – not diluted versions, not simplified summaries, not what she called ‘twaddle’, but the real thing, served up with the confidence that a child’s mind is not only willing, but strong enough to receive it.

She believed that the job of the teacher was not to explain and pre-digest and spoon-feed, but to set a feast of living ideas before the child and trust them to take what they needed. She called this ‘spreading the feast.’ The child’s mind would do the rest, because the mind was designed to feed on ideas the way the body was designed to feed on bread.

She believed that a living book – a book written by a single author with genuine passion for a subject, a book that speaks to the reader as one person to another – was worth a hundred textbooks compiled by committee.

And she believed all this a full generation before Tolkien and Lewis were born.

I have not yet written anything on C.S. Lewis, but I have written about Tolkien several times in the following essays, here on Care & Craft.

In Middle-earth: A World of Craftsmanship and Faith, I argued that Tolkien’s world is built on craft, not conquest. In From Lord of the Rings to Lord of the Spreadsheet I traced the way magic in his work is not a system but received grace. In From King Arthur to Hogwarts I followed the pattern of every generation reaching back to older stories when the present fails to nourish.

But I had never connected Tolkien’s thinking about stories and children to the work of a Victorian schoolteacher who lived and worked on the south coast of England.

In 1939, Tolkien delivered a lecture at the University of St Andrews called On Fairy-Stories. It is one of the most important things he ever wrote, and it contains an argument that Charlotte Mason would have recognised instantly.

Tolkien argued that fairy stories are not for children. They never were. The assumption that they belong in the nursery is, he said, ‘an accident of our domestic history’ – the result of adults deciding they had outgrown such things and handing them down to the young, the way old furniture gets moved to the children’s room when it is no longer wanted in the drawing room.

Children, Tolkien insisted, are not a separate species. They are human beings. Some of them like fairy stories. Some of them do not. Their tastes are as varied as those of adults. And the stories themselves – the real ones, the old ones, the ones that deal with beauty and hope to terror and death – are not childish things. They are intrinsic and inseparable from what makes us human.

Tolkien went further. He said that life is ‘above the measure of us all’ and that we all need literature that is above our measure too. He said, one should never write down to children, or to anyone.

Charlotte Mason, half a century earlier, had said essentially the same thing. Children are born persons. They deserve real ideas, not simplified ones. A living book is one that does not condescend. The moment you begin to dilute an idea for a child, you have already decided that the child is not capable of receiving it, and in doing so you have diminished both the idea and the child.

The parallels do not stop there. Tolkien described one of the great gifts of fairy stories as ‘recovery’ – the regaining of a clear view. We need, he wrote, to clean our windows, so that the things seen clearly may be freed from the drab blur of triteness or familiarity. A fairy story helps us see the world afresh, as though for the first time. The child who reads about an enchanted forest in a story looks up from the book and sees the real trees outside anew.

Mason’s entire philosophy is built on the same insight. Education, she said, is ‘the science of relations.’ A child learns by forming living connections with the world – with books, with nature, with history, with art, with ideas. The purpose of education is not to fill the child’s head with facts but to help them see the world clearly, richly, and with wonder. The feast is spread. The child’s mind makes the connections. And the world, seen through those connections, becomes new.

Tolkien called it recovery. Mason called it relations. They were describing the same thing.

And so was C.S. Lewis. In The Abolition of Man, Lewis’s fierce little book about education, Lewis argues that modern education was cutting the hearts out of children by teaching them that values are merely subjective feelings rather than real qualities in the world.

He argued that a waterfall really is sublime. A traitor really is contemptible. These are not just things we feel; they are things that are true. And if, today, we teach children to believe that nothing is objectively beautiful or good or worth defending, we will produce what Lewis called ‘men without chests’ – people with clever heads and active appetites but nothing in between to connect the two.

Charlotte Mason had been saying something remarkably similar decades before Lewis was born. She believed that children needed to be fed on the best ideas because ideas were real things with real power. A child who was given noble ideas would grow into a person of noble character – not because the ideas had been explained and enforced, but because the ideas themselves did the work because they are founded on truth. The mind feeds on truth in the same way the body feeds on food. You did not need to study the bread to prove it is nourishing, you simply need to eat it.

Lewis, Tolkien and Mason all arrived at the same conclusions by different paths. Mason through the classroom. Lewis through philosophy and theology. Tolkien through philology and the ancient languages, and now more than ever, they are very much not alone in their opinion.

In my view Charlotte Mason is more relevant today than she was in her time. Homeschoolers across the USA, and a growing number here in the UK, share that conclusion, and I absolutely and unashamedly share her values

What Lewis, Tolkien and Mason shared was a conviction that children do not need to be managed into learning. They need to be trusted with real things – real stories, real beauty, real difficulty – and their own minds and imagination will do the rest.

It now all suddenly fits. When I recall standing in front of two hundred and twenty eleven-year-olds at Rother College in March, I saw with my own eyes, conclusive proof of Lewis, Tolkien and Mason’s convictions.

Up until a week ago, I had not read, or even heard of Charlotte Mason. I had never heard of narration or living books or the science of relations. I did not know her name. But I knew absolutely, that children today deserved real stories, not simplified ones. I instinctively knew that children were, and are, capable of leaning in to listen to, enjoy stories that contain difficult themes. I knew that the hunger was there – the hunger for something that respected their intelligence and spoke to them as whole human beings, not as lesser versions of adults.

For me, finding Charlotte Mason, has been a revelation and confirmation of everything I believe in.

Those children at Rother College proved it. Two hundred and twenty children, (and five teachers) sat in silence for twenty minutes while I read to them from a story that is unafraid of morality, truth, and danger. Those children did not fidget. They did not check out. They leaned in.

Charlotte Shaw Mason would not have been surprised. I am sure she would have seen the same thing countless times over a hundred and forty years ago.

Charlotte Shaw Mason believed children were born persons. She believed they deserved the best. She believed that if you spread the feast – if you trusted them with real ideas, real stories, real beauty, real challenges, – their minds would rise to meet it.

Charlotte Shaw Mason was right then and she is right today.

There is something that moves me very much about the fact that she was here, local to me - the same as my distant connection (via my great, great, grandfather, to William Morris). Charlotte was not in some distant city, not in some famous university, but here – in nearby Chichester. She probably walked on the same stretches of the Sussex coast where I walk today. She taught children in the schools I know. She trained teachers in a building I can drive to in ten minutes.

Charlotte Mason developed the ideas that would shape education on the other side of the world, and she did it in a place that has almost entirely forgotten her.

I have not read her six volumes - yet, but I came to the same convictions she held by my own independent path – through Tolkien, through the Arts and Crafts movement, through the experience of reading stories to children. But finding her here, on my doorstep, isn’t a coincidence – it’s confirmation.

Children are born persons. Stories matter. The best ideas are not too good or challenging for the younger minds. And the magic of reading – the real magic, the kind that transforms a child sitting in a school hall into someone who leans forward and forgets to breathe – does not come from simplifying things. It comes from trusting children with the real thing and watching them rise.

Charlotte Mason knew this. Tolkien knew this. Lewis knew this, and I knew this, when in a school hall in Sussex, in March of 2026, two hundred and twenty children and five teachers leaned in.

‘Education is an atmosphere, a discipline, a life.’

Charlotte Mason, 1842–1923. Worthing. Chichester. Ambleside. The world.

Care & Craft. ‘Why we all need something real in a world dominated by digital.’

In 1971, when I was nine years old, my mother gave me an abridged ‘Classics Today’ copy of David Copperfield. She was the manager of the book department at WH Smith, here in the UK, so books arrived in our house the way other families accumulated milk bottles, steadily and without ceremony. I still have it, and it’s the first ‘grown up’ novel I ever read.

I loved it. I still love it, and what I remember the most are the characters.

Mr Murdstone. The name is the man. Peggotty, warm and solid and safe. Mr Dick, flying his kite on the cliffs, and in my mind, a favourite uncle I would like to have had. Aunt Betsey Trotwood, terrifying, yet compassionate and magnificent. Uriah Heep, whose humbleness made your skin crawl before you understood why. Micawber, waiting for something to turn up with a confidence that even a nine-year-old could see was heartbreaking.

No one explained these characters to me. No one told me what I was supposed to feel about them. No one softened Murdstone’s cruelty or tidied up Heep’s malice or made sure I understood the correct moral lesson. Dickens simply trusted the reader whether ninety, or in my case, nine years old.

In today’s world, I am sure many ‘gatekeeping adults’ would deem a Dickens novel not a suitable first novel for a child, too ‘Victorian,’ and inappropriate for a whole bunch of reasons, not least that a child today wouldn’t be able to keep their attention on the story for a single chapter, let alone the entire book. In any event I loved it. I loved every page of it. In my view, and even though he wasn’t writing for children specifically, it is because Dickens understood something that too many authors who write for children today have forgotten: children do not need to be protected from complexity or moral ambiguity. They need to be trusted with it.

Recently, American children’s book author Mac Barnett published Make Believe: On Telling Stories to Children. In it he riffed on an old line by the science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon – that ninety per cent of everything is crud – and added his own addendum: that children’s literature might suffer from an even higher percentage. 94.7, he suggested, with the kind of deliberately absurd precision that is obviously a joke – until it gets screenshot and shared without its context.

The screenshot travelled. Authors were hurt. A petition circulated. The row became about privilege, identity, gatekeeping, and who gets to define quality. All of which matters, none of which I intend to wade into here, but underneath the fury, there is a real question. And it is not a new one.

Are too many children’s books written by adults who see children as projects to be shaped, rather than as people who deserve a story?

Yes.

Absolutely – yes.

Charlotte Mason, the Victorian educator whose radical conviction was that children are born persons – not empty vessels to be filled,– knew it in 1886. Tolkien knew it in 1939. C.S. Lewis knew it in 1943. Rowling knew it in 1997.

Today, more than ever before, far too many parents watch their child’s eyes glaze over three pages into a book about a morally perfect eleven-year-old who delivers a sociology lecture to the incompetent adults around them.

Mason called it twaddle – the diluted, pre-digested material that adults produce when they do not trust children to handle the real thing. Tolkien, in “On Fairy-Stories,” argued that children are not a lesser audience requiring simpler fare, but natural recipients of wonder because they have not yet learned to distrust it. In my view, far too many children’s authors today are doing precisely that: writing stories that invoke distrust and cynicism in children before their capacity to be captured by wonder has had a chance to develop.

Lewis, in The Abolition of Man, warned that an education which strips away the capacity to feel, which replaces genuine emotional and imaginative response with approved correct thinking, produces what he called “men without chests.” People with intellects and appetites but nothing in between – no hearts.

To quote Charlotte Mason – ‘children are born persons,’ who deserve the finest literature, beauty, and the deepest truth we can offer them. Not lessons dressed as stories. Not messages with characters bolted on. Stories.

I have some evidence for this, and it is not a percentage.

In March this year I stood in front of two hundred and twenty children in a school hall in Sussex and asked them a question. What is magic? Not a single child reached for their phone. Not one looked at the floor. They leaned in, every single one of them. They wanted to talk about magic, about stories, about which books they loved and why. Those eleven year old children were fierce, hungry, imaginative human beings who had been offered something real, and they rose to it. Children always do – when we let them.

The question is whether we let them often enough.

An American author wrote this week about taking her children to the library and finding it hard. Characters who burst into the world already morally perfect, with nothing to learn, whose only function is to educate the flawed adults around them. Sudden epiphanies that read like public service announcements. She is not a literary critic. She is a mother watching her children’s faces, and she can see what works and what does not. A school librarian who circulates thousands of books a year into the hands of children said the same thing from the other side of the counter: too much of what comes through the pipeline does not meet the needs of the children in front of her.

These women are not saying that all children’s books are crud. Nor am I. There are people writing magnificently for children right now, with courage and imagination and faith in their readers. But the instinct to protect children from difficulty, and not only to soften every edge, but to ensure every character models correct behaviour, to replace the wild uncertain magic of a real story with the safe predictable mechanics of a lesson – that instinct is not new, and it has always been the enemy of great children’s literature.

Tolkien did not protect his readers from difficulty. The mines of Moria are terrifying. The Dead Marshes are haunting. The Scouring of the Shire is devastating. And children have loved The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings for seventy years because Tolkien trusted them with the weight of it. He did not write down to them. He wrote across to them, as equals in the act of imagination.

Alan Garner did the same. So did Susan Cooper, and C.S. Lewis, and Rowling at her best. They trusted children with darkness, with ambiguity, with characters who made terrible decisions and suffered real consequences, with endings that did not resolve neatly, with beauty that was not explained.

And so did Dickens, in 1850, when he gave the world a child narrator who endured cruelty, loss, betrayal, and confusion, surrounded by adults who were variously monstrous, ridiculous, heartbreaking, and magnificent. Although it was not written for children, it is frequently adapted into children’s versions, because, once upon a time, adult ‘gatekeepers’ trusted children to feel their way through stories without a single instructional aside.

As a nine-year-old boy in 1971, I did not need anyone to explain that Uriah Heep was dangerous and morally bankrupt, I could see it for myself, in Heep’s character and the evolving narrative. That is what a living book does. It trusts the child’s imagination to do the work.

Mac Barnett asked the right question, but in my view, he asked it badly, too glibly, too provocatively, from too high a platform, at exactly the wrong moment – or perhaps that was precisely his intention. The hurt he caused is real, and the people who felt it are not wrong to say so. But the question remains, and it will remain long after the controversy has faded from social media.

What do children deserve from their books?

The answer has not changed since Dickens. Since Mason. Since Tolkien. Since Rowling. It has not changed since my mother put David Copperfield into my nine-year-old hands let me find my own way through it.

What children deserve from their books, is the freedom to draw their own conclusions.

Care & Craft

The Woman Who Painted Charlotte Mason's England

What does J.R.R. Tolkien have in common with a Victorian watercolourist most people have never heard of…

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a month ago · 6 likes · 5 comments · Vincent Shaw

They are presented as an invitation to look more closely, ‘beyond the biscuit tin’ as it were. Allingham painted these scenes because this way of live was rapidly disappearing. Each painting is a small act of preservation. For those who wish to explore her life and work more fully, Ina Taylor’s Helen Allingham’s England: An Idyllic View of Rural Life remains the essential biography, (if you can get it) thoroughly researched, beautifully illustrated, and the first to reveal the full range of an artist too often reduced to her cottage paintings alone.

More than you might think. And the answer matters – not just for those of us who care about art and literature, but for anyone trying to understand what we lose when we stop paying attention to ordinary, everyday beauty.

In 1895, a three-year-old boy arrived in England from South Africa with his mother and brother, visiting family in Birmingham. His father died before he could follow them, and the small family settled at a cottage in Sarehole, a rural hamlet four miles from the centre of the city. The green fields and woods of Worcestershire – after the hot, dry veldt – made an impression that never left him. The mill on the river. The lane full of bluebells. The old cottages with their deep-set windows and climbing roses. He would later call it ‘a kind of lost paradise,’ and would describe those years as ‘the longest-seeming and most formative part of my life.’ His name, of course, was J.R.R. Tolkien, and from that countryside paradise he would build the Shire.

Thirty years earlier, a teenage girl called Helen Paterson arrived in Birmingham from the other direction. Helen was fleeing grief, not seeking adventure. Her father and three-year-old sister Isabel had died in a diphtheria epidemic, and she, along with her remaining family moved to the city to live with relatives. Helen enrolled at the Birmingham School of Design, and from there she went on to study at the Royal Academy Schools in London. In time she would become one of the most successful artists of her age.

She married and became Helen Allingham, and she spent her life painting exactly the kind of England that Tolkien would later mourn in prose.

Here is what connects them: what they loved was vanishing before their eyes. Tolkien revisited Sarehole in 1933 and found it swallowed by suburbia – red brick everywhere, the bluebell lane full of motor cars, the hamlet swallowed by modern development. Allingham had watched the same process unfold decades earlier in Surrey, where the old timber-framed cottages were being demolished to make way for modern development. Tolkien built Middle-earth as an act of memory. Allingham did something remarkably similar in her art, by painting cottages that were being knocked down, sometimes even restoring them in watercolour to their original state, undoing on paper what could not be undone in life.

I would argue that The Shire is an Allingham painting rendered in words. If you want to see the countryside idyll of Tolkien’s childhood, look at Helen Allingham’s work.

In all likelihood, and especially if you grew up here in Britain, you have probably seen her work and simply dismissed it. It is ubiquitous on biscuit tins and jigsaw puzzles, on greeting cards and calendars, on the covers of books about English country gardens. A thatched cottage half-buried in roses or a child at a gate with late afternoon light falling across a garden path.

That is both Helen Allingham’s legacy and her problem. She has been so thoroughly reproduced, so completely absorbed into the visual wallpaper of Englishness, that the woman behind the images has become invisible. And with invisibility came dismissal. Chocolate-box. Sentimental. Merely pretty. The word ‘merely’ has done a great deal of damage to Helen Allingham’s reputation, and it is time to put that right.

Helen Mary Elizabeth Paterson was born in 1848 in Swadlincote, Derbyshire, the eldest of seven children. After the family tragedy that brought her to Birmingham, she trained at the School of Design and then, following her aunt Laura Herford, (the first woman ever admitted to the Royal Academy Schools) Helen went to London to study.

What followed was a career of quiet but extraordinary distinction. As a young illustrator, she became one of the founding staff members of The Graphic – and the only woman. She illustrated Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd for its first serialisation in the Cornhill Magazine in 1874. Vincent van Gogh, studying English illustrated journals as he developed his own art, was struck by her work and wrote about it to his brother Theo. She was not a minor figure. She was at the centre of things.

In 1874 she married the Irish poet William Allingham, who was nearly twice her age and moved in the literary circles of Cheyne Walk – Tennyson, Carlyle, Rossetti, Ruskin. John Ruskin became an admirer of her painting. When she showed him a gentle portrait of Carlyle in his garden, Ruskin asked why she had drawn the philosopher as a lamb when he should be drawn as a lion. Her reply, recorded by her biographer Marcus Huish, was that she could only paint him as she saw him.

Free from the daily need to earn a living through illustration, she turned fully to watercolour – her true love. The family moved from Chelsea to Sandhills, near Witley in Surrey, and there she found her subject. The cottages, gardens and timber-framed farmhouses with their deep thatch and tangled hedgerows, along with the women and children who lived in them.

In 1890, she became the first woman admitted as a full member of the Royal Watercolour Society. She exhibited constantly, collaborated with Gertrude Jekyll (painting the famous garden at Munstead Wood), and moved in a Surrey circle that included the watercolourist Myles Birket Foster, the illustrator Randolph Caldecott, her lifelong friend Kate Greenaway, and the naturalist Alfred Russell Wallace.

Unfortunately, Helen was widowed at forty-one, and with three children to support, she did so through her painting. She was prolific, professional, and commercially astute. She was not, despite a century of condescension, a lady dabbler painting pretty pictures for parlour walls.

So why the dismissal?

Because she painted ‘pretty’ cottages and gardens. Because she worked in watercolour, the medium that polite Victorian society considered ‘suitable for a woman.’ Because her subjects were domestic, rural and quiet. Because her paintings looked ‘easy,’ as though capturing light falling on a garden wall required no skill or intelligence to render.

But most damning of all, because her work was beautiful. Beauty, in the critical vocabulary of the twentieth century, became suspect. If something was beautiful, it must be shallow. If it was popular, it must be unsophisticated. If it made people feel nostalgic, it must be dishonest.

But Helen Allingham was not dishonest. She was doing something far more honest than simply reaching for nostalgia.

She was recording. The cottages she painted were being demolished – torn down by landlords, replaced by modern buildings, lost to the advance of development that was slowly eroding the English countryside in the decades either side of 1900. Helen Allingham knew this all too well. She painted the cottages and countryside precisely because they were disappearing. In some cases, she even painted cottages back to their original condition, removing later alterations and showing them as they had been before the changes began.

This was not sentimentality, it was an act of preservation – the same impulse that drove Ruskin, Morris, and the Arts and Crafts movement, the same impulse that built the National Trust. The fact that she did it with a palette of soft colours and in watercolour does not make it any less valid. If anything, the gentleness of her method has obscured the urgency of her purpose.

One reviewer at the Watts Gallery, which mounted a major Allingham retrospective in 2017, put it well. Allingham painted not just the destruction of the buildings but ‘the way of life, a world when man, or more often woman, and nature were as one.’

That is the world that Tolkien saw being lost in and around Sarehole.

Which brings us to Charlotte Mason.

Mason, born in 1842, was Allingham’s almost exact contemporary. They lived through the same decades, watched the same changes, breathed the same air of Victorian England as it tipped into the modern age. There is no evidence they ever met. Mason was an educator in Ambleside; Allingham was an artist in Surrey. Their paths did not cross, but their convictions did.

Charlotte Mason believed that children should be surrounded by beauty – not as a luxury, but as a necessity. She believed in what she called ‘picture study’: the careful, unhurried contemplation of great art, one painting at a time, until the child could hold the image in memory. She wanted every child to leave school with ‘whole galleries of mental pictures’ and ‘at least a hundred lovely landscapes’ hanging in the halls of their imagination.

She also believed in nature study – in training children to see what was actually in front of them. Not just to glance, but to look. Not just to look, but to attend. To notice the way light changed across a field. To draw what they saw, carefully, in a nature journal. To learn the names of things and the habits of things and the seasons of things.

Allingham painted that curriculum. Her watercolours are picture study and nature study fused into a single image. They teach attention. They reward close looking. They show the beauty of ordinary things – a garden gate, a flowering hedge, a child standing in a doorway – rendered with the kind of patient, precise observation that Mason spent her life trying to cultivate in children.

And yet Helen Allingham does not appear on any Charlotte Mason picture study schedule I can find. The major homeschool curricula that follow Mason’s method – Ambleside Online, Simply Charlotte Mason, and others – have assembled careful lists of artists for children to study, term by term, year by year. Turner is there. Constable is there. Millet, Monet, Vermeer, Rembrandt, Van Gogh. All worthy. But not Allingham.

This is, I think, an oversight worth correcting. Not because Allingham is better than any of those artists – she would not have claimed to be – but because she is closer to what Charlotte Mason actually described. When Mason talked about children learning to see ‘the common sights of life’ through art, she was describing what Allingham had spent forty years painting.

There is a pattern here, and it runs through everything I write about on this Substack.

We dismiss the things that are closest to us. We overlook the art that looks like life. We assume that beauty must be dramatic or exotic or difficult to be worth our attention, and in doing so, we lose sight of the beauty that is right in front of us, the beauty of an old cottage, a well-tended garden, a child playing by a gate.

Helen Allingham spent her career insisting that this beauty mattered. She was called sentimental for it. She was reduced to a biscuit tin. But the cottages she painted are gone, and her watercolours are what remain – not as decoration, but as testimony. She saw what was vanishing, and she put it down on paper before it was too late.

If you want to see Tolkien’s childhood playground, seek out Helen Allingham’s work.

Nestled comfortably in the South Downs, a couple of miles north-east of the town of Arundel, is the very pretty Sussex village of Burpham, and for the first time in over twenty years, I went to seek out the grave of one of my literary heroes, who sadly passed away in 1968 when I was only five years old and he was only fifty-seven.

The writer is Mervyn Peake. Not only was he a writer, he was also a poet and artist. His grave is in St Mary the Virgin churchyard in Burpham, an eleventh-century church in a village that is so quiet and tucked away that you could miss it entirely. Also in the grave is his wife Maeve Peake. She died in 1983.

I have loved Mervyn Peake’s work since my twenties when I was first introduced to the Gormenghast trilogy, and I also have the added bonus that he is, and was, local to me. Arundel is only half an hour’s drive away from where I live on the coast. Over many years, I have walked the same countryside and seen the same views of Arundel Castle that, in my mind, were the catalysing element in Peake writing the Gormenghast books. But more on that later.

In July 2011 and for the centenary of Peake’s birth, a conference was held at the University of Chichester. ‘Mervyn Peake and the Fantasy Tradition.’ One of the speakers was Sebastian Peake who spoke about his father and about how life experience affects and artist. The author Joanne Harris was also one of the speakers. There was an exhibition of his work in the The Otter, and Pallant House galleries.

Peake’s work is glorious in its distorted ugliness.

Now I don’t say this lightly, or to denigrate his magnificent body of work – far from it. I celebrate his drawings for their ugliness. They are a celebration of the English grotesque, and I would argue that although not quite anglomythic in nature, Peake’s work is very much in the same lane.

I have written a few articles now on Tolkien and Middle-earth, and as much as I love the Lord of the Rings, I would be hard pressed to decide if Lord of the Rings or the Gormenghast books were my favourite books. I love them both equally, but for quite different reasons.

Tolkien’s world reaches upward. Middle-earth is built on a moral architecture, and his prose lifts you toward something divine and sacred.

Peake’s world reaches inward.

The saying ‘Beauty is only skin deep, but ugliness goes right through to the core,’ is very true of the Gormenghast books. There is no quest, no dark lord, no moral axis. Gormenghast itself is a vast castle so huge and ancient that it has become its own weather system, its own physics, its own reason for existing. Unlike Tolkien, the work does not lift you, it pulls you in and fills your mouth with the finest wine of fantasy prose.

Where Tolkien’s language serves something beyond itself, Peake’s language ‘is’ the thing itself. You don’t read Gormenghast for what it means. You read it for what it tastes like.

Tolkien built a mythology. Peake built a world that needs no mythology because the language itself is the experience.

Like Tolkien, Peake was a creator in the fullest sense of the word. Writer, poet, painter, illustrator. He once said he turned to writing because he could not find a canvas big enough to paint the castle he had inside his head, and it is only now, as I write this article, that I wonder if I have a similar sensibility. He drew in the margins of his manuscripts, the characters appearing beside the sentences that described them, the pictures and the prose emerging from the same hand at the same moment. He designed costumes. He wrote plays. He illustrated Treasure Island, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the Alice books, Bleak House, the Brothers Grimm.

If you have never read him, what follows should tell you why you need to. Take your time and savour the language, as outside the story itself, it is an experience to be lingered over and savoured. It is also wonderful to read aloud.

What follows is the opening of the first chapter and a short extract from further into the chapter – just a taste.

The Hall of the Bright Carvings. Chapter 1 of the first book – Titus Groan.

Gormenghast, that is, the main massing of the original stone, taken by itself would have displayed a certain ponderous architectural quality were it possible to have ignored the circumfusion of those mean dwellings that swarmed like an epidemic around its outer walls. They sprawled over the sloping earth, each one halfway over its neighbour until, held back by the castle ramparts, the innermost of these hovels laid hold on the great walls, clamping themselves thereto like limpets to a rock. These dwellings, by ancient law, were granted this chill intimacy with the stronghold that loomed above them. Over their irregular roofs would fall throughout the seasons, the shadows of time-eaten buttresses, of broken and lofty turrets, and, most enormous of all, the shadow of the Tower of Flints. This tower, patched unevenly with black ivy, arose like a mutilated finger from among the fists of knuckled masonry and pointed blasphemously at heaven. At night the owls made of it an echoing throat; by day it stood voiceless and cast its long shadow.

And further on into the chapter.

Entering at seven o’clock, winter and summer, year in and year out, Rottcodd would disengage himself of his jacket and draw over his head a long grey overall which descended shapelessly to his ankles. With his feather duster tucked beneath his arm, it was his habit to peer sagaciously over his glasses down the length of the hall. His skull was dark and small like a corroded musket bullet and his eyes behind the gleaming of his glasses were the twin miniatures of his head. All three were constantly on the move, as though to make up for the time they spent asleep, the head wobbling in a mechanical way from side to side when Mr Rottcodd walked, and the eyes, as though taking their cue from the parent sphere to which they were attached, peering here, there, and everywhere at nothing in particular.

At the 2011 conference, Sebastian Peake spoke about what life experience does to an artist. He spoke about his father’s arrival at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in June 1945, commissioned as a war artist to record what the liberating forces had found. Sebastian spoke about what his father saw there, what he drew, and how he carried it with him for the rest of his life.

I believe that knowing a writer’s biography is pivotal in understanding their work, and more importantly, enjoying their work. Not every detail or in an academic manner, but the broad shape of who they were and what they lived through. Lived experience informs a writer’s work whether they intend it to or not.

Mervyn Peake.

Mervyn Peake was born in 1911 in Kuling, a hill town in China, where his father was a medical missionary. He spent the first eleven years of his life there, in a compound surrounded by a wall, with China on the other side. The teeming streets of Tientsin, the Forbidden City in Peking with its pagodas and temples, the dark gorges of the Yangtze, the camel trains outside the city walls, the rituals that still dominated Chinese life. All of it entered a boy’s imagination and stayed there.

Peake came to England at the age of twelve, and went to art school where studied at the Royal Academy. He lived and painted on Sark in the Channel Islands, taught at the Westminster School of Art, married Maeve Gilmore and exhibited in London galleries.

For nearly twenty years, all that material sat in his subconscious, unwritten and waiting.Then in 1940, he and Maeve moved from London to a small cottage in Burpham, Sussex, rented from the Duke of Norfolk. And there, dominating the skyline to the southwest, was Arundel Castle. Vast, brooding, disproportionately large, a permanent presence. He began writing Titus Groan – the first of the Gormenghast books – that same year.

He joined the Royal Artillery, and was given special dispensation to continue writing his novel. In June 1945, he was sent to Germany as a war artist and entered Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

Mervyn Peake drew the dying. There is a charcoal drawing of a girl and wrote a poem called ‘The Consumptive, Belsen 1945.’

Titus Groan was published the following year. The second book, Gormenghast, written in the years immediately after, deepens into tragedy, cruelty, and violence in ways the first book only hints at.

I often think about Peake besides Tolkien. Tolkien was at the Battle of the Somme in 1916. He lost all but one of his closest friends. He came home and began building Middle-earth. He called the act of creating an imagined world ‘sub-creation,’ and its purpose ‘recovery’: the restoration of a clear view of the world, achieved not by looking at reality more closely, but by looking at it through the lens of the imagined.

Peake never used that word. But I think he was doing exactly the same thing.

Both Tolkien and Peake experienced the worst violence and atrocities that human beings are capable of ,and came out of their experiences carrying the weight of what they had witnessed, and both responded by making. Whether we call that recovery, or therapy, or simply what artists do, the result is the same – the work contains the experience without being consumed by it. Both responded not by writing about what they had seen directly, but by building fantasy worlds as their own unique and individual ‘recovery.’

Whilst Tolkien’s world reached toward the divine, toward grace and light and the possibility of redemption. Peake’s world was a complete contrast. Peake reached towards wickedness, the pointlessness of existence as personified under the suffocating weight of ritual and stone. He delights in the absurd and grotesque. It is not a ‘funny’ set of stories, but I firmly believe they are supposed to be amusing, via their characters. And within character is where the roots of the English grotesque can be found.

It begins, for our purposes, with William Hogarth. His eighteenth-century engravings are savage, comic, overpopulated and merciless. Every face is exaggerated, distorted. Every exaggeration tells a truth. Hogarth does not caricature for laughs alone. He caricatures because the distortion reveals something the polite portrait would conceal. The drunk, the vain, the corrupt, the desperate – Hogarth draws them all as though the outside of a person should be forced to confess what is happening on the inside.

Then comes Dickens. The teeming streets of London, and the wonderful, names of the characters. And the names ‘are’ the character.

Pecksniff, Bumble, Quilp, Wackford Squeers – the comic-horrific character portraits where a man’s body becomes the outward expression of his soul. Dickens’s London is overpopulated, filthy, grotesque, and teeming with life, death poverty wealth, liberation and oppression. You name it, it can be found in Victorian London, (which is why I think it is so fascinating, but that’s another essay). Every room smells. Every face twitches. The comedy, the horror and the pathos often sit side by side in the same sentence, and none of them apologises for any of the others.

Peake knew Dickens intimately. His wife Maeve read Bleak House aloud to him in the evenings while he worked at his drawing board. He went on to illustrate Bleak House himself, and those illustrations were later described as Gothic exaggeration in which the comic is always the close companion of the sinister – as natural to Peake as it was to Dickens. When preparing his illustration style, Peake deliberately studied Hogarth alongside Cruikshank, Dürer, Blake, Doré, and Goya. The lineage was not accidental. He chose it.

But how many of you reading this have ever heard of Vivian Stanshall?

If you have not encountered Sir Henry at Rawlinson End, it is worth seeking out, (the audio version rather the the film). Stanshall’s creation is the crumbling English country estate populated entirely by grotesques, where the language itself has become drunk on its own excess. Every sentence staggers magnificently under the weight of more adjectives than it can reasonably carry. The house is falling apart. The inhabitants are monstrous. The whole thing is simultaneously hilarious and unbearable. Stanshall takes the Dickensian grotesque and removes the city entirely, trapping it inside a decaying building where the rituals of English life have long since lost any connection to their original purpose.

Intentional or not, Sir Henry at Rawlinson End is Gormenghast on steroids, comedy and all.

The tradition did not end there. Gerald Scarfe’s savage political caricatures carry the same Hogarthian conviction that the illustrated, exaggerated face, tells a deeper truth than the photograph. And in children’s books, Cressida Cowell draws and writes in the same hand; her manuscripts for How to Train Your Dragon are filled with scratchy, urgent illustrations inseparable from the story they tell. I would argue that like Peake’s illustrations, hers are also wonderful in their unashamed ugliness.

But in my view, Peake goes further than any of them.

Gormenghast exists nowhere. It is not England, although it feels English. It is not China, though the walled Forbidden City are definitely in its bones. It is not any place that has ever existed. It is its own self-contained world. Where Dickens dreamed a city, Peake dreamed a castle. Where Hogarth satirised a society, Peake invented one from scratch and populated it with characters who are the fantasy.

And like Dickens, the names are a banquet and delight for the senses. Rottcodd. Swelter. Prunesquallor. Flay. Steerpike. Barquentine. Sepulchrave. They are all quite wonderful, but they are not names that belong to human beings. They are names that belong to, and are part of Gormenghast castle, as though Gormenghast itself has not only named, but given birth to its inhabitants. Dickens would have recognised all of them instantly.

This is the English grotesque at its fullest flowering. Not cruelty for its own sake. Not ugliness as provocation. But the understanding that truth sometimes wears a twisted face, and that the exaggerated, the absurd, and the monstrous can carry an emotional honesty that the polished and the beautiful cannot.

I said earlier that I believe Arundel Castle was the catalysing element in Peake writing the Gormenghast books. Let me explain what I mean by that.

Sebastian Peake was careful to say that Arundel should be seen as just one of many candidates for the inspiration behind Gormenghast. He believed the castle formed but one of many visual memories retained from his father’s colourful and exotic upbringing. And he was right, as far as it goes.

But I would argue something slightly different. I do not think Arundel Castle inspired Gormenghast. I think it unlocked it.

For twenty years, all that childhood material from China, the swarming streets, and the Forbidden City, had been sitting in his mind for twenty years with nowhere to go. And then, most influential of all, Bergen Belsen Concentration camp. Peake was a painter, an illustrator, and a teacher, but he had not yet found the form that could contain what his mind was carrying. I would argue that when he moved to a cottage in the shadow of a castle, the form arrived. You could even argue that he may have had a J.K. Rowling moment. Hers was a delayed train when Harry Potter popped into her head. His may have been the first sight of Arundel Castle.

Read the opening of Titus Groan again. ‘The mean dwellings swarming like an epidemic around the castle walls.’ That is the compound in Tientsin, walled off from the swarming streets beyond

The Hall of the Bright Carvings, where wooden sculptures are seen in narrowing perspective like the highway for an emperor. That is the Great Spirit Way, the stone animals lining the road out of the Forbidden City. The rituals that nobody in Gormenghast understands any longer, performed with obsessive precision by people who have forgotten their origin. Those are the eternal rituals that still dominated Chinese life and were still ever present within the Forbidden City itself until the ejection of the last Emperor Puyi in 1924.

China gave Peake the content, Belsen gave him the darkness and finally, Arundel Castle gave him the shape. Titus Groan was already underway before Peake entered the camp in June 1945. But the second book, Gormenghast, was written in the years that followed, and it is a darker, crueller, more violent work than the first. Steerpike’s malice sharpens. The deaths become more intimate. The suffocating weight of the castle presses harder. It would have been impossible for Peake to walk through Bergen-Belsen and return to his writing unchanged. The experience alone did not create Gormenghast, but it deepened it. It gave the stone its coldest, cruellest temperature.

And Maeve, who walked the Downs above Burpham with him every day while he talked through characters and names and ideas, later said that the only three things she would save if their cottage caught fire were the baby, the nappies, and the manuscript.

There is something else in Gormenghast that I think anyone who cares about creativeity will recognise, and it is this: Gormenghast is a world where craft long ago became become hollow ritual.

The castle runs on ceremony. Ancient observances are performed at precise times, in precise ways, by people who have long since forgotten why. The Master of Ritual, Barquentine, enforces traditions whose origins are buried so deep in the past that not even he knows what they once meant. The Bright Carvers who live against the outer walls spend their lives creating wooden sculptures of extraordinary beauty and skill, and every year, only three of those carvings are carried into the Hall of the Bright Carvings, inspected, and stored. They are never looked at again, and those not selected – burnt. The making continues. The meaning has gone.

This is the dark mirror of everything I believe about craft. I have argued throughout this publication that making things with our hands and imaginations, that the act of creation is one of the most human things we can do, that craft carries meaning and memory and connection in ways that nothing else can. Gormenghast shows us what happens when that connection is severed. When making becomes obligation rather than expression. When ritual survives but purpose does not. When the hands keep moving but the heart has left the building.

It is, I think, a warning that sits uncomfortably close to our own time. We live in an age of content – of things made too quickly and too cheaply, because the corporate balance sheet demands it. The great ‘almost’ flood, as I called it in an earlier essay, is upon us. Gormenghast’s hollow rituals are not so very far from Western society’s own.

But Peake himself was the opposite of hollow ritual. He was a man who could not stop making. He wrote, he drew, he painted, he carved, he designed, he performed. Everything he made carried the full weight of his attention and his experience. The castle he created may be a place where craft has lost its soul, but the act of creating that castle was itself a triumph of craft at its most alive.

Why, then, is he not more widely known? Why does Gormenghast not sit on the same shelf as the Lord of the Rings and the Chronicles of Narnia?

I think the answer is that Peake refuses to make it easy for you. Tolkien gives you a quest. Lewis gives you an allegory. Peake gives you a castle and says: live in it. There is no ring to destroy, no wardrobe to step through, no clear axis of good and evil to orient yourself by, and more importantly, no way out. There is only the stone, the ritual, the grotesque.

Gormenghast does not travel as easily as Middle-earth because it does not offer the consolations that Middle-earth offers. There is no eucatastrophe, no eagles arriving at the last moment, no return of the king. There is only Titus, born into a world he did not choose, bound by rituals he does not understand, who eventually walks away from the castle entirely – and finds that the world outside is no less strange than the world within.

Perhaps that is why those of us who love these books love them so fiercely. They do not comfort or reassure, and they will not tell you that goodness will prevail. They simply show you what it is to be human – far too often trapped against our will inside structures and rituals we did not choose.

Peake was never able to finish the story he had begun. His illness, originally diagnosed as Parkinson’s disease and now understood to have been dementia, took his ability to write and draw long before it took his life. He died in 1968, aged 57. The third book, Titus Alone, was published in 1959 but had been heavily edited against his wishes, and a fuller version compiled from his early drafts was not issued until 1970. He had planned further books. They were never written.

But Maeve wrote.

In the years after Mervyn’s death, Maeve Gilmore sat down privately and began writing a continuation of her husband’s story. She called it Search Without End. She never seriously tried to publish it. She wrote it as an act of grief, of love, of her won recovery – that word again – working through the loss of her husband by continuing the journey of his most famous character – Titus.

In her version, Titus travels through landscapes that echo the places Mervyn and Maeve had lived in together, but in reverse order, as though Titus were walking backwards through their marriage. And gradually, without ever naming him, Titus moves toward a figure who is unmistakably Mervyn Peake himself. A widow writing her husband back into existence through his own character.

Maeve died in 1983 without telling anyone what she had done. The manuscript lay in the family attic for almost thirty years until, in January 2010, Peake’s granddaughter found four composition books in a box. Titus Awakes was published in 2011, the centenary year, the same year as the Chichester conference.

Sebastian Peake is gone now too. He is buried near Arundel, close to his father and mother. The Peake family and this Sussex landscape are bound together in the ground as firmly as they were ever bound in life.

At the base of Mervyn and Maeve Peake’s grave are the following words.

‘To live at all is miracle enough.’

Do not be put off by the bleak prospect of the books, which may be the impression given by this essay. I personally don’t find them at all depressing, they are the most glorious banquets of words I have ever read. If you love Dickens, you’ll love the Gormenghast books.

If you do read the books, take your time with them. Read them aloud if you can, and let the language fill your mouth and savour every morsel.

A butler, a ghost and a boy with a question. Seven minutes of storytelling. Written and read by Vincent Shaw.

From Lord of the Rings to Lord of the Spreadsheet – How Magic Lost Its Wonder.

Written and read by Vincent Shaw

Earlier this year, for World Book Day, I stood in front of two hundred and twenty children and five teachers and asked them a simple question.

What is magic, and where does it come from?

As the presentation was for eleven-year-olds, I kept things simple by keeping the central premise around the idea that magic could be thought of as a catch-all word to explain things and events that defy rational explanation, and how, over the centuries, magic evolved into the sciences. Alchemy became chemistry, astrology became astronomy, and so on. (You can read that article here.)

In reality, magic is of course an extremely broad and nuanced topic and beyond the scope of this essay. Broadly speaking, magic was a human and deeply personal invention. It was analogical and rooted in the conviction that the world was alive with hidden sympathies and correspondences. Two things that look alike are alike. Two things that had once been in contact were always in contact. If you wanted to heal someone, you found a plant that resembled the afflicted organ. If you wanted to harm someone, you made an image of them and stuck pins in it. Magic was never rational, but it was logical, according to the human condition and world thinking at the time, and that thinking and definition of magic has evolved over time.

In a nutshell, magic was a method to address a human need when other rational mechanisms were unavailable or simply didn’t work. Heal me, protect me, find me love. Tell me who stole my pig. Make it rain. The list is endless. Essentially, magic was seen as a force that could be called upon when something was out of, or beyond, human control. As magic evolved into science, and science enabled greater control, magic simply became redundant.

I would argue that the decline in a belief of magic, ran parallel to a decline in faith. But now, as the world becomes increasingly dangerous and events move beyond the control of ordinary people, so once again we are seeing belief in magic increase, and faith strengthen. But that is an essay for another day.

But as far as practical magic, for want of a better phrase, evolved, it became the sciences, but a belief in magic did not disappear entirely. Magic found its way into fairy stories.

Fairy tale magic is wild. It is arbitrary and unexplained, and is ruled by an internal logic that never announces itself. Beans for a cow. A kiss breaks a curse. Spin straw into gold or die. You don’t know why these things work, they just do. The story doesn’t explain because it doesn’t need to.

But fairy tale magic, for all its wildness, is not amoral. It is deeply and consistently moral – it just refuses to announce its rules in advance. In Perrault’s ‘The Fairies,’ a kind girl gives water to a disguised fairy and finds jewels falling from her lips whenever she speaks. Her rude sister refuses, and is cursed with toads and snakes. In Grimm’s Cinderella, the stepsisters’ vanity is rewarded by doves pecking out their eyes. The discovery of his true name, breaks Rumpelstiltskin’s power, because in the folk tradition, to name something is to hold authority over it.

In fairy tale magic, the virtuous character is rewarded and the wicked, punished. The magic rewards generosity and punishes transgression, but it does so on its own terms. You cannot predict it, game it, or learn it in order to exploit it.

What fairy tale magic is not, however, is sacred. Fundamentally it is pagan in nature. Fairy tale magic is above and beyond not only the character’s, but the reader’s comprehension. It answers to a justice they cannot understand. It has has no named source and no cosmology or omnipotent creator behind it. The morality is real but it is tethered to the individual story, and only applicable within it.

This matters because of who came next – Tolkien.

Others had been there before him of course, George MacDonald was one. He was a Scottish minister whose fairy tales carried the weight of faith, was acknowledged by Tolkien as a forerunner. But MacDonald’s magic was sacred within the frame of a parable. Tolkien did something else entirely. He created a world whose moral architecture made every act of magic legible. It was either good and sacred or evil and corrupted. Faithful or fallen. In Middle-earth, magic was a reflection of the world’s making or the rebellion against it.

Fundamentally, Tolkien made magic sacred.

In Middle-earth, magic is not a system to be learned. It is not a skill to be practised, or a resource to be spent and replenished. It is a quality of being, something closer to grace than to individual power, and it cannot be separated from the moral and spiritual architecture of the world in which it operates.

Gandalf can and does use spells. He produces light from his staff, breaks the Bridge of Khazad-dûm with a word of command. But Tolkien never explains his power. There is no spell list, no progression, no sense that Gandalf’s abilities follow rules the reader could learn. You never know what he can or cannot do. The mystery is preserved, even when the magic is on full display. He was sent, not trained. And when he falls in Moria, he is not rescued by his own cleverness or by another character’s intervention. He dies as a direct result of battling evil. He is then resurrected and sent back. The parallel is obvious.

And the word ‘sent’ carries the entire weight of what underpins magic in Middle-earth. Power in Middle-earth is not seized. It is received. The moment you try to seize it, you have already begun the fall.

That is why the Ring cannot be wielded for good. Not because of some arbitrary rule that Tolkien imposed for dramatic convenience, but because the logic of the world makes it impossible. The Ring is domination made physical. To use it, even with the best of intentions, is to accept domination as a method, and in Tolkien’s world, the method is the meaning. There is no version of events in which Gandalf or Galadriel takes the Ring and uses its power for noble ends, because the act of using that kind of power is in itself the corruption. In Middle-earth, magic is not a system. It is the foundation of the world.

The Elves understand magic instinctively. In Lothlórien, when Sam asks about ‘Elf magic,’ the response is one of genuine confusion. The Elves do not distinguish between magic and craft, between enchantment and making, between the numinous quality of a thing and the skill with which it was made. To them, it is all one. A rope woven by Elvish hands has properties that Sam would call magical, but the Elves would simply call it, good rope. This is not vagueness on Tolkien’s part. It is precision. He is telling us that in a world where making is sacred, there is no boundary between the made, and the enchanted – magic.

And the magic of Middle-earth is in everything.

Tom Bombadil teaches the hobbits a spell before they cross the Barrow-downs, although he doesn’t call it a spell, and the reader might not recognise it as such. He gives them a rhyme to chant if they need his help. And when Tom rescues the hobbits from the barrow-wight, his counter-magic is to dig up the treasure and give it away. That is how you defeat a barrow-wight: you break the hoard. To a reader raised on fireballs and lightning bolts, none of this looks like magic at all, but it is. It is magic as the real world practised it for thousands of years, a magic rooted in folk knowledge and sympathetic correspondence, and the conviction that certain acts performed in certain ways, have power.

Aragorn heals with Athelas, a herb whose other name is Kingsfoil, because the king’s hands heal. This is not a fantasy invention. It is a direct inheritance from the real-world tradition of the royal touch, the belief that the anointed monarch carried a divine healing power. Tolkien takes this ancient tradition and places it at the heart of his story. Aragorn cannot heal because he has learned a skill. He can heal because he is the king, and the king’s authority is not political. It is sacred – the divine right of kings. Again, the parallel is obvious.

And then there are the holy names. When Frodo, on the verge of death on Weathertop, instinctively cries out Elbereth Gilthoniel, the name itself repels the Nazgûl. When Sam faces Shelob in the darkness of Cirith Ungol, the same name causes the Phial of Galadriel to blaze with light. Elbereth is Varda, the Queen of the Stars, the greatest of the Valier, the most revered of all the Valar. Frodo and Sam are not casting spells. They are calling out to the divine, and being answered. The name works not because of any magical property inherent in the word, but because of the divine entity it calls.

This is the point at which the underlying faith within The Lord of the Rings becomes impossible to ignore. The magic in Middle-earth behaves the way faith behaves – often as prayer answered.

The Ainulindalë, the creation myth of Middle-earth, is not a spell. It is a song, a great music in which each voice contributes its part to a theme set by Ilúvatar. And the discord of Melkor is woven into the pattern rather than erased from it, because even rebellion serves the greater design. This is the logic of a world that means something, a world underwritten by a greater purpose that the characters can sense even, though they cannot see it.

And the divine, as the source of magic, is what makes Tolkien’s magic feel so very different, in fiction, from all the magic that came after.

Magic in Middle-earth is the power of received grace. That is why it nourishes the reader.

And then we turned magic it into a spreadsheet.

In 1974, Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson published Dungeons & Dragons, and after D&D hit the shelves, magic in fantasy changed forever. The motivation that drove the game’s invention was the love of Middle-earth and The Lord of the Rings – two people trying to find a way of returning to, and having a more complete experience inside, that world.

D&D was a remarkable sideways step into the imaginative landscape. It was a new way for people to inhabit fantasy worlds, and to do so together. But a game requires rules. That is the nature of a game. You cannot have a player announce ‘I cast a spell’, and then spend forty minutes debating whether their character has sufficient moral authority to make it work. (Actually you can. I was that argumentative teenager, but that is a different story.) You cannot have magic in a game, without having some kind of determining mechanism, which for D&D, was the polyhedral dice. The dice, along with spreadsheets, can track levels, ranges, power and duration. And this became magic’s determining mechanism.

So, due to the invention of a game, magic had to become quantifiable. Spells needed categories, levels, ranges, durations. A fireball had to do a specific amount of damage to a specific target at a specific range. Magic became, for the first time in the history of storytelling, a resource to be managed. And within the logic of the game, it works. It has to. The alternative is an unplayable game, and chaos.

But the mechanics of game magic didn’t stay inside the games.

Game magic, and its quantifiable mechanism, bled into fiction, slowly at first and then completely.

Over the following decades, fantasy novels increasingly treated magic as a system. Writers built elaborate frameworks: materials that granted specific powers when ingested, energy sources that could be drawn upon and depleted, magical disciplines with rules as rigid as the laws of physics. The reader’s pleasure shifted. It moved away from the wonder of the divine, toward the satisfaction of watching an elegant mechanism working, and leading to a reward-based outcome.

Entire schools of thought emerged around this idea. Writers taught other writers that a magic system was only satisfying to the degree that the reader understood its constraints, that the resolution of a fantasy novel should depend on the protagonist’s insight into how the magic works. That mystery in magic was a flaw to be engineered out, not a quality to be preserved. And a generation of readers and writers grew up believing that this is simply what magic in fantasy is: a system with rules, a mechanism to be understood. That encroachment of rules-based magic into fiction, has now reached the point where it is a fiction genre in its own right – LitRPG (Literary Role Playing Games), stories where game mechanics and narrative literally coexist on the page.

All these different forms of magic can be found in countless books, and they work very well. A well-constructed magic system can be genuinely thrilling. The pleasure of watching a clever character exploit the laws of a fictional world is real. Many of these books are quality, well-written works, and the people who love them are not wrong to do so. But something was lost, and I would argue that most readers can sense it – that as good as these books are, they do not come close to the experience that The Lord of the Rings delivers.

I think what was lost, was spiritual depth.

A well-crafted magic system entertains. It engages the mind. It provides the pleasure of pattern recognition and the satisfaction of a reward-based outcome. But it does not nourish emotional or spiritual hunger. It does not leave you, at the end of the story, feeling that you have been in the presence of something that touches absolute truth, something greater than simply words on a page.

Tolkien’s magic nourishes spiritual hunger. That is why people return to The Lord of the Rings time and time again. They return so they can re-engage with something that can be deeply felt and does not diminish with rereading. This feeling is best illustrated by Samwise Gamgee in Mordor.

‘There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.’

This passage never fails to move me. Why? Because it touches upon an absolute truth, and I am certain that I am not alone. In my view, that is what is missing from so much contemporary fantasy fiction, and why magic in fantasy is now unsatisfying, no matter how many fireballs you cast.

Sam seeing the Star of Eärendil is moving because it represents the entire architecture of Tolkien’s legendarium: the Silmarils, the Two Trees, the light that existed before the sun and moon, Varda who set the stars in the sky, the whole cosmology of a world made in love and marred by pride and sustained by grace. Sam doesn’t know any of this. He just sees a star. But the reader senses that spiritual foundation, even if they have never read the Silmarillion. The reader feels it because the world Tolkien built is founded on faith, hope, and truth.

A magic system rests on its own internal logic. When the logic is exhausted, when the reader has understood all the rules, the wonder is spent and the spreadsheet is complete.

Tolkien’s magic flows from the divine. That is why the passage where Sam sees the Star of Eärendil is so moving, even on its twentieth reading.

I stood in front of two hundred and twenty children and asked them where magic comes from. The answer I gave them that day was the one that fits on a classroom whiteboard: magic became science. Chemistry was once alchemy. We learned to explain the world and the magic receded.

But the question I have been turning over ever since, is a different one. Not where does magic come from in the world, but where does it come from in the stories we tell, and why does it land so deeply in some stories and not in others?

I think the answer is that the most satisfying magic in fiction was never really about magic at all. It was about what sits behind it. One upon a time, fairy tales gave us magic that was strange and beautiful, and it thrilled us, but Tolkien moved beyond this.

Tolkien gave us magic that was an founded on truth, and that is impossible to improve upon.

From King Arthur to Hogwarts - what every generation hungers for.

Written and read by Vincent Shaw

Around two years ago, a very elderly aunt told me that my grandmother had been given a gold sovereign by the Pre-Raphaelite artist, William Morris. I burst into tears on the spot.

The tears surprised me. I’m a man in his sixties, and I was weeping because of a coin that may, or may not have existed, given by a man who died more than a century ago. After a great deal of thought, I realised the tears weren’t about the sovereign – they were about connection. The full story can be found here.

I have spent my whole life admiring the work of William Morris and loving the work Edward Burne-Jones. The tapestries, the stained glass, the paintings and the medieval dreamworld they created, and I had absolutely no knowledge that my own family, in a very small way, had been part of it.

My great-great-grandfather Robert, knew William Morris well. He owned the Marylebone Glassworks in London, and made stained glass windows for Morris and Company. His sisters, my great-great-aunts, were cloth stainers who worked for Morris and lived above the very first Morris & Co shop at 449, Oxford Street.

After sixty years of ignorance, I could not believe that I had a direct connection with some of the men I admired the most. For me, it was total shock and an impossible dream come true, I was connected – hence the tears.

What I didn’t understand then, but think I understand now, is why I so desperately wanted to be connected to them. Morris, Burne-Jones and many other Pre-Raphaelite artists were reaching for something – they were reaching for the romance and beauty that can only be found, in fairy tales.

Without knowing it, that is what I had also been reaching for all my life, and now with greater insight, that is what I will continue to do until I no longer draw breath.

But I am not alone. That reaching, that searching has been going on for centuries.

In 1839, a young Scottish nobleman named Archibald Montgomerie, the 13th Earl of Eglinton, staged a medieval tournament on his estate in Ayrshire. Real armour. Real lances. Real horses. A hundred thousand spectators came to watch, many of them in costume. Unfortunately, the Scottish weather had other ideas, and it poured with rain for the entire tournament and the whole thing descended into a magnificent, glorious muddy shambles – knights and horses slipping in mud, pavilions collapsing, spectators drenched – but nobody seemed to mind. The desire, the longing to be part of the romance was bigger than the disaster and came to be known as the Eglinton Tournament.

Mark Girouard, in his wonderful book The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman, traces this desire back to its roots. What he found was not nostalgia in the way we understand it – a sentimental longing for a lost golden age – but something deeper. A hunger, an ache. The Victorians were reaching for something their age was rapidly destroying. The very beauty and romance they believed in.

Victorian Britain was the richest, most powerful civilisation on earth – at the time – and it was spiritually eating itself alive. The Industrial Revolution had delivered extraordinary wealth, but it had done so by stripping out everything that made life feel meaningful.

The human hand was replaced by the factory line. Towns that had grown organically over centuries were demolished and rebuilt as engines of production. The air was black, the rivers were dead. Beauty was replaced by ugly efficiency. Romance was being replaced by the accounting ledger, which in turn meant that man had less value, than machine.

And in the middle of this, a group of artists and writers looked at what their age had built and found it spiritually and morally bankrupt. So they searched for those lost values by reaching into the past.

Morris looked for it in medieval craft – in the hand-printed book, the hand-woven tapestry, the hand-thrown pot. Burne-Jones (along with many other Pre-Raphaelite artists), looked for it in Arthurian legend, painting knights and enchanted forests with a luminosity that made the industrial world outside, the aberration, not the dream. Tennyson looked for it in verse, rewriting the Arthurian cycle for a generation that desperately wanted to believe that honour, beauty, and selflessness were still possible.

And they weren’t alone, and they weren’t the first. Others had gone before them. Sir Walter Scott and Kenelm Digby had already rekindled the flame – Scott through his novels of medieval chivalry, Digby through The Broad Stone of Honour, a hugely influential book that reimagined the knightly code as a living ethos for the modern gentleman. The desire to reach back did not begin with Morris and Burne-Jones. It had been building for decades.

Morris and Burne-Jones reached back to King Arthur and the medieval, not because the Middle Ages were better – Morris, of all people, knew they weren’t – but because the medieval world contained something their own age had thrown away. A belief that making things with your hands mattered. That beauty was not a luxury but a necessity. That the measure of a civilisation was not taken by what it produced, but by what it cared about.

And here is the thing that matters most. They didn’t just admire the past, they were inspired by it. Morris didn’t want to live in the Middle Ages. He wanted to make wallpaper, furniture, and stained glass with the same care and conviction that medieval craftsmen had brought to their work. Burne-Jones didn’t want to be a medieval knight. He wanted to step inside the myth – to paint Avalon so vividly that the world outside his studio, disappeared. The past was never the destination, it was the romantic inspiration.

My great-great-grandfather Robert was part of that movement. He made stained glass windows for Morris and Company, but not just churches, but for homes too, handmade whilst the factories of industrial England roared around him. The only surviving examples of his work are in a small parish church around the corner from my house in Sussex. I lived ten minutes away from them for a decade without knowing they existed. The full story can be found here.

I own a copy of Girouard’s book. It came from and was published in the USA, and I have read it countless times. But one passage stopped my heart the first time I encountered it, and it has stayed with me for forty years.

On page ninety-five, Girouard describes Charles Lamb – not the essayist, but a young Victorian aristocrat preparing for the Eglinton Tournament. Earlier that summer, Lamb had rented a house outside Bognor Regis on the Sussex coast, for the races at nearby Goodwood, and one day had come across a fourteen-year-old girl wandering on the Bognor Sands. She was in deep distress. Her employer, an Indian rajah, was trying to seduce her. Lamb, in the full grip of the chivalric code he tried to live by, rescued her. Her name was Charlotte Gray, the daughter of a draper in nearby Chichester, and she was very beautiful, with coal-black hair that fell to her feet when she let it down. Charles became her faithful knight.

I have walked those sands. I still walk them. The book arrived from three thousand miles away and opened onto a scene on the beach I have been walking on, all my life.

The goose bump feeling I had on reading about Charles Lamb and Charlotte Gray, was the same feeling I had on discovering that my great-great-grandfather’s windows still existed around the corner from my home. The past is not behind us. It surrounds us, it’s beneath our feet and it’s in our bones. It is in the stories we tell our children and the things we make with our hands. It is the thread that connects a Victorian glassmaker in London to his great-great-grandson in Sussex. We are not separated from the past. We are made of it. It binds us to one another across generations, and when we feel that connection, often unconsciously, we sense we are part of something greater – a never-ending story. A story that started before we existed and that will continue, after we die.

The chivalric revival that Girouard examines in his book did not survive the First World War. It couldn’t. The generation that had been raised on King Arthur and honour, and the playing fields of Eton, walked into the trenches of the Somme and discovered that chivalry was no protection against industrialised killing. The medieval dream that had sustained a century of British self-belief, was destroyed.

What replaced it, was silence. A generation of men who had seen what they had seen and could not speak of it in the old language. Chivalry – honour, glory, sacrifice – had lost its meaning, destroyed by the reality of what those words had actually demanded.

But that deep ache, that hunger for something beyond the present, was not destroyed by the war. The hunger for romance, for beauty, for moral certainty, did not die. It lives in and thrives in the hearts of us all and it is impossible to destroy.

Two men who survived the First World War spent the rest of their lives reaching back into the past. Not this time for inspiration, but for ‘recovery.’ And they reached back further this time, back beyond the medieval and the romance of King Arthur. Further, deeper, to the roots beneath the roots.

One of them was J.R.R. Tolkien, a philologist, a scholar, and a man who fought in the terrible battle of the Somme. Before he was a novelist, he was one of the foremost scholars of Beowulf, the oldest epic poem in the English language. It is the tale of a hero who knows that despite defeating the monster, he will lose in the end. Tolkien understood that Beowulf was not a literary curiosity, but a living thing, that still had something to teach a world that had just tried to destroy itself.

Tolkien reached back to Beowulf, to Norse saga, to the deep mythological roots of northern Europe, and he built Middle-earth. Not as escapism, but for what he called ‘recovery,’ a way of seeing things clearly again by seeing them through an older lens. Middle-earth is not a world of warriors. It is a world of creators and craftsmen – Elvish smiths who forge with patience and love, Dwarven miners who find beauty in stone, Hobbits who garden and cook and build with their hands – craftsmen who have to put down their tools to fight, and who long for nothing more than to pick those tools up again.

The other man was C.S. Lewis, Tolkien’s friend and fellow survivor of the war. He reached back to medieval romance, to classical mythology. He built Narnia – a place where children step through a wardrobe and find themselves in a world where virtue matters, and where good and evil are real and distinguishable. Lewis believed, and wrote explicitly, that the modern world’s rejection of objective beauty and moral truth, what he called ‘the abolition of man,’ was a catastrophe that would leave us with nothing to stand on. Narnia was his answer, his ‘recovery.’

Both men were doing exactly what Morris and Burne-Jones had done a generation earlier. They looked at what their age had lost, and they went looking for it in older stories. The romance of the past was the raw material. Middle-earth and Narnia were the handmade result.

But between the Pre-Raphaelites and Tolkien, between the Victorian revival and the post-war recovery, something else happened. Something that changed the terms of the argument.

Modernism arrived as a reaction to the First World War.

It arrived with tremendous intellectual force and genuine moral conviction. The old forms – representational painting, narrative storytelling, ornamental architecture, tonal music – were declared exhausted, dishonest and complicit in the catastrophes of that terrible conflict. The argument was not trivial: if the old values had failed to prevent a world war, then perhaps the old values were part of the problem. Perhaps sentiment was a lie. Perhaps the most honest response to the war was abstraction and pure function.

And so beauty was stripped out of public life with frightening speed. Quite literally, ‘the baby was slung out with the bathwater.’ Buildings that had stood for centuries were demolished and replaced with towers of glass and concrete. The classical tradition in painting was abandoned. In literature, storytelling was dismissed as naive. Difficulty became a virtue. Accessibility became suspect. The gap between art and audience widened into a chasm that for many, was uncrossable.

In education, the same impulse took hold. Imagination was subordinated to measurable outcomes. The arts were pushed to the margins. Making things with your hands was regarded as recreation rather than learning. The assumption, never quite stated but always present, was that these things were pleasant but were fundamentally shallow and without merit.

The modernist project asked valuable questions. But the cost was enormous. When you strip beauty out of life, people do not stop yearning for it. They go looking for it somewhere else. And where do they find it?

In the old stories. In Tolkien, who was writing against modernism as much as against industrialisation. In Lewis, who named the crisis more directly than anyone else. Millions of readers reached for Middle-earth and Narnia, not because they wanted to escape the modern world but because the modern world had stopped offering them anything worth staying for.

And then came JK Rowling.

For Harry Potter, she also reached back, but not to Beowulf or Norse saga, but to the Edwardian boarding school story, the chosen-one myth, the medieval castle, and to the men she admired the most: Tolkien and Lewis. Men of the Edwardian age. She built Hogwarts: a place lit by candles, furnished with oak and governed by tradition and eccentricity. A place where children learn by doing – mixing potions, tending magical creatures and casting spells. Hogwarts could not be more different from the fluorescent-lit, outcomes-measured, assessment-driven schools she was working in.

Harry Potter arrived in 1997, at the dawn of the internet age, and it conquered the world. Not because it was the most original story ever told – JK Rowling borrowed freely from everything that came before her, and she did so unashamedly, because it fed a hunger that had been building for decades. I would argue that hunger was very much in herself as it was in the wider world. The hunger for a world where things were made by hand, where knowledge was passed from person to person, where belonging was earned through loyalty and courage.

The adults who queue for Butterbeer at the Wizarding World of Harry Potter (you can read more about that here), are doing exactly what the hundred thousand spectators at the Eglinton Tournament were doing in 1839. They were paying to stand in the presence of something they felt has been lost. The Victorian tournament was a shambles and Butterbeer is only a soft drink, but the desire, the yearning to be part of the romance is exactly the same.

Harry Potter is nearly thirty years old now. The children who read it under the covers by torchlight are now adults with children of their own. And they are handing their children the same books, reaching back to Hogwarts the way the Victorians reached back to King Arthur and Camelot. They do so because they feel that modern life, with all its digital convenience, has taken away something essential – romance.

The Victorians lost craft and beauty to the Industrial Revolution, and Morris and Burne-Jones reached back to King Arthur and the medieval world, and from that romantic inspiration, they made stained glass windows, paintings, and poetry, that many of us still treasure today.

Tolkien and Lewis tried to find themselves again after the trauma of the World Wars. They reached back to Beowulf, to Norse saga, to medieval romance, and from that inspiration they created Middle-earth and Narnia.

Modernism tried to strip beauty and narrative out of public life in the name of honesty and progress, but it simply created a hunger for things that are made with care and told with conviction, and that longing has simply grown stronger ever since.

The Harry Potter generation lost wonder and belonging to consumer culture and the start of the digital revolution. Rowling reached back to the boarding school, the castle, the candlelit hall for inspiration, and from that inspiration she made Hogwarts, a world so vivid and alive that millions of adults still queue to stand inside a replica of it, twenty-nine years after it was first imagined.

The names change. Camelot. Middle-earth. Narnia. Hogwarts. But the hunger, the yearning doesn’t. Every generation feels something essential slipping away and it always tends to be the same thing – beauty, craft, meaning, wonder and romance – and every generation produces storytellers who reach back to the older stories to recover it. I would argue that the looking to the past for inspiration is not nostalgic weakness, as some would have it, it is the driving force that comes into play when the present fails to nourish us with what our souls crave the most – hope.

And the lesson, every time, is the same. The storytellers who endure are the ones who look to the past and, inspired by what they find there, make something new. Morris made windows. Tolkien made languages. Lewis made a wardrobe that opened onto another world. Rowling made a school where children learn magic.

The hunger has not stopped, and it will never go away.

Here in the UK, The National Literacy Trust tells us that only one in three children aged eight to eighteen now enjoy reading in their free time – the lowest level in twenty years. The screens are bright, the friction is zero and the slop is endless. But when you put a real story in front of a child they lean forward. I have watched it happen as I delivered that story. Two hundred children in a school hall, and the room went quiet, and they leaned forward, because the story was real and they were hungry for it.

The question is not whether the old stories still matter. Of course they do. King Arthur still matters. Middle-earth still matters. Narnia and Hogwarts still matter. They will continue to have value, for as long as human beings need to be reminded of what the present keeps trying to take away from them.

The question is whether we trust ourselves to make new ones.

New stories, made with care and told with conviction. Handed to a child by an adult who genuinely believes in them – not because they were designed to add revenue to a corporate balance sheet, not because the story carries an approved message, not because it has a film deal attached, but because the story is good, stands on its own merit, and is founded on courage and hope.

Care & Craft – ‘Why it’s more than nostalgia.’

Written and read by Vincent Shaw.

In the nineteen-seventies, Friday night was always my bath night, and Friday nights in winter are the ones I remember the most.

December. Cold, wet and windy outside. Warm, dry and snug inside.

After my Friday night bath I was always allowed downstairs in a towel to get dry in front of the fire. Back then it was a coal fire. By early evening it had been going for hours, thumping out its orange furnace heat into the living room, and by that time it was the warmest room in the house. A child, naked and towelling dry in front of a real fire, no inhibitions, no self-consciousness, just warmth.

Then, sitting cross-legged on the carpet, clean, warm, hair brushed and in fresh pyjamas. Crumpets toasted on the open fire, butter, jam, tea, telly and delicious munching. And then the best bit.

Jackanory.

Jackanory was a BBC early evening children’s storytelling programme. Each week a well-known actor or personality would read a children’s book aloud, usually seated in an armchair, one chapter per episode across daily fifteen-minute slots. Its format was simple. One person in a very simple set and sometimes no set at all, just the storyteller and the chair. No special effects, no frantic editing, just old-fashioned storytelling.

The programme ran for thirty years, from 1965 to 1996, broadcasting around three and a half thousand episodes. Actors, comedians, even Prince Charles, as he was then, sat in that chair and read. But my strongest memory of Jackanory is of one episode in particular: it was December in the run-up to Christmas and the story was Alice Through the Looking Glass, told by Bernard Cribbins.

Actor Bernard Cribbins was Jackanory’s most well-known and best loved storyteller, appearing over a hundred times across twenty-five years. He was also Mr Perks in The Railway Children and the voice of the Wombles, but for me he will always be the first man, more than my own father, who told me stories.

The BBC’s original intention was to encourage children to read. The detractors at the time said it would do the opposite, that listening to a story would replace the effort of reading one. They were wrong. If anything, Jackanory lit the fire of wonder in children’s imaginations and sent them into books.

But something else was happening in that room, something older and deeper than literacy campaigns. Something that had been happening for thousands of years and long before anyone wrote anything.

Before there were books, before there were scrolls, and before there was any kind of written language, there was the spoken voice and oral storytelling.

We are very much a literate culture, but it takes very little imagination to understand what the world was like when nothing was written. When every story, every law and every warning about the dark forest only existed in the mind of the person who knew it, oral storytelling was of critical importance. It was the only way that tales and knowledge could be passed on.

Homer, for example, whoever he was, did not write the Iliad. He sang it. That great poem existed for centuries only as a handed-down performed story, shaped and reshaped by every performer across a thousand years.

Another example would be the great Welsh myths of the Mabinogion. They were told orally long before they were written down. Beowulf was a tale told around fires in ancient halls before it was ever set down on a page. The fairy tales we now read to children in neat illustrated editions were once told in kitchens by people who could not read, and did not need to.

The voice came first. The written word much later.

In 1987, Jim Henson, creator of the Muppets, created another of my favourite TV shows. The Storyteller.

The Storyteller was filmed at Elstree Studios in the UK and aired on Channel 4 in 1988, and in the title role was actor John Hurt. Hurt sat by a fire, an old man in heavy makeup with enormous ears and a prosthetic nose, and he told European folk tales to his talking dog. The dog was sarcastic. The stories were dark. The production was visually sumptuous, but the engine of the whole thing, and the reason it worked, was John Hurt’s incredible voice simply telling a story.

Who could forget the show’s opening words:

‘When people told themselves their past with stories, explained their present with stories, foretold the future with stories, the best place by the fire was kept for the Storyteller.’

Henson himself, in his notes on the series, wrote something that I think about often. He spoke of his childhood, of family gathered at his grandmother’s table, of stories told, of laughter. And then this: the flow of information, and energy, and entertainment from the storyteller to his listeners as the storyteller calls upon them to meet him halfway, to create the story in their own minds.

And now today, in 2026, stories delivered via the spoken word are becoming more and more popular. I am convinced that audio will eventually become the fiction delivery medium of choice.

Audiobooks are now the fastest-growing delivery format in publishing. In 2019 they overtook ebooks in revenue for the first time, and they continue to gain market share.

In the US, in 2024, audiobook sales reached over two billion dollars, up fifty percent in five years. Over half of American adults have now listened to an audiobook. The global market is projected to more than triple by the end of the decade.

People are listening on their phones while they walk the dog, on their commute, while they cook, while they fold the laundry. Modern living demands more of everyone’s time and audio is becoming more popular than ever before, as it allows everyone to ‘read’ even when occupied by other tasks, but it’s more than that. Everyone simply loves to be told a good story.

And children were there first, and the commercial reality proves it.

In 2016, two fathers in Germany launched the Toniebox: a small, soft, screenless cube. You place a figurine on top and it plays a story. No screen, no swiping, just a voice, speaking to a child who has chosen to listen. In its first three months it sold 30,000 units. By 2017 that had risen to 148,000 units. By 2019, a million. Today, over 10 million Tonieboxes have been sold worldwide, with more than one 134 million figurines. In Germany, one in every two preschool households now owns one. Over a million have been sold in the UK alone, and North America is now the company’s biggest market. Revenue grew over 30% in 2025.

My three-year-old grandson takes his everywhere.

And then, this month, April 2026, the New York Times published its first ever Children’s Audio Bestseller list, and the fact that fourteen of its top fifteen slots are Harry Potter tells you everything.

In April 2026, in an era of limitless streaming content and algorithmic recommendation and short-form video, the most successful children’s book series of the last thirty years is conquering the bestseller charts again. Not as books. Not as films. As voices.

The wheel has come all the way back round again.

What Jackanory and The Storyteller both understood, and what the Harry Potter audio chart proves beyond argument, is that the human voice telling a story is not an obsolete form of storytelling. It is not a quaint relic of a pre-literate age. It is something we still hunger for, and in my view, more now than ever.

There is a reason that the bedtime story endures. There is a reason that grandparents who cannot remember what they had for breakfast can still recite the opening of a story they were told at five years old. There is a reason that two hundred and twenty eleven-year-old children and five teachers leaned forward whilst I read them a story.

It’s because all of us, young and old, love stories and vocal storytelling came first. Nothing we have invented has ever replaced it, and now, in 2026, we are returning to it.

Care & Craft. Why we all need something real, in a world dominated by digital.

Beauty bound in a book.

A cathedral is impressive enough from the outside, simply by the sheer scale of it, but that is not what stirs most visitors, myself included. The full impact does not hit until you enter the building.

The air changes. It is cooler, stiller, and it carries a particular smell: old stone, candle wax, polish, and underpinning all this, is the feeling that you just walked into the presence of something far greater than yourself.

That sense of awe is not accidental. The people who commissioned these buildings knew exactly what they were doing. The soaring nave, the impossibly high vaulted ceiling, the way the light pours through the stained glass: all of it exists for a single purpose. This is God’s house, and it must be worthy of Him. Every arch, every carved capital, every pane of glass was created as an act of devotion: the best that human hands could offer, coming together collectively to create something magnificent.

I have always loved old churches. I love the cool, the musty quiet of a space that by its nature, pulls you into a gentle but insistent whispered respect.

But a cathedral takes that feeling of quiet respect and raises it into awe, and Winchester Cathedral does this in spades

However, it is not the magnificent building that draws me back to Winchester Cathedral time and again. It is the treasure it contains.

In the easternmost corner of the south transept is, in my opinion, one of the most beautiful handmade objects ever created: the Winchester Bible.

You do not come to the Winchester Bible directly. There is an anteroom first, with a small permanent exhibition on how the Bible was made, from raw materials to working methods. In a display cabinet there are the raw pigments in both their whole state and powdered forms, some of which are toxic. Vermillion, a beautiful luminous red, made from ground mercury sulphide. Lead white, made from lead carbonate. Ultramarine blue, derived from lapis lazuli, a semi-precious stone whose only known source in the twelfth century was Afghanistan, and that was once more valuable than gold.

There is also a stretcher showing how calfskin was prepared by being soaked in lye, scraped, pulled taut, dried, and scraped again until it became vellum, a surface smooth enough to hold ink and strong enough to last a thousand years. The Winchester Bible required more than two hundred and fifty calf hides to create it.

In the centre of the room, there is a large digital display table. You can scroll through full-sized pages, tap on illuminations, zoom in to see brushwork and gilding and reveal the Bible’s beauty. This exhibition is well worth exploring before you see the Bible itself.

Directly next to the exhibition is the Bible room, and in here everything changes.

The room is not a room. It is the south-eastern corner of the south transept, and it is very dimly lit as in front of the original windows there is a curtain of very fine chain that filters out most of the daylight. In here there are three display cases, each holding one of the Bible’s rebound volumes, and each case is itself partly covered with heavy cloth.

The only illumination on the pages comes from two small LEDs in each case. They cast a warm glow not even as bright as a candle, to keep the light levels down to an absolute minimum.

By accident, or by design, the Bible room is the holy of holies - the inner sanctum.

The Winchester Bible was made in Winchester between roughly 1150 and 1175. It is the largest surviving English Bible from the twelfth century, and it contains the complete Latin Vulgate: Old and New Testaments, two versions of the Psalms, and the Apocrypha, and the entire text was written by one person.

Every word of the Latin Bible is written in a consistent, beautiful Gothic hand across hundreds of enormous pages, each one measuring nearly two feet tall. It is estimated that the text alone took over four years to complete, and as the scribe worked, another monk followed behind, checking and leaving corrections in the margins that are still visible today.

And then came the artists.

At least six of them working over a period of twenty-five years. None of them signed their work and we do not know their names. In the 1940s, an art historian named Walter Oakeshott studied the Bible systematically, and for the first time gave the artists names based on what he could see in their work: the Master of the Leaping Figures, the Master of the Apocrypha Drawings, the Master of the Genesis Initial, the Amalekite Master, the Master of the Morgan Leaf, the Master of the Gothic Majesty.

Those names alone tell you something. These were not journeymen following a template. Each had a distinct artistic personality. The Master of the Leaping Figures filled his illuminations with figures in dramatic, dynamic poses, bodies mid-leap, robes flying. The Master of the Genesis Initial, punched patterns into gilded surfaces and created figures turning their backs to the viewer: a striking innovation for the twelfth century. The Master of the Morgan Leaf worked in bold emotional expression and vivid blues and reds.

The process began with a drypoint drawing traced onto the vellum, then line inking, then gilding or silver accents applied by another hand. Finally the paint was added using a painting technique called tempera.

Tempera uses egg yolk instead of binder oils such as walnut or linseed. There is no working time as the paint dries instantly on application, and this constraint of the paint has very much influenced the overall style of not only the Winchester Bible, but illuminated manuscripts in general.

Those monks spent years of their lives on this work. They ground pigments that could poison them. They laid gold leaf over gesso and punched it with patterns for texture, and not one of them expected to be remembered for it. The work and the resulting beautiful bible was the point – not their names, but the Winchester Bible was never finished.

After twenty-five years the work stopped when its likely patron, Henry of Blois, Bishop of Winchester, died in 1171.

Because the artists stopped at different stages on different pages, you can see every step of the process. On some pages there are only rough outlines. On others, inked drawings waiting for colour. On others, gilding laid but not yet painted over. And on the completed illuminations, the full blaze of colour that was the intended destination of all that patient, painstaking, anonymous work.

The Bible is not only a beautiful object but its unfinished pages an invaluable document on the methods and techniques of illuminated manuscript creation. The Winchester Bible is one of the most beautiful examples of Care & Craft in existence, and I still find it extraordinary that the Bible still looks like it was completed only yesterday.

Six artists, one scribe, twenty-five years of work, and not one of them signed their names.

They did not need to. The Winchester Bible is still here. Still in the building it was made for. Still taking the breath away in a quiet corner of the south transept, nine hundred years after the last brush stroke was made.

In the crypt of St Paul’s Cathedral, there is an epitaph to its architect, Sir Christopher Wren. It is written in Latin and reads:

Lector, si monumentum requiris, circumspice.

Reader, if you seek his memorial, look around you.

The monks who worked on the Winchester Bible have no epitaph. But if you ever find yourself in that dim corner of the south transept, leaning over a dimly lit case and looking at brushwork nine centuries old, you will understand why they do not need one.

In the opening minutes of The Prisoner of Azkaban film, Harry is under his bedcovers casting the spell Lumos Maxima. A ball of light magically appears at the tip of his wand, illuminating a copy of Extreme Incantations which he is studying. Uncle Vernon’s footsteps creak on the landing and instantly the wand light goes out, Harry lies down and feigns sleep. Uncle Vernon looks in, sees Harry asleep and leaves. Harry tries again.

In the book, there is no spell. Harry is using an ordinary Muggle torch to study for an essay on the History of Magic. The Lumos Maxima spell was invented by the film’s director Alfonso Cuarón, a cinematic liberty that Harry Potter fans have argued about for years.

But in both book and film, the premise is the same: to carry on doing something you cannot bear to stop, even at the risk of getting into trouble.

And this is what has always stayed with me about that scene. It has nothing to do with underage wizarding law, it has to do with the fact that I have been Harry under the bedsheets and I suspect, if you are reading this, that so have you. And in all likelihood so has every adult who ever loved reading as a child.

On more occasions than I can count, I would be tucked up in bed still reading when one of my parents would come upstairs and tell me to go to sleep as it was getting late. My response was always the same: ‘Let me just finish this page.’ And as soon as they were gone, I would forget entirely and carry on reading.

What felt like hours later, but was probably no more than ten minutes, one of my parents would be back. The light would go out followed by an exasperated ‘Go to sleep!’

Sleep. I didn’t need sleep. Heroes didn’t need sleep. They pressed on through the quest with very little food and no rest whatsoever. I had a princess to rescue, a lost treasure to find, a monster to kill. Sleep was for people who did not have the responsibilities of a hero. I was that hero.

Very quickly I adapted in the way all heroes have to. I learned to dutifully put the book down turn the light out when told. But I could never go to sleep. The quest was waiting.

As soon as the light under my bedroom door went out and the house fell quiet, out would come my torch. Deep under the duvet, breathing the warm stale air of my own little cave, I would open the book and dive back inside the story. The call to return was irresistible. It was not a choice I made, it was the complete conviction that the story needed me, the hero, to continue.

I have thought a lot about why that opening moment in the film - Harry, the covers, the light - has always stayed with me more vividly than the same scene in the book.

In the novel, Harry uses a torch. He is us. He is every child who has ever read past bedtime by torch light.

But in the film, Harry uses a spell. And whether the director intended it or not, the use of magic and light under the bed clothes reframes everything.

The light you read by in a duvet cave is not ordinary light. It is stolen light, conspiratorial light, a small secret act of defiance that transforms a cave into a kingdom.

What is it that makes a child unable to put a particular book down? They are not just reluctant to put the book down, they are unable to. They are willing to risk getting into trouble, willing to sacrifice sleep and to lie there waiting for the house to go quiet so they can reopen the book and be back inside the adventure.

Why is that?

I think the answer is simpler than we might expect and also very important.

A child lost in a book is not passively consuming entertainment. They are doing something active. They are building the world in their imagination, and living in the adventure.

A screen provides the faces, renders the castle, manufactures the weather. None of it requires your imagination to exist. You can look away and look back and it is all still there, exactly as it was, but behind that screen it is somehow less alive than it is in your head. When a book is closed, the world is gone, and it will not come back until you start reading again, recreating the world with your mind.

Watching is observing. Reading is inhabiting.

When that experience disappears from a childhood, when the torch never comes out in the duvet cave, something is lost that no amount of content on a screen can replace.

Late last year I was asked to present to forty eleven-year-old ‘reluctant readers’ at Midhurst Rother College in West Sussex. The school has around 1,200 students, drawn from villages and hamlets across four hundred square miles of countryside in and around the Sussex Downs.

For the session I workshopped ‘What is Story?’ During the hour we spent together, the children became deeply engaged. We talked about how everything is story from films to simply taking the bus to school or going shopping, and how, if they wanted to create their own stories, they had a secret weapon available to them at all times: the notebook.

I am currently writing a middle-grade fantasy novel, and towards the end of the session I read a short passage from it. I asked them what kinds of things they would like to read about in the book. Their engagement was extraordinary. At the end of the hour I was mobbed for autographs, which is a first for me; I’m unpublished and write purely for pleasure. The children were desperate to know more about a book that is not even finished and for me, that was quite something. I was asked on the spot by the teacher to return and present to the entire year group (Year 7 UK, Grade 6 USA) for World Book Day, on the fifth of March 2026.

I did so, this time to present and read to over two hundred and twenty eleven-year-olds and five teachers.

No pressure!

This time my presentation was ‘What is Magic?’

I talked about how what we call magic has changed over the centuries. Six hundred years ago, if you had said that one day people would fly, they would have called it witchcraft, and you might well have been burned for saying it. Today we fly all the time. We do not even look up when a plane passes overhead. What was once unimaginable became engineering, and what was once sorcery became science.

The same story has played out again and again. Lightning captured in glass tubes - a light bulb.. A device in your pocket that lets you speak to someone on the other side of the world - a mobile phone. A surgeon who can stop a heart, repair it, and start it beating again - medicine. Every one of these things would have been called magic by the people who came before us.

So I asked them: is there any magic left? Or has it all become science and there is no such thing as magic anymore?

And then I told them that I believe magic is real, and still very much alive.

Real magic is reading, because reading unlocks the power of imagination.

Following this I read again from the novel I’m working on. This time for twenty minutes and there was some concern from teachers that it would be too long to keep the attention of two hundred eleven year olds.

The reading touched upon loss, danger, ancient mystery, responsibility and of course the type of magic that features in children’s fantasy.

It was extraordinary. Two hundred eleven-year-olds not only sat in silence for the full twenty minutes -they leaned in, and after the reading hands started to go up everywhere to ask questions, but unfortunately I was out of time.

I have thought about that morning many times since. Not because it was a triumph, but because of what it proved. The hunger for reading is there. The willingness to be transported, to be frightened - to believe. Those children were not reluctant or lost to screens and computer games. They were waiting for someone to hand them a story and to trust them with it.

I am not a teacher, I’ve never even tried to get published, but in my own small way, in a forgotten corner of England I am trying to do what I can to keep the magic of reading alive.

The UK National Year of Reading 2026.

Why Adults Queue for Butterbeer.
On imagination, reading and the magic we are in danger of losing.

There is a photograph of Peter Pan’s Playground in Worthing that I found some years ago, a faded colour postcard from the early 1970s. In it, children queue at a turnstile beside a small white castle with four towers, one at each corner. Pedal cars circle a track in the foreground. A helter-skelter rises behind. It is a perfectly ordinary seaside playground of its era, and to anyone else that is all it is: a postcard, a curiosity, a glimpse of a Britain that no longer exists.

But to me, it is a door back in time.

I must have been six or seven years old. My parents were early risers, the kind who arrived at destinations long before anything has opened, or in fact before the rest of the world has even had breakfast. We had driven down to the Sussex coast from London in the half-dark, and I had slept most of the way curled under a blanket in the back seat, waking with a start as we pulled into a large and empty car park. It was a cool, clear June morning, still early enough that the light still had a thin, sliver quality that spoke of the hot summer day to come.

And there, across the empty tarmac, was a castle. The castle. My castle.

That was what caught my eye. In a moment I was out of the car and running over to it, but the playground was still closed and wouldn’t open for another hour or two. There was no gate, just a ticket booth and a simple turnstile, hardly a barrier at all. A small child could easily have slipped beneath it, and that is exactly what I did.

Inside, the play ground was covered in thick white sand, and the first thing I did, as I always did, was kick off my sandals. I can still remember the cool, slightly damp sand between my toes. The castle was only made of wood and painted plaster, and the towers smelled faintly of pee from one too many child accidents, but I didn’t mind. I didn’t see wood and plaster; I saw something far grander, bigger, older. I had no interest in the rest of the playground; it fell away, replaced by a kingdom of my own. I was a knight, a wizard, and a king all at once, defending my stronghold from imaginary dragons, rescuing damsels imprisoned in towers, or casting spells and mixing potions. The faint scent of paint and timber became, in my mind, the warm, sun-baked smell of ancient stone - the smell of wee, the stinky potion in a cauldron, and for me it was all completely real.

Across the car park, I could see my parents beginning to move about, my mother making breakfast on the car bonnet - cornflakes and tea in a plastic thermos cup, that was too hot and always tasted of plastic. My father looking towards the castle, My castle.

I didn’t wave. I hid.

I had an overwhelming desire to stay hidden, not out of mischief but out of something more instinctive. I knew, with a certainty I couldn’t have articulated, that the moment they saw me the spell would break. That a kingdom requires, above all things, that no sensible adult is watching. Eventually my father’s eyes found me, and I dutifully returned to the car and to breakfast.

I went back to that castle every time we spent a day in Worthing. But it was never quite the same as that first illicit morning, alone in the early light, when the castle belonged to me and I was king.

What was the infant me, over fifty-five years ago now, actually experiencing in that castle? Was I just using my imagination? Just playing make-believe?

I want to stop at those words, because I think they matter more than we realise.

Take imagination first. We celebrate it - up to a point. It is on the curriculum, art, drama, creative writing, the school play. World Book Day. The children’s publishing industry, worth billions, is entirely predicated on imagination being valued. Nobody, in 2026, would openly argue that children shouldn’t have one.

But there is a particular kind of imagination that gets no timetable slot and earns no marks. The unstructured, solitary kind. The child alone in a castle at dawn, defending a kingdom that exists only in their head. An afternoon lost entirely in a world of their own making, doing nothing that could be measured or assessed or put in a report. That kind of imagination, the kind that requires only a cardboard box and permission, is the one that gets quietly squeezed out as the demands of measurable achievement accumulate. Imagination is all to often only celebrated in sanctioned forms and subordinated everywhere else.

Make-believe is worse. It is a compound word that contains its own diminishment - the make suggesting fabrication, the believe immediately qualified by the make that precedes it. We have built the scepticism into the language itself.

But the most damaging word of all, in this context, is just.

Just pretend. Just make-believe. Just playing. Just imagination.

That single word does enormous damage - and importantly, not to the child, but to the adult who says it. In using it, the adult simultaneously acknowledges and diminishes whatever the child is doing, as though their inner world is of lesser importance than whatever the practical world requires of them next. More damagingly still, in saying just, the adult is projecting their own disenchantment onto the child, assuming that growing up means growing out of imagination, because that, somewhere along the way, it is what happened to them.

What was happening in that castle was not a lesser version of engaging with reality. I was not just playing make- belive. For my six year old self, it was reality - processed through the most powerful and precious instrument a child possesses: an imagination running at full capacity, entirely unencumbered and doing precisely what it is meant to do.

The castle was wood and plaster, and it was ancient stone. Both of these things were simultaneously true. A child holds this contradiction without effort, without embarrassment, without any need to resolve it. The ordinary world doesn’t disappear, it gets promoted. Transformed into the substrate of something larger. The deckchairs didn’t cease to be deckchairs. They became guards who happened to look exactly like deckchairs.

This is not a failure to perceive reality accurately. It is a sophisticated act of creative perception, and it is one that not only more and more adults have lost, but that younger and younger children are steadily losing too.

But then if something is lost, it can also be found again.

Consider The Wizarding World in the Universal theme parks.

The Wizarding World lands have drawn around ten million visitors a year since opening in 2010, consistently the most visited areas in any of their parks. Interactive wands, priced at up to eighty-five dollars each, are among the highest-selling merchandise items in theme park history. The precise number sold over fifteen years is not publicly known, but even a conservative estimate - twenty per cent of visitors, across fifteen years - puts the figure somewhere between ten and fifteen million wands, and the revenue somewhere between half a billion and a billion dollars from wands alone, before a single ticket, butterbeer, or broomstick is counted.

How did a corporate giant sell a billion dollars’ worth of plastic sticks?

I suspect the demand was never primarily driven by children. It was driven by adults who read those books at ten, twelve or fifteen, and discovered twenty years later that the hunger was still there. Still intact. Still looking for somewhere to go. The wands are not toys. They are a pass key - permission that allows the adult to revisit the child they once were, and to experience, briefly and at considerable expense, the magic they remember.

Disney understood this long before anyone else. The genius of their parks - the genuine genius, beyond the logistics and the economics - is that they are built to the precise specifications of adult longing. They are not designed for the children who are present. They are designed for the children those adults once were. Every detail calibrated to the moment when a story first became real. The castle at the end of Main Street is not a children’s attraction. It is an act of collective memory, and the adults weeping quietly as they walk toward it are not being sentimental, they are remembering something true and what they perceive, (probably subconsciously), as their own childhood selves.

The hunger for imagination doesn’t leave us. It simply gets lost, buried under the weight of ordinary life, waiting for permission to re-emerge.

Both Disney and Universal are extraordinarily clever at finding that buried longing, reawakening it, and charging admission to reach it. I don’t say this with cynicism, the experiences and joy is genuine, and I understand completely the adult queuing for butterbeer with an expression of barely suppressed joy. I am that adult. But there is something worth naming in the distance between what we needed then and what we are told we need now.

I was fortunate enough, at six years old, to have my own castle, at least for an hour, of wood, plaster, (and pee). At home, cardboard boxes and dining room tables and blankets thrown over chairs did the same job. The imagination was the thing, the props almost nothing.

Fast forward to today, and we are told the only way back is through licensed intellectual property, a twenty-minute queue, and an officially sanctioned butterbeer. Corporate appetite has monetised the longing, and — more worrying - convinced far too many people that their imagination can now only be accessed at the turnstile.

It was never true.

It still isn’t true, as somewhere right now, a child is proving it with a cardboard box and a blanket.

So what happened between that child in the castle and the adult in the queue?

The world got louder. Responsibility accumulated. The hundred practical things that constitute adult life crowded out the frequencies on which imagination thrives. We lost the habit of tuning in, but lost, not destroyed. That is the crucial and more importantly, hopeful distinction.

There is also, I think, a particular British cultural discomfort around being caught believing that makes this worse for us brits than for those in the USA. In the UK, the adult imagination is only tolerated in certain licensed contexts, fiction, film, games, the safely bounded space of a theme park. These are the approved channels, the places where believing is permitted.

We learn, somewhere between childhood and adulthood, that the deckchairs are just deckchairs. That seeing them as guards is charming in a six-year-old and alarming in a thirty-year-old. We become, in the truest sense of the word, disenchanted, not in a single dramatic moment but in a long, quiet erosion, the imaginative frequency still present, but now lost.

And yet I firmly believe there is a way back. There always has been. It runs, as it always has, through books.

Books remain enormously popular. They are delivered differently now, more often via screen, or as spoken word through earphones on a commute - and the industry has adapted accordingly. But the deeper habit of reading for pleasure, the private act of surrendering to a story for its own sake, is in trouble. Most alarmingly, it is in trouble among the young.

Here in the UK, The National Literacy Trust surveys over one hundred thousand children and young people every year. Their 2025 findings make for uncomfortable reading. Just one in three children aged eight to eighteen said they enjoyed reading in their free time, the lowest level recorded in twenty years. Fewer than one in five said they read anything daily, a figure that has fallen by nearly twenty percentage points since 2005. The steepest declines are among those aged eleven to sixteen - the precise ages at which a child’s relationship with reading tends to be formed for life.

A thirty-six per cent decrease in reading enjoyment since 2005 is a terrifying collapse.

Sit with that for a moment before moving on.

A child who does not read is a child whose imagination is being starved and replaced with unfulfilled longing, and who, in twenty years time, queue for the theme park because no one ever offered the cheaper, richer, more portable alternative, and who will need the billion-dollar infrastructure because the cardboard box was never offered.

The imagination doesn’t require a wand at eighty-five dollars. It requires a story, told well, given freely, at the right moment.

The reasons for collapse in reading numbers are not mysterious, and they are not the fault of children. Children, (as well has adults), have always chosen the path of least resistance when left to their own devices, this is not a moral failing, it simply evolution. The question is what we, as adults, have placed in their path.

And what we have put in their path, with increasing sophistication, is a screen.

I want to be careful here, because the screen debate has become so laden with guilt and counter-guilt that it is almost impossible to say anything useful. Screens are not the enemy. A child watching a beautifully made film, or playing a game that demands problem-solving, or listening to an audiobook in the car, is not the problem

The problem with screens, specifically in the context of reading and imagination, is not that they are harmful. It is that they are frictionless.

A book requires something of you before it gives anything back. You have to decode the words, construct the world, populate it with faces and voices that the author has only sketched. The effort is the point. That slight resistance, the gap between the words on the page and the world in your head - is precisely where the imagination does its work and becomes stronger. It is where the castle gets built.

A screen removes that gap. It hands you the faces, the voices, the world, pre-constructed and fully rendered. There is nothing wrong with receiving a story this way. But it is a different transaction. The imagination is a passenger rather than the engine, and like any faculty that goes unused, it quietly loses its tone.

The compound effect of a childhood spent almost entirely in the passenger seat is what the National Literacy Trust data is measuring. The child who reads, who has always read, who was given books early and often and enthusiastically - arrives at adolescence with an imagination that has been exercised daily, strong, supple, and capable of building kingdoms from almost nothing. The child who has not read arrives at the same point with the same innate capacity, but untrained, unexercised, less confident in its own existence.

And here is the cruelest part: the longer the gap, the harder the return. A child who has not learned to find pleasure in the friction of reading by the age of eleven or twelve is unlikely to discover it alone. The steepest declines in reading enjoyment, as the Trust’s data shows, fall precisely at the ages when phones become ubiquitous and social media becomes consuming, when the comparative effort of reading a book becomes, without support, simply too much to ask.

We have not made screens too appealing. We have made books for children far less appealing and in turn, too easy to put down.

The solution is not to remove the screens. It is to make the books impossible to resist, which means putting well written and imaginative books in the hands of adults who still believe in them. Adults who remember what it felt like when a story became somewhere you actually lived. Adults who have not entirely forgotten the cardboard castle.

There is something particular that happens when an adult who still has access to their own interior world of imagination sits down with a child and a book.

I don’t mean reading aloud, necessarily, though that is its own kind of gift. I mean credibility and conviction that an adult with their own rich and active imagination brings to a story. Children are extraordinarily sensitive where adults are concerned. They can detect, with an accuracy that should unsettle us, the difference between an adult who is performing enthusiasm and an adult who genuinely feels it. The performed version is kind, well-intentioned, and goes almost entirely unnoticed. The real version lands, it is infectious and stirs the child’s own imagination into action.

When an adult has not entirely forgotten what it felt like to be a child reading, that enthusiasm shines though, the child feels that the adult in the room is not merely facilitating access to a book. They are a fellow traveller. Someone who has been to these places and knows they are real.

This is not a skill you can acquire by reading about it, you have to recover what is lost in yourself by occasionally, slipping under the turnstile yourself and and playing in the wooden castle.

A child handed a book by an adult who is merely being dutiful will put it down the moment something easier appears. A child handed a book by an adult who genuinely believes, who leans in and says this one, with quiet certainty, will open it. And once a child is truly lost in a story, lost in the way that makes the words disappear and allows the world to inhabit their imagination, has something alight inside them that does not easily go out.

In the United Kingdom, 2026 has been named as the National Year of Reading.

It would be easy to let this pass as a governmental initiative, a well-intentioned campaign, a thing that teachers put on classroom walls. It is all of those things, but is also something quieter and more significant: an official acknowledgement, arriving in the careful language of policy, that something real is at stake. That the habit of reading, begun early and sustained through childhood, matters enough to be named publicly, to commit to, and to ask the whole country to think about.

What the initiative understands, and what is difficult to say in the language of policy but which Care & Craft exists precisely to say plainly, is this: a child who reads is a child whose imagination been released. Who will not, in later life, need a billion-dollar theme park to feel wonder, because wonder was given life and room to grow early, at low cost, through the simple and revolutionary act of a story well told.

The castle in Worthing is gone now. Peter Pan’s Playground closed long ago and the site is a now a swimming pool complex. The white towers with their four corners and their faint smell of paint, pee and adventure exist only in a postcard and in the memory of a sixty-something year old man who once slipped under a turnstile in the early morning and discovered that he was king, knight and wizard.

But that magic was never entirely lost.

For me, a happy and fulfilled life, came from the magic of my imagination and that was never lost to begin with, due to parents who loved books and who loved to read.

But that very first spark, that very first moment of permission to have and to treasure my imagination began in a tatty wooden castle that smelled of wee.

But I won’t.

Not because I don’t think the world is too dominated by digital. I firmly believe it is. My argument is that AI is not the enemy. Human greed is the enemy, it always has been.

And many people are already pushing back. I believe we are heading towards a quiet revolution and a resurgence of human-made art and craft, because historically, we have been here before. It all began with one of the biggest greenhouses ever built: the Crystal Palace.

In 1851, six million people walked through the doors of the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park, London. Six million people in a country of twenty-one million. Nearly a third of the population came to stare at what the Industrial Revolution had made possible. Steam engines. Power looms. Hydraulic presses. Mechanical reapers. Over a hundred thousand exhibits from forty-four countries filled a glass and iron cathedral that stretched the length of six football pitches. There were French silks and Sèvres porcelain. Indian textiles displayed on a stuffed elephant. Pianos, telescopes, firearms, furniture. A fountain made from four tons of pink glass. The Koh-i-Noor diamond. An early fax machine. Even the world’s first public flush toilets, which cost a penny to use, and gave us a phrase that can still be heard today. The Great Exhibition was industry’s coronation - and it was magnificent.

It was also, for a great many people, terrifying.

Because alongside the art and culture, there were the machines that had emptied cottage workshops, and put people out of work, and leading to widespread poverty. The handloom weavers suffered most. They had once produced cloth at their own pace, in their own homes, but they were being rapidly replaced by machinery that could do the same work faster, cheaper, and without complaint. The potter, the woodcarver, the glassblower and many other craftsman, all felt the ground shifting beneath their feet, and they too eyed the future of their livelihoods with fear.

Within a generation, the response came. Primarily from William Morris. He was not only a craftsman but a social revolutionary who sought to replace industrial capitalism with a society based on equal opportunity and artistic craftsmanship. Along with artists such as Walter Crane and Edward Burne-Jones, he founded the Arts and Crafts movement and declared that industry itself was not the problem. He famously clarified his position by saying:

“It is not this or that tangible steel and brass machine which we want to get rid of, but the great intangible machine of commercial tyranny, which oppresses the lives of all of us.”

Commercial tyranny. I would argue that the basis of his objection can be summarised in a single word: greed.

Morris did not hate industry. He objected to machines being used to dictate to human beings, turning workers into machine minders. He viewed machines as valid tools to assist workers and eliminate what he called ‘donkey work,’ the tedious manual labour that consumed lives without enriching them.

The Arts & Crafts movement grew out of a simple conviction: that the Industrial Revolution, for all it had given us, was taking something essential away. The factories were producing more than ever before, faster and cheaper than anyone had thought possible. But the things they produced had no soul in them. No fingerprint. No evidence that a human being had sat down and cared about what they were making. Morris and his contemporaries looked at what was pouring out of the mills and the foundries and said: this is not enough. We can make things that are beautiful, and the making of them with our own hands and imaginations matters as much as the result of that effort.

I believe William Morris’s view towards AI today would be exactly the same as it was towards industry in his time. Machines exploited by the greedy to increase profit, not to make life easier for the people doing the work.

In an ideal society, machines would be used to reduce labour and increase leisure time. Time to think, to read, to make something beautiful with your own hands.

And in the end, that same Industrial Revolution that destroyed the livelihood of the handloom weaver has also given us an extraordinary number of benefits. Clean water. Abundant energy. Modern medicine. And in my view, one of the most liberating machines ever invented: the washing machine. It returned hours to the lives of millions of women who, until its invention, had spent entire days bent over washtubs.

Industry, at its best, has always done that. It can take away the drudgery and free human hands and imaginations.

And so here we are again. A new machine has arrived, artificial intelligence, and it is extraordinarily powerful. And once again, people are understandably afraid. And once again, greed has seized the tool before most of us have had time to think.

You can see it everywhere you look. Websites filled with soulless text that reads like a Wiki entry.

Children’s books with illustrations that have the eerie, waxy perfection of a mannequin’s smile. Articles that say nothing in a thousand words, all of them competent, none of them alive. Content - and there’s a word that should make us uneasy - generated not because someone had something to say, but because a space needed filling and a machine could fill it faster and cheaper than a person.

I have come to think of AI generated content as the great ‘almost’ flood.

Almost writing. Almost art. Almost human. Close enough to pass a glance, but dead the moment you hold it up to the light.

The fault is not with AI, it is with the person who commissioned it. They didn’t want something good. They wanted something quick. They didn’t want craft. They wanted content. They didn’t want to put in the effort, they wanted to go straight to the product and profit. And so we come back to it yet again.

Greed, human greed.

That is not a technology created problem. It is not the fault of AI. AI is just a tool, like any other. It is a person created problem - human greed and laziness.

But something positive is happening too.

Many of us are pushing back against the ‘almost.’ There is a growing movement that is steadily gaining momentum, as people look beyond the AI fakery, determined to find something real. You can see it in the rise of craft markets and maker spaces. In the parents who are getting children to put down their tablets and pick up their paintbrushes. In the queues outside independent bookshops. In the young people who are choosing vinyl records, film cameras, handwritten letters, and notebooks over their digital equivalents. Not because they are Luddites, but because they are hungry for something that has texture and weight and the unmistakable mark of being made by human imagination and hands.

And crucial to this desire to once again own real media such as vinyl and DVD, is that people are pushing back against corporate greed. People want to own what they purchase. You own the vinyl, you own the Blu-ray. You don’t own streaming services, the provider does. You simply rent it, and you are also held hostage to their terms and conditions. And so I make no apology for coming back to it yet again.

Greed, human driven corporate greed.

And with no apology for repeating myself and coming back to my argument. The enemy is not AI.

Why is AI not the enemy?

Because quietly, away from the greed, slop and the outrage, that same AI powers some incredible technology that is of real benefit.

AI is helping researchers untangle protein structures that hold the keys to diseases we have fought for generations.

AI is helping doctors identify cancers that human eyes would miss, and is reading medical scans with a precision that saves lives.

AI is translating languages in real time, connecting people who could never have spoken to one another.

AI is doing what industry does at its best — taking the drudgery, the impossible volume, the tasks too vast for human hands alone, and freeing us to do what only we can do - create beautiful things.

The tool is not the problem, the problem is ourselves and our human nature.

We choose to generate rather than create. We choose to consume rather than make. We choose to let our children scroll rather than draw, watch rather than read, absorb rather than imagine. That is not the machine’s fault. The machine didn’t make that choice. We did.

The world is becoming more greedy and more lazy. That is the inevitable consequence of human nature. All we can do, those of us that passionately believe in Care & Craft, is push back against it and continue to strive in our chosen analogue pursuits. It’s time to stop blaming AI and take responsibility for our own actions.

Care & Craft – Why we all need something real in a world dominated by digital.