In my very first Substack essay, Stained Glass and tears, which you can read here, I wrote about how my love for all things King Arthur began, as it did with so many English boyhoods, in front of the television. The film was Disney’s The Sword in the Stone, I was about seven, and it ignited something in me that has never gone out.

Around the same time – it would have been 1970 – my best friend was taken on holiday to California, to Disneyland, and I was sick with envy. I had watched Disney Time countless times on the tv and I wanted to live in that wonderful Sleeping Beauty castle. To me it was the most magical building in the world, and between the Sword in the Stone film and the castle in California, the seeds of a lifelong love were quietly sown.

The Sleeping Beauty Castle, that Walt Disney built drew much of its inspiration from Neuschwanstein castle in Bavaria. Neuschwanstein was itself a dream made solid, begun in 1869 by King Ludwig II, the Fairy-Tale King. He was a Romantic in the truest sense of the word: a man who cared far more for myth and music than for governing, a man who shut the real world out almost entirely, and kept his deepest devotion for the composer Richard Wagner. His castle was not designed by an architect, but by Christian Jank, a painter and set designer, primarily for Wagner’s operas – which makes Neuschwanstein, quite literally, an opera set built in stone, and nearly every room in the place is given over to legend.

The throne room was conceived as the hall of the Holy Grail; the great singers’ hall was painted with the story of Parsifal, the Grail king. His son Lohengrin, is the Swan Knight, from whom the lonely King Ludwig took his own emblem. He died in 1886 in mysterious circumstances and with Neuschwanstein unfinished. King Ludwig was a recluse who had built a medieval myth into the Bavarian hillside and for an audience of just one – himself. And my whole childhood enchantment was an echo of his fantasy castle.

King Ludwig II and Neuschwanstein castle was the loneliest and strangest expression of a longing that was moving not only through one man, but through the whole of the nineteenth century: the wish to turn away from the smoke and iron of the modern industrial age and back towards a medieval dream of knights and quests.

But where the Bavarian king shut himself away and built for no one but himself, in Britain the same longing turned outward. Here it was not one recluse and his private stage set, but a whole company of poets and painters who, in the space of fifty years, took a legend that had been nearly forgotten and created a body of work, that went from art and architecture to poetry and story. That legend was of course, King Arthur, and this essay is the story of how the Victorians brought him to life.

Where does an obsession that grabs the imagination of so many people come from? Not with any single book, time or event, but with a hunger.

For half a century before Queen Victoria came to the throne, the English imagination had already been turning quietly back towards the Middle Ages: in the old ballads the antiquarians were rescuing, in the Gothic tales that thrilled the drawing rooms, in Sir Walter Scott’s romances of chivalry. It was, at heart, a reaching for enchantment in an age that was beginning to feel disenchanted – a turning-away from industry, reason and machinery and towards something older and less corrupted – but not the harsh reality of the middle ages – the romantic ideal of it, primarily from Sir Thomas Malory’s epic romance Le Morte d’Arthur.

Le Morte d’Arthur was printed by Caxton in 1485, and by the beginning of the nineteenth century, it had nearly been forgotten. Yet it was ‘the’ great treasure-house of the whole Arthurian legend – the book that first drew the scattered medieval tales of Arthur and his knights into a single English prose epic, from the drawing of the sword and the founding of the Round Table to the last battle that brings Camelot down. However, between 1634 and 1816, not a single new edition appeared. Then, in 1816, two rival editions were published and a third the year after by the poet Robert Southey. In my view, those three books ignited a creative fire that would burn fiercely across the 19th century, and right up to World War II. Arguably, the fire burned first and most fiercely in a young Alfred Tennyson, who first met King Arthur in one of those reprinted editions.

And Tennyson, that fire became a blaze. Scott had given the Victorians their love of the Middle Ages, but it was Tennyson who gave them their love for Arthurian myth. In 1842, Tennyson took the closing pages of Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur – the mortally wounded Arthur borne from the field, Sir Bedivere hurling Excalibur back into the lake and finally the three Queens and the barge taking the dead Arthur to Avalon – and reworked that medieval prose into a short poem of his own, borrowing Malory’s title, and trimming it to ‘Morte d’Arthur’. It was a first proof that Tennyson could take an old tale, and tell it again in a new voice.

Then, from 1859, came Tennyson’s greatest work – the Idylls of the King, the long cycle of poems that turned King Arthur into a myth that defined the age. The Idylls were a sensation, and after their publication, Arthurian myth was everywhere. All the creators downstream from Tennyson, drew from him before they drew from Malory. When a painter wanted a scene, a weaver a subject, a photographer a face, they went to Tennyson’s Idylls first.

In my view, the Victorian obsession with King Arthur and the romance of chivalry took hold for the reason the deepest enthusiasms often take hold: the Victorians saw themselves in the tales, or rather, they saw the men they longed to be – dutiful, honourable, chivalrous, devout, and at the very moment the industrial world seemed to be losing all those values. The King Arthur legend was not only a story they loved, it was a crystallization of the chivalric ideal that they aimed for.

But before the Victorian love for King Arthur really took off, it had already been carried into the very heart of British Government – and by a man not many remember.

In 1847, whilst Arthur was still obscure and unfashionable, the Scottish painter William Dyce was asked to decorate the Queen’s Robing Room in the newly built Palace of Westminster. Of all the subjects available to him, he chose Arthur. It was a strange, brave choice, a full decade before the fashion for King Arthur caught up, and it gave Dyce nothing but trouble. He set out to embody the seven chivalric virtues, each drawn from a scene in the legend – and found, to his evident discomfort, that the story he had pivotal turns on a queen’s adultery and the fall of a kingdom. He wrestled with it for years, and completed only five: Mercy, Hospitality, Generosity, Religion and Courtesy. Dyce died in 1864 with the work still unfinished; the last two he had planned, Courage and Fidelity, were never painted at all.

There is something moving in that. In the room where the monarch robes before opening Parliament, a new King Arthur legend was created by a man who did not quite live to finish it, but none the less, the Arthurian legend was being quietly written into the fabric of British government whilst the rest of the nation had hardly noticed.

Meanwhile, a new generation was being bitten by the same bug. In 1855, an Oxford undergraduate named Edward Burne-Jones found a copy of Southey’s Malory in a bookshop – he could not afford it, so his friend William Morris bought it instead, and the two of them read it aloud to each other until they had virtually learned it by heart. Their love of King Arthur soon demanded they find their own creative outlet, which they did in 1857.

That summer, a loose band of seven young men descended on the Oxford Union and set about painting its new debating hall with scenes from Malory. Rossetti led them; Morris and Burne-Jones were among them, and so was Val Prinsep. They were high-spirited and largely untrained, and they made a glorious hash of the technique – painting straight onto barely prepared plaster, so that the colours began to fade almost before the scaffolding came down. You can still see the murals today, but only faintly. It was here, during the work, that a young woman named Jane Burden was noticed in an Oxford theatre and asked to model. She became the face of Queen Guinevere, and then she became William Morris’s wife.

The same year, Edward Moxon, a poet and pblisher, brought out a lavishly illustrated edition of Tennyson’s Poems, illustrated by Rossetti and Millais, as well as many others. Among the edition’s finest plates are Hunt’s Lady of Shalott and Rossetti’s Sir Galahad, Of note is that Edwared Burne-Jones did not contribute work, yet he would go on to spend the rest of his life inside Camelot and painting Arthurian myth.

Among that Oxford company, a little older than the rest, was George Frederic Watts – and his contribution has a quiet significance.

In 1862 Watts painted Sir Galahad: a young knight standing bareheaded beside a white horse, caught in the hush of his vision of the Grail. He modelled the knight’s features on a boy named Arthur Prinsep, a member of the household at Little Holland House where Watts lived, as artist in residence for nearly thirty years. And here is the part that matters. Watts later gave a version of the painting to Eton College, to hang in the ante-chapel, and he gave it so that boy after boy, year after year, might stand before the knight and be inspired.

A picture handed to children, so that children might be formed by seeing it. Hold that thought as we will come back to it.

A few miles across the water, on the Isle of Wight, another creator was giving King Arthur life via photography.

Julia Margaret Cameron came to photography late and sideways. She was forty-eight when her daughter gave her a camera in 1863, and she taught herself in a coal-shed turned darkroom, ruining plate after plate in pursuit of a vision most of her contemporaries thought was simply bad technique. She lived at Freshwater, with Tennyson for a neighbour, and in 1874 he asked her to make photographs for a popular edition of the Idylls. Her reply tells you everything about her: it would be, she said, immortality to be bound up with him. She threw herself at it, making some two hundred and forty-five exposures to arrive at the handful she wanted, dressing her housemaids and neighbours as Elaine, Guinevere and Lancelot until the Arthur legend was standing alive in her garden.

However, in the actual Tennyson edition, only three of her images were used – and those shrunk down and translated into woodcuts, diminished into exactly the mechanical thing everyone assumed a photograph was. So Margaret Cameron did something extraordinary. At her own expense and risk, she published two great volumes of her photographic prints set beside Tennyson’s verse and copied out in her own hand, determined to prove that photography could stand as high art beside any painter’s. The soft focus, the smudges, the long trembling exposures – these were never failures of craft. They were a woman reaching after the ideal and refusing to sacrifice the poetry of it for mere sharpness. Margaret Camera brought King Arthur to life with photography.

But it did not stop with poetry, painting and photography, the legend carried over into architecture.

Enter architect and designer William Burges. In 1865 he met the third Marquess of Bute – reputedly the richest man in Britain, and as helpless a medievalist and romantic as Burges himself. Together they conjured whole worlds out of stone. Cardiff Castle and Castell Coch, along with Burges’s own Tower House on Melbury Road, in among the artists’ houses of Holland Park where the homes of Lord Leighton, Watts and countless others lived. Burges’s biographer called the great rooms passports to fairy kingdoms, and that is exactly right. These were not just paintings of Camelot; they were the romantic medieval dream-world made real. Burges gave the 19th century somewhere for the romance of Arthur to inhabit, and nearly a hundred years before Disney did.

And Morris’s own workshops wove the legend into cloth. In the 1890s, for a dining room at Stanmore Hall, Morris and Company made six great tapestries telling the Quest of the Holy Grail – Burne-Jones designing the figures, Morris the heraldry, the whole thing culminating in Galahad’s attainment of the Grail amid a company of angels. It is amongst the last and greatest of things either man made.

The knights and romance went into glass, too. Burne-Jones set them into stained-glass windows made in the Morris workshops.

And then, in 1892 a publisher named Dent gave a young, consumptive, insurance-clerk a commission to illustrate Malory. His name was Aubrey Beardsley, and he began, by dutifully imitating Burne-Jones – so closely that Morris accused him of theft. But Beardsley quickly broke into something entirely his own: sinuous, black-and-white, faintly wicked, medievalism seen through a strange new decadent glass. And Dent’s edition, unlike Morris’s beloved hand-made books, was printed cheaply and sold to the many. In forty short years the golden Avalon of the Pre-Raphaelites had become stranger than it ever had been before.

So there he stood, at the century’s close: a mythical king who had begun the century half-forgotten, and who was now, thanks to fifty years of craftsmanship, more vividly visible than at any time since Malory wrote Le Morte d’Arthur. Arthur was alive in verse and fresco and photograph, in real castles and tapestry and glass.

And here is the curious thing the age then said about him. By the 1890s, the fashionable verdict was that the whole Arthurian business had become too quaint – a cliché and a subject, people said, more fit for a child than for a grown man. The world, as ever, was too sure of itself and it was already turning toward the hard clean lines of the century to come, and it no longer wanted knights and legends.

But British painters, writers and artisans had already given England some of their most beautiful work, and the Arthurian genie could not be put back in the bottle. King Arthur had a face now – a hundred faces – and those faces simply went into the nursery. Into the schoolroom and onto the chapel wall.

Remember Watts’s Sir Galahad, given to a school so that children might be formed by looking at him. That was not a stray act of sentiment. It was the whole instinct of the age, distilled: the conviction that a child set before a truly beautiful thing, and taught to look at it properly, is being given something that will hold them for life.

It is exactly the conviction that Charlotte Mason built into her method of picture study – a child placed, unhurried, before a single great picture, and taught to see. She did not invent that idea out of nothing. She was the direct inheritor of a century of writers and craftsmen who had already decided that beauty was a birthright, and who had spent fifty years bringing to life a British myth worthy of a child’s attention.

I turned to the right and went down the wooden stairs and emerged at one end of a low, narrow, dark and slimy passage. Ahead, and perhaps thirty feet away, was a quite literal light at the end of the tunnel.

The passage was no place to linger in, so I quickly walked to the end and out into the street.

I had been looking down into Knockturn Alley from the room above for twenty minutes, and I thought I knew what I was coming down into, but I was wrong. Looking down on a street is like reading about a country you have never visited. You get the shape of it, the general impression, but you miss everything that matters, the smell, for one. From the upstairs window, Knockturn Alley had looked dirty. From street level, it smelled worse than it looked, and it had looked terrible. There was the mud, which was not entirely mud. There was smoke, thick and sharp, not wood smoke or coal smoke but something that caught in the back of the throat and tasted of metal. River mud, horse dung, but also, of all things, fried onions, and a waft of that distinctive, sickly perfume smell of joss sticks that was trying and failing to mask the smell of a nearby sewer.

The buildings, from down here, looked even more tumbled down than they had appeared from above. They didn’t just lean toward each other, they loomed. The upper storeys jutted out so far over the street that the sky was almost gone, reduced to a thin, crooked line of grey. The timber frames of the buildings were black and swollen with damp, and between the beams the plaster had crumbled away in places to show the wattle underneath, dark and rotten, and nothing was straight. Every line was off, every angle wrong, as though the whole street had been built by someone who had heard what a building looked like, but had never seen one before.

Suddenly, and from behind me, I heard a loud, slow creaking sound, like a massive door being forced closed on reluctant hinges. But there was something else underneath it, a grinding, scraping of stone against stone – of weight shifting, and settling. At that moment, I knew I had made a dreadful mistake, and spun around, but it was too late.

The two buildings on either side of the passageway were moving quickly together. The passage went from being a few feet wide to a few inches in seconds, and then the passage was gone, as though it had never existed in the first place.

‘Oh no.’ I said it out loud, and to nobody. Trapped. Now what. I glanced about me.

The wall where the passage had been was, to look at, a wall like any other on the street. Black timber, blistered and dirty plaster with patches of bare brick showing through. I put my hand flat against it. It was warm. Not sun-warm, there was no sun to speak of, but warm in the way a kettle is ten minutes after it has boiled, and beneath my palm, very faintly, the wall ticked. It was stone, settling and sounded exactly like a car engine cooling on a driveway.

Idiotically, I knocked, not expecting anything to happen, and of course, nothing did. After five minutes of staring at the blank wall I finally concluded that there was no way back, at least not through the way I had come in. I just had to find another way out, and that meant looking for one. I stood a while longer with my hand on the warm plaster and then I turned my collar up and took stock – not that it took long. My phone, fully charged with no signal, not even one bar, as though the phone had already decided not to bother looking My wallet, containing two bank cards, and forty pounds in notes that were promissory and from a bank that, as far as this street was concerned, did not exist. And the keys to a house that was either sixty miles away or two hundred years in the future, I had no idea which.

I was, by any measure that mattered, destitute.

From the earlier window, the crowd had looked uniformly furtive, a street of turned-up collars and downcast eyes, and I had put it down to the weather, or the neighbourhood. From within it, it was quite different. Some people were indeed keeping themselves to themselves, moving quickly with their heads down and their business written in their stride and the set of their shoulders. Others were standing in doorways or on street corners. Some in twos and threes, and all of them watchful for the right opportunity – or the wrong one. Their eyes moved constantly, most of them furtively. They looked at everything and everyone, and when they looked at me they kept looking for an uncomfortably long time.

I assumed it was my clothes that were catching their eyes. I could not have been more conspicuously dressed. Everyone around me looked as though they had walked out of a Dickens novel, and one of the notorious London rookeries. Knockturn Alley was Bill Sikes territory, Fagin’s attic den emptied into the street. Except, of course, they hadn’t walked out of anything, I was the one who had walked in. And in my modern coat and clean jeans and trainers and all too clean face, I stuck out like a sore thumb. Two men leaning against a wall, broke off mid whispered conversation as I passed, as one nudged the other and nodded in my direction. I kept walking – quickly. But I had no idea where I was going.

Twenty yards later, I noticed out of the corner of my eye, that a large burly shadow had detached itself from a doorway and was following me. Not close, not hurrying, just there, at the distance a man keeps when he wants to see follow and hope you are unaware of it.

I stopped at a dark window and checked my reflection, on the reasonable theory that I had something on my face. The old glass gave me back a rippled, drowned version of myself, but it was recognisably me. And behind me, and also stopped was the burly shadow. When I glanced back, the man tipped his chin up briefly in acknowledgement, the way a bouncer does when he has decided you are his problem for the evening.

I started walking again and I tried very hard not to show that I was steadily increasing my pace, walking faster and faster. Left, then right. I glanced back. He was still there. Left, left again. Closer still. His own pace matching my own.

I tried not to break into a run, because running, would indicate fear, and I felt certain the man would smell it and catch up fast. Then, quite without warning, the street widened into a kind of court, and on my right there was a shop. I went straight in, the door opening with a cheerful ding that felt wildly inappropriate given the shop’s rather insalubrious location. I closed it firmly behind me, and then darted straight into one of the bay windows to look back at the way I had come.

The court was empty. No broad shadow, no bouncer’s chin, in fact, nobody at all. The man had gone, or stopped, or had never intended to follow me inside in the first place, which raised the question of what he had intended.

Then I jumped.

Right next to me in the window, only a few feet from my head, were two snakes coiled around a tall wooden staff, intertwined so tightly that at first I took them for one. They were enormous, thick-bodied, their scales a dull olive-green with darker bands running the length of them. They were, however, quite motionless, and after a couple of seconds I assumed them to be taxidermy specimens.

There was something about them, though. Something familiar that I could not place at first, the nagging half-recognition of a thing seen a thousand times in a context you have forgotten. Then I had it. I had spent several years working within the NHS and private healthcare services, and you cannot spend several years within medicine without seeing that image from time to time on lanyards, letterheads and signs. Twin snakes around a staff. A world wide recognised medical symbol, Greek in origin I think, that symbolised health and medicine.

Then the smell of the shop grabbed me. It was an extraordinary cocktail, like a cross between a chemist, a sweet shop and a florist. A kind of herby, almost disinfectant sweetness, as if someone had boiled eucalyptus in honey and then arranged flowers around the pot. Beneath that, something sharper and less pleasant, a chemical, mineral tang of things ground in a pestle and mortar. There was also a general soft hiss, not from the snakes, but from gas lamps set along the walls in brass brackets. The light they gave out was golden-brown and steady, and oddly enough, the place felt safe, if a little creepy, and I relaxed for the first time since I found myself trapped here.

Looking around I could see that the walls were covered in shelving, from floor to ceiling, and packed with glass jars, boxes, and bundles, all of them neatly labelled in a cramped, slanting hand. Some of the jars held dried leaves and flowers. Others held coloured and rather unsavoury looking liquids that were slow-moving, and shifting gently in the lamplight as though stirred by an invisible stick, whilst yet others held powders. On the counter sat a set of brass scales, a pestle and a stained marble mortar the size of a mixing bowl, along with a stack of small paper bags, folded and waiting. Behind the counter, rows of wooden drawers ran from waist height to the ceiling, each with a brass pull and a label. The place had the deep, settled quiet of a room where the same work has been done, in the same way, for a very long time.

There was nobody behind the counter, in fact, there was nobody in the shop at all, as far as I could see. Just me, the lamps, the jars, and the two stuffed snakes on the staff in the window.

‘Can I asssissssst you in any way, Ssssir?’

‘Hello,’ I called and walked to one end of the counter and looked towards an open door to a back room.

‘Hello,’ I said again.

‘Hello,’ said the same soft voice. It was behind me, and inexplicably, the hairs started to stand up on the back of my neck.

‘I don’t think the gentleman understandssssssss,’ said another, but very similar voice.

I spun round. The two snakes that before had been looking out of the window were now looking directly at me, their black forked tongues tasting the air, whilst two pairs of dark eyes were fixed upon me.

Wide-eyed, ‘Eeer, eer, eer,’ was all I could manage.

‘Ahhh,’ said one snake. It had partly uncoiled itself, but very much still at head height, it was leaning in towards me. ‘Would we be correct to assssssume you have never graced Sssssslythebe and Sssssssettle before?’

‘Eeer, eeer.’

‘I don’t think he hassssss, Mildred,’ said the other snake also now unwinding itself from the staff and also leaning in towards me with great interest.

‘No indeed, Mavissssss,’ said the other.

‘In fact,’ said the Mildred snake drawing the word out as if tasting it, ‘he issssss altogether sssssomething elssssse, I’m ssssssure.’

‘Indeed he issssss ssssssomething elssssse.’

Despite my consternation, Mavis and Mildred as the names of two talking snakes was not what I was expecting, not that I had been expecting the snakes to speak at all, I thought they were stuffed. Mavis and Mildred were names for ladies who played bridge on Thursdays and sent each other birthday cards with flowers on the front.

What happened next, I saw with my own eyes and yet I still don’t quite believe it.

The two snakes uncoiled from the staff, a slow unwinding of muscle, the only sound a dry whisper of scale against wood. But as they uncoiled, they seemed to pour themselves onto the floor and at the same time grow. Not quickly but with a sort of patient inevitability, the way a flower opens in one of those time-lapse films, except that what was opening here was not a flower. The olive-green of the scales paled and softened and became skin. The long bodies thickened, stretched, divided. I watched four arms emerge from what had been coils. I watched two faces form, from what had been flat, shovel-shaped heads, the jaws narrowing, the eyes rounding, the bone moving themselves beneath the surface.

It took perhaps five seconds, and at the end of it, two elderly women were standing in front of me, both of them smiling warmly.

They were not particularly tall, and they were both thin, lithe and tidy looking, with long necks that still held something of the way they had carried themselves as snakes a moment ago. They both had a slight forward tilt, and an attentive angle, as though they were always on the verge of leaning in to hear you better. Their faces were almost identical. High cheekbones, sharp noses, bright dark eyes set deep. Both had grey hair pulled back tightly and neatly, and both were wearing long dark robes of a deep bottle-green that I suspected was not a coincidence, given what the cloaks had been not a few moments ago. They women were old, certainly, but old in the same way that a well-made building is old, homely and comfortable in its own skin.

Up until this point, in the space of an afternoon, I had walked through a garden shed and come out in the wrong century, at least that is what it felt like. I had watched a passage close behind me like a healing wound. I had been followed through streets that smelled of the river and the middle ages. All of that, if I am honest, I could have talked myself out of as simply a vivid dream or hallucination, but I could not talk myself out of what I had just seen, because I had seen it from a few feet away in good light. Magic was real. It was standing in front of me and adjusting its cuffs.

The woman on the left spoke first.

‘There now,’ she said, in a voice that was still dry and precise but had lost its hiss entirely. ‘Much easier to talk like this. My name is Mildred Slythebe.’ She touched her chest lightly. ‘And this is my sister, Mavis Settle.’

‘We are,’ said Mavis.

‘The proprietors,’ said Mildred.

‘Of this establishment,’ said Mavis.

‘Slythebe and Settle,’ they said together, with the automatic harmony of a phrase spoken ten thousand times.

‘Apothecary,’ said Mildred.

‘And sundries,’ added Mavis.

The rhythm of it, that see-sawing completion of each other’s thoughts, had the quality of a parlour act performed so often it had ceased to be a performance and become simply how they spoke. I found myself nodding along to it, which was absurd, as I had not yet managed to produce a word.

‘And you are?’ said Mavis.

‘Eeer Vincent, Vincent Shaw.’

‘Well Mr Shaw, you look,’ said Mildred, studying me with her head tilted at that slightly serpentine angle, ‘if you will forgive me for saying so.’

‘Dreadful,’ said Mavis.

‘I was going to say cold.’

‘Cold and dreadful,’ completed Mildred.

‘Do sit down,’ said Mavis, gesturing towards a chair by the counter that I was certain had not been there a moment ago. It was old, deep-seated and upholstered in something dark, the sort of chair that elderly relatives keep by the fire and defend with their lives.

I sat. I sat because my legs had decided, independently of the rest of me, that they were finished with standing. The chair was wonderfully warm and smelled faintly of lavender.

Mavis had already moved behind the counter and was doing something with a small copper kettle and a jar of dried leaves. The way she moved through the shop had none of the hesitation you would expect from a woman her age. She knew where everything was without looking, her hands finding jars and stoppers and measures the way a pianist’s hands find keys.

‘Tea,’ she said. It was not a question.

‘I’m sorry, I have no money. At least, I have money, but I very much doubt it is money that would have any value here.’

The two sisters exchanged a glance. It was brief and it was practised and it contained an entire conversation that I was not invited to.

‘Did you hear that, Mavis,’ said Mildred. ‘Mr Shaw thinks we would charge a man who walks in off the street on a day like this.’

‘Looking like that,’ added Mavis.

‘Perish the thought,’ said Mildred.

‘Perish it entirely,’ said Mavis, setting a cup and saucer down in front of me. It was thick, white, chipped at the rim, and the tea in it was a deep reddish-brown and smelled of something I could not identify. I sipped it. It was not tea, exactly. Something older and grassier, with a warmth underneath it like cinnamon but not quite. It was rather pleasant.

Mildred had settled herself behind the counter, her head inclined towards me. Mavis remained standing on this side of the counter, one hand resting lightly on it. They were both watching me, and I had the odd sensation of being observed by two people who were looking at the same thing but seeing different bits.

‘Now then,’ said Mildred, in the tone of a woman who has stood behind a counter and listened to the troubles of strangers for fifty years.

‘What,’ said Mavis.

‘On earth,’ continued Mildred.

‘Has happened to you?’ finished Mavis.

I took a sip of the tea. It was extraordinary. Whatever was in it unknotted something behind my ribs that I had not realised was knotted.

‘Well, I got here by accident – kind of. I came in through a garden shed in Soho Square in London.’ It sounded ridiculous. ‘I went up some stairs that shouldn’t have been there, into a room that was too big, and looked out of a window at this street instead of modern London. There was a cupboard with a sign that said to knock and turn left or right. I turned right and came down and now the passage has closed behind me and I can’t get back.’

I stopped, because saying it all at once made it worse.

Mildred looked at Mavis. Mavis looked at Mildred, and something passed between them.

‘A garden shed,’ said Mildred carefully.

I said, ‘It looks like an Elizabethan building, white plaster and black timbers.’

‘In Soho Square,’ said Mavis, equally carefully.

‘In Muggle London,’ added Mildred. ‘And you say, that you came down the right-hand staircase.’

‘Yes.’

‘And the passage,’ said Mavis. ‘It closed.’

‘Completely. The buildings moved together. It’s just a wall now.’

‘Well you are not a Muggle, that much is evident,’ said Mavis.

‘Muggle?’

‘A non-magical person,’ answered Mildred.

‘And yet you do not appear to be magical, otherwise you would not have been surprised at our appearance.’

‘I used to like card tricks as a child,’ I offered.

The two sisters –I assumed sisters – once again passed one another that knowing look and then said in unison, ‘Something else.’

‘Which calls for tea,’ said Mavis, ‘Which you have.’

‘And kindness,’ added Mildred, her gaze returning to me, and for a moment something shifted in her face, something that looked very much like recognition being weighed against caution, and caution winning.

‘In any event,’ she said briskly. ‘You are here, you are cold and you are not dressed for this weather or indeed,’ she paused, ‘this neighbourhood. Mavis, do we still have that cloak?’

‘The grey one?’

‘The grey one.’

‘I believe we do.’

Mavis disappeared through the door behind the counter. I heard rummaging, the opening and closing of drawers, a muffled conversation with someone or something I could not see. She returned with a heavy grey cloak, long and plain and slightly moth-eaten, and held it out to me.

‘It has been here longer than we have,’ she said. ‘Which is saying something.’

I took it. The wool was thick and coarse and smelled of cedar and age, but it was clean. I put it around my shoulders and immediately felt warmer, and less conspicuous.

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘You are very kind. Both of you.’

‘We are practical,’ said Mildred.

‘Practical and nosy,’ added Mavis.

‘Practical, nosy and not without some experience,’ said Mildred, ‘of people who find themselves where they did not expect to be.’

She said it lightly, but beneath it there was a weight I did not understand.

I drank my tea and looked at the two sisters and the shop around them. The gas lamps, the jars, the quiet. The brass scales on the counter, perfectly balanced, and waiting for something to weigh. Outside, through the thick window panes, the court was darkening and the street was emptying.

‘It is getting late,’ said Mildred, following my gaze. ‘Knockturn Alley after dark is not a place for.’ She stopped herself.

‘Not a place for a man in Muggle clothing,’ said Mavis, finishing the sentence with what I suspected was not the ending Mildred had intended.

‘We have a room,’ said Mildred. ‘Upstairs. It is small and it is not luxurious but it has a bed and a lock on the door, and you would be welcome to it. In the morning things will seem...’

‘Clearer,’ said Mavis.

‘I was going to say simpler.’

‘Nothing around here is simple, Mildred.’

‘No,’ said Mildred quietly. ‘I suppose it isn’t.’

I put down my empty tea cup. The chair was warm. The cloak was warm. The shop smelled of beeswax and eucalyptus and safety, and safety had become, in the space of an afternoon, a thing I could no longer take for granted.

And then, through the bay window, I saw the figure again. Still there, on the far side of the court, half-lit by the spilling apothecary shop light. Not the broad shadow from before, someone smaller, standing quite still in a doorway, facing the shop. Not threatening, not approaching, just present, in the patient way of a person who has been watching and waiting for some time and is prepared to watch and wait for considerably longer.

The two sisters were looking at me, waiting for an answer.

What to do next?

This is one of my all time favourite paintings.

A woman in an orange dress lies half-asleep in a garden, surrounded by roses and fruit and music. Someone is playing a lute for her. A child offers a bowl of peaches. The light is warm, the colours extraordinary – that dress, blazing out of the darkness like a bonfire in a forest. Everything about the painting says luxury, pleasure, rest. You want to be in that garden.

And then you notice what is happening at the edges.

To the right, a figure holds a finger to her lips. Behind her, someone is stealing away with a fan of peacock feathers. The sleeping woman does not see any of this. She cannot see it, she is asleep.

The painting is called The Deceitfulness of Riches. The title comes from Matthew’s Gospel – the Parable of the Sower, the seed that falls among thorns, where the deceitfulness of riches chokes the word and it becomes unfruitful. It was painted in 1901 by a Eleanor Fortescue - Brickdale when she was just twenty-nine years old.

In a previous essay, I traced a chain of connections from my great-great-grandfather’s stained glass windows through William Morris – who he knew well – through to John Ruskin and Charlotte Mason’s picture study method. Each link in the chain leading somewhere you could not have predicted but which, once you see it, feels entirely inevitable.

But there was another branch of that chain I did not follow. Another line running out from Ruskin, through a different family, to a woman painter who was part of the last generation to keep the Pre-Raphaelite tradition alive.

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Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale was born in 1872 in Upper Norwood, Surrey, the youngest of five children. Her father Matthew was a barrister at Lincoln’s Inn. He was also a fellow student of John Ruskin’s at Christ Church, Oxford, and a founding supporter of the Arundel Society – one of Ruskin’s projects to document and preserve the great works of European art through high-quality reproductions.

This matters, because Eleanor did not stumble upon the Pre-Raphaelite tradition by accident. She grew up inside it. Her brother Charles attended Ruskin’s lectures at Oxford and remained a keen amateur artist all his life. The household received illustrated periodicals, gallery-going was a regular family pursuit, and the conviction that art carries moral weight – that looking at beautiful things carefully is in of itself a form of education, that craft and vision are inseparable – was not something Eleanor would encounter for the first time at art school. It was simply the air in her father’s house.

Eleanor was educated at home by a governess, and at seventeen she enrolled at the Crystal Palace School of Art, near the family home. Her father died in a mountaineering accident in the Alps in 1894, when Eleanor was twenty-two. She then moved to the St John’s Wood School of Art, and later applied to the Royal Academy Schools.

It reportedly took her three attempts to gain admission to the Royal Academy Schools. Whether this was because of the quality of her early work or because of institutional reluctance to admit women is, I think, a question that answers itself.

At the Royal Academy Schools she came under the influence of John Byam Liston Shaw – himself a protégé of John Everett Millais, and deeply influenced by John William Waterhouse. There is an apostolic succession at work here, and it is worth tracing. Millais was a founding member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848. Millais taught Byam Shaw. Byam Shaw taught Fortescue-Brickdale. She carried the tradition on into the twentieth century, painting in the Pre-Raphaelite manner long after fashion had turned against it.

Byam Shaw was born the same year as Eleanor. They met at St John’s Wood and became close friends, and would remain so for the rest of their lives. They painted the same subject, the complexities and deceptions of love – simultaneously and in dialogue with each other. Byam’s Love’s Baubles appearing in 1897, Eleanor’s The Pale Complexion of True Love in 1899. Byam married in 1899; but Eleanor never did. Byam died in the influenza epidemic of 1919, aged forty-six and Eleanor went on teaching at the school he had founded, and painting, for another two decades.

And here is a thread that connects her to the artists Charlotte Mason’s homeschooling families study today: Waterhouse appears on the Ambleside Online picture study schedule. Waterhouse shaped Byam Shaw. Byam Shaw shaped Fortescue-Brickdale. She is, in a real sense, the next step in a tradition that Mason’s modern audience already knows – it’s just a step they have probably not yet taken.

Eleanor’s first painting exhibited at the Royal Academy, in 1899, was The Pale Complexion of True Love – its title borrowed from Shakespeare’s As You Like It. Two years later – the same year she painted The Deceitfulness of Riches – she held a solo exhibition of forty-five watercolours at the Dowdeswell Gallery in London. The reviews were extraordinary. The Artist commented that rarely had a woman painter made such a reputation so quickly and so thoroughly. In 1902, Eleanor became the first woman elected to the Royal Institute of Oil Painters, and she was also elected an Associate of the Royal Watercolour Society that same year.

Her work came to the attention of George Frederick Watts – the great Victorian painter, the man whose chapel and gallery stand in Compton, Surrey, and whose allegorical painting Hope remains one of the most reproduced images in British art. On seeing Eleanor’s work he said:

‘I feel inclined to throw away my palette and brushes. What are my things by the side of such stuff as hers?’

That is not polite praise from an artist who was widely considered to be Britain’s Michelangelo. That is a master recognising, in another painter’s work, something he was not sure he could match. Watts was in his eighties. She was in her early thirties. He had spent a lifetime painting moral allegories, and when he looked at her painting, he saw the tradition continuing in hands that were steadier than his own.

But as a woman, Elearnor could never become a Royal Academician. The door was open enough to let her in, but it was not open wide enought to allow her into the room.

And then, Eleanor’s illustration work is where the Charlotte Mason connection becomes impossible to ignore.

In 1909, Ernest Brown of the Leicester Galleries commissioned twenty-eight watercolour illustrations for Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, which Eleanor painted over two years. They were exhibited in 1911, and twenty-four were published in a deluxe edition by Hodder & Stoughton in 1912.

Charlotte Mason put Tennyson’s Idylls of the King on her reading lists, and her students read the same poems that Elearnor Fortescue-Brickdale was painting. The same stories, used for the same purpose – giving young people access to the Arthurian legends through great language and great art – by two women working simultaneously in the same tradition, drawing from the same well, apparently unaware of each other.

She also illustrated Robert Browning’s poems – thirty-two watercolours exhibited at the Dowdeswell Gallery in 1909. Charlotte Mason recommended Browning too.

In 1919, Hodder & Stoughton published Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale’s Golden Book of Famous Women. Not ‘illustrated by’ – the book carries her name in the title because it was hers. She selected every passage, and chose which women should be included. She decided which moments from literature best captured each one, and then she painted fifteen of those moments.

The book contains excerpts from fifty-two works of fiction and poetry featuring women from history and legend. The authors she drew from include Shakespeare, Dante, Byron, Coleridge, Tennyson, Wordsworth, Thackeray, George Eliot, Hawthorne, Poe, and Jane Austen. The women include Cleopatra and Guinevere, Joan of Arc and Becky Sharp, Beatrice and Hester Prynne, Catherine of Siena and Maggie Tulliver.

Real women and fictional women, side by side, treated as equally alive, equally worthy of attention. Not a history book. Not a fiction anthology. A single artist’s personal gallery of the women she considered worth looking at, drawn from the full span of Western literature.

The binding was in the same style, from the same publisher, as the deluxe gift books of Arthur Rackham, Kay Nielsen, and Edmund Dulac. Elearnor stood alongside the greatest illustrators of the Golden Age. But where Rackham illustrated fairy tales and Dulac illustrated The Arabian Nights, Fortescue-Brickdale curated a canon of women from literature and history – and illustrated it with paintings that took the reader as seriously as the text did.

Charlotte Mason would have called this a living book. Not because it was beautiful or well-made – though it was both – but because it was the work of a single mind with genuine passion. One woman, choosing real literature for real readers, trusting them to receive it. That is Mason’s definition. And Fortescue-Brickdale met it without ever having heard of Charlotte Mason.

And then there is her stained glass window work.

Eleanor designed windows for more than twenty churches, the glass itself fabricated by her associate Harry Grylls and later by James Powell & Sons. Many were First World War memorials. Her 1921 window commemorating the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry stands in York Minster. Others survive in Bristol Cathedral, in churches across Buckinghamshire and Somerset, in Brixham.

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She designed stained glass in the same tradition that my great-great-grandfather Robert worked in when he made windows for William Morris. Different workshops and decades, but the same inheritance. The conviction, passed down from Ruskin through Morris through the Arts and Crafts movement, that a church window is not decoration but devotion, and that the craft of making it is in itself a form of worship, and to quote Tolkien, ‘a form of sub-creation’.

Elearnor was a devout Christian, and donated works to churches. Her subject matter was soaked in Christian allegory and moral narrative – not as performance or signalling, but simply as a conviction of faith.

During the First World War years, she designed government recruitment posters. Afterwards, she turned to memorial windows – glass for the dead, made by a woman who had spent the same years painting famous women from literature. The memorials to the fallen men and the celebration of the enduring women. Both made by the same hands.

Three years after painting The Deceitfulness of Riches, Fortescue-Brickdale returned to the same territory with an even more ambitious work.

Love and his Counterfeits is a large watercolour, painted in 1904 and exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1905. On the reverse, she wrote a detailed programme note – a complete narrative key to every figure in the painting. A girl’s soul awakens at the left of the composition and opens the door of her Heart’s Castle to receive love. But she does not recognise him. First she sees Fear, in black armour with no coat of arms. Then Romance, a boy on a bubble with a castle of dreams in his hand. Then Ambition, riding Pegasus. Then Position, with his train of Appearance, Prestige, and Riches carried by a Cupid. Then Pity, with a cup of tears. Then Flattery, with a mirror. And finally, at the far right, almost at the edge of the painting, True Love arrives – empty-handed, to take and win her Heart’s Castle.

The counterfeits are louder. More elaborately dressed. Easier to mistake for the real thing. True Love stands at the margin, quiet, easy to miss if you are not paying attention.

She was thirty-two when she painted it and unmarried, and Eleanor would remain so for the rest of her life. Her closest friendship was with Byam Shaw, who had married five years earlier. No letters, no diary entries, no recorded commentary from Fortescue-Brickdale about her romantic life – or its absence – appear to have survived. What survived instead is the work itself, and it speaks for itself.

And the painting is a picture study waiting to happen.

Show it to a child, then take it away and ask them what they saw. The knight in armour. The winged horse. The figure with the mirror. The child would discover the allegory through looking – through attending, noticing, receiving – exactly as Charlotte Mason intended.

Charlotte Mason’s picture study method descended from Ruskin through Julia Firth, his friend and pupil in Ambleside, who showed Charlotte’s trainee teachers how to look at paintings not for their technique but because they had something true to say. Eleanor’s vocation descended from Ruskin through her father, who had studied alongside him at Oxford and supported his life’s work. Two channels from the same source, flowing into the same conviction: that looking carefully at beautiful things is a moral act, and that the capacity to see truth in beauty is not a privilege but a birthright.

In all likelihood, Eleanor and Charlotte never met. There is no record of Charlotte mentioning Eleanor, no evidence that the PNEU programmes ever included her in their picture study schedules. But they were breathing the same air, drawing from the same well, and arriving at the same conclusions independently. Charlotte taught children to look at paintings as carriers of ideas. Eleanor painted paintings designed to carry ideas. Charlotte put Tennyson and Browning on her reading lists. Eleanor illustrated Tennyson and Browning.

Two women who never knew each other, doing the same work, because the same man had taught both their traditions that art is not a luxury but a necessity.

Unfortunately, in her later years, Eleanor’s eyesight failed, and she suffered a stroke in 1938 that ended her painting career entirely. She spent her final years unable to do the one thing she loved, and had done since she was seventeen.

Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale died in Fulham Hospital in 1945, aged seventy-three. She was buried at Brompton Cemetery, and her obituary in The Times called her ‘the last survivor’ of the Pre-Raphaelites.

And then she was forgotten.

Not slowly, not gradually – almost immediately. The art world moved on. Fashions changed, the critics turned their attention elsewhere, and the narrative painters, the illustrators, the women who painted Tennyson and Browning and allegories about the things that deceive us, were left behind. Her work fell from public consciousness. The paintings were still there, in galleries, in churches, in private hands, but nobody was really looking at them anymore.

The first monograph on her work was not published until 2012. Pamela Gerrish Nunn’s A Pre-Raphaelite Journey, accompanying an exhibition at the Lady Lever Art Gallery in Port Sunlight, which later travelled to the Watts Gallery in Compton.

I want to return to the painting I began with, The Deceitfulness of Riches.

That orange dress, blazing out of the canvas. The roses and the music and the sleeping woman. The thief at the edge, stealing away while everyone watches and nobody says a word.

Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale painted a warning disguised as a gift. The painting seduces you before it tells you the truth. That is not a flaw, it is the point. The deceit is in how good it looks. You have to see past the surface to find what the painting is actually saying – and the only way to do that is to look carefully, to attend, to stay with it long enough for the beauty to stop being the whole story.

That is what Ruskin taught. That is what Charlotte Mason built her schools around. That is what Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale painted, over and over, for forty years, until her hand could not hold a brush. And it is what we still need to hear, perhaps now more than ever.

The counterfeits are always louder, always more elaborately dressed and nearly always far more seductive, whilst the real thing, that which has value, is far too often pushed to the edges or out of sight entirely.

But here is the thing about hope, truth and beauty. It waits. It does not decay with time, it does not demand attention or dress itself up or shout from the centre of the room. It simply goes on being hopeful, true and beautiful – quietly, at the edges – until someone finally notices and once again pulls it into the light.

And slowly, unmistakably, after decades in which the brutal and the ugly were championed as the only honest response to the world, people are looking for hope, beauty, and truth again. You can see it in the queues at the Pre-Raphaelite exhibitions, in the parents choosing real books over screens, in the homeschooling families who pin watercolours to their walls and ask their children to look, really look, at what is there. The appetite for something that lifts rather than dismantles, that gives hope rather than despair was never extinguished, and it never will be.

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If you have read any of my previous essays, you will know that Tolkien sits at the heart of almost everything I believe about stories, craft, and imagination. I have written about Tolkien’s world as a world of craftsmen, about his magic as received grace rather than learned technique, about the Shire as an act of preservation. I love Tolkien’s work, and I have read The Lord of the Rings many times.

But there is another writer I love more. And the story of how I fell in love with his work begins not with a book, but with a film and a single word.

I cannot tell you exactly how old I was, or even where I was, when I first saw David Lean’s 1946 Great Expectations, other than I saw it on the television. What I can tell you is the memory of that opening scene, and of hearing that word, wittles.

That opening scene has stayed with me all my life, and in my view it is one of the most atmospheric pieces of cinema Britain has ever produced. The bleak Kent marshes under a grey sky, the gravestones, the biting cold wind. And a boy, alone, very alone, at his parents’ grave and beginning to cry.

And then, out of nowhere, a great monster of a man with a coarse voice and terrifying face. The face of a man who has crawled out of a desperate, terrible world the boy cannot imagine.

I am fairly sure it was my very young fascination with that film that prompted my mother to give me a children’s version of David Copperfield, my very first grown-up novel. I was nine years old. She managed the book department at WH Smith, and she knew what a book could do. Copperfield was the door into Dickens, and once I was in his world, I never came out.

But as much as I love David Copperfield, it was not Copperfield that made me fall in love with the works of Charles Dickens, or indeed with the English language itself. It was David Lean’s film, and that single word, wittles.

That 1946 film did two things to me, and I did not understand until much later that they were connected.

The characters in David Lean’s film are extraordinary to look at. The film is shot in black and white, and in my view they are closer to the original Cruikshank illustrations than any colour adaptation could be, and deliberately so, I am sure. Those faces, those rooms, those bodies shaped by their natures; they pulled me in the direction of art. Of painting. Of portraiture. Of wanting to capture character on a surface.

And the story itself, the arc of Pip’s false expectations, his slow recognition, the magnificent generosity of Magwitch, the quiet goodness of Joe Gargery, pulled me in the direction of writing. Of wanting to do with words what Dickens had done: build a world from character upward.

I did not know it then, but that single film was the spark for both of the things I have spent my life doing, painting and storytelling. Both rivers flow from the same source. And the source is a terrifying convict on the Kent marshes saying wittles.

I have read Great Expectations and watched many versions of the film more times than any other story. More than The Lord of the Rings. More than the Gormenghast trilogy. Those novels have given me some of my most deeply felt essays for this publication, and neither of them is the book I return to most.

And here is what I have come to understand about returning to Great Expectations. On the first reading, it is an act of discovery of the plot. Who is Pip’s secret benefactor? What happened to Miss Havisham? Will Estella ever love him? On the first reading, you turn pages because you want to know what will happen next.

On the fifteenth reading, you know the story intimately. The plot is settled, the surprises are spent. And what remains, what you find underneath once the scaffolding of suspense has been taken away, is Dickens’s moral architecture through his characters. The whole of a man revealed in a single mispronounced word.

If you have not read the novel – spoilers ahead.

Wittles. Not the correct word, victuals. Wittles. A word that tells you everything about the man who says it. The sound is blunt and graceless, a word from a man who has never been given anything and has had to take everything by force. A convict, a brute, desperate and hungry.

And it is the word that begins the most generous relationship in the entire novel, and, I would argue, in any novel. Because the man who said wittles, Abel Magwitch, will spend twenty years rebuilding his life in Australia and pouring every penny he earns into a boy who brought him food on a freezing morning. Pip brought Magwitch what he wanted not out of kindness, but out of terror. But that did not matter, as far as Magwitch was concerned. I would argue that from Magwitch’s perspective, a pork pie from a frightened child was probably the only real act of kindness that had ever been shown to him in his entire life, and it opened his heart to reveal his true noble, and long forgotten, self. That act of kindness from Pip awakened the real Abel Magwitch.

In my view, in not only Great Expectations but in all Dickens’s novels, characters are the story, and the story are the characters.

Magwitch is violent, but he is not vicious. That distinction matters. He is brutal because the world has brutalised him: transported, imprisoned, beaten into the shape of a criminal by a system that never once gave him a chance to be his real self. And all it would have taken is a little kindness.

I would go further and say that Dickens was familiar with Shelley’s Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus, and that Dickens took the creature from Frankenstein and made him a man in the form of Abel Magwitch. Magwitch is what the creature might have become if it had been treated with kindness and acceptance.

And yet you see the humanity in Magwitch almost immediately, and you understand that he acts out of desperation and not malice. Within hours of getting his wittles, Magwitch is caught on the marshes. Accompanying the hunting soldiers are Joe the blacksmith and Pip. Magwitch speaks out. He tells the sergeant that he stole the pie from the blacksmith’s house, so that Pip will not get into trouble on his account.

Right there, Magwitch’s true character is revealed. And in the same moment, so is the blacksmith and Pip’s guardian, Joe Gargery.

That passage says everything you need to know about Joe Gargery, and at the same moment, about Magwitch himself. Joe does not hesitate. He does not weigh whether the convict deserves his pity. He simply offers it, freely, because Joe does not keep accounts. And Magwitch, the brute, the convict, the man who tilted a terrified boy over a tombstone, turns away, because something has clicked in his throat – his humanity.

I said that Pip at his parents’ graveside is alone, very alone, and I think that very same loneliness is also present in Magwitch. He is also an orphan, and there is a longing in him that runs deeper than hunger, and survival. A longing for the family he nearly had – Molly and Estella, and the son he never had – Pip. And from this moment on the marshes, from a stolen pie and an act of grace from a blacksmith who could barely afford the loss, Magwitch will build his entire life’s purpose around a boy who does not even know his name.

This is pure grace and redemption. Dickens never once explains it; he does not need to. He simply shows you a man pouring his life into an act of love so extravagant and so quiet, and Pip, for years, does not know where it comes from.

Pip assumes the money must be from Miss Havisham. Because of course it must. Because Pip, by this point in the story, has come to believe that only the respectable and the wealthy are capable of generosity. That the convict who grabbed him on the marshes could be his benefactor is unthinkable. And when the truth arrives, it does not just shock Pip; it demolishes everything he has built his adult life and his moral framework upon.

And then there is Miss Havisham.

Miss Havisham is, I believe, the most wicked character Dickens ever created. Not the most villainous; that honour probably belongs to Fagin or Bill Sikes. Miss Havisham is the most wicked, in the sense that her cruelty is deliberate, calculated, and enacted upon innocents.

She was jilted. That is her wound, and it is real. But what she does with it is monstrous. She takes a child, Estella, who is, though Miss Havisham does not know it, Magwitch’s own daughter, and shapes her, carefully and methodically, into a weapon. She raises Estella to be incapable of love, and she uses Pip as target practice. She invites a young boy into her ruined house, shows him a beautiful girl, and watches him fall in love with someone who has been specifically moulded to break hearts. That is grief redirected into anger and directed at the most innocent victims imaginable: children. And yet there is a fondness in Miss Havisham towards Pip, something genuine, something that might have grown into remorse far sooner, but it is trodden down and out of her hands by what she has set in motion in creating Estella and encouraging Pip to fall in love with her.

And then, at the very end, she sees it.

There is a moment, just before the fire, when Miss Havisham looks at what she has done and recognises it. She sees Estella’s coldness for what it is: not a triumph but a mutilation. She sees Pip’s suffering for what it is: not justice but cruelty. She sees herself clearly, perhaps for the first time in decades.

And then she burns.

Dickens dresses Miss Havisham in a wedding gown that has yellowed and decayed over years of arrested time, a garment that was supposed to represent the beginning of a new life, rotting on a woman who refused to move forward. And when the fire comes, it takes the dress first. She is consumed by the thing she could not let go of.

I will leave the reader to consider what Dickens may have intended by that image. He chose fire, and he chose Miss Havisham’s moment of recognition, and he placed one immediately before the other. I do not think the sequence is accidental. Miss Havisham realises her cruelty too late to beg forgiveness, too late to make amends, and she is quite literally consigned to the flames.

One cannot help wondering whether Dickens was examining something he recognised in himself. His treatment of his wife Catherine, the very public separation, the children divided, the cruelty dressed up as respectability, is one of the darker aspects of his life. In my view, Dickens wrote himself in Miss Havisham, on a certain and probably subconscious level.

Did Dickens understand that a person can see their own wickedness only when it is too late to undo it? I suspect he could, and all too well. Miss Havisham’s fire may be fiction, but the question it asks feels uncomfortably personal for a man who knew what it meant to wound the people closest to him and to justify it until justification was no longer possible.

But the fire is not the novel’s last word on redemption. That belongs to Pip.

Pip’s arc is the arc the reader lives through. He begins as a kind, humble boy at the forge, and he ends there too, but between those two points he becomes someone his younger self would not recognise. He is ashamed of Joe. He is ashamed of the forge, of the marshes, of everything that made him. He pursues wealth and status and Estella, and he loses himself so completely in the pursuit that when Magwitch finally appears in his London chambers and reveals the truth, Pip’s first emotion is not gratitude but revulsion. He is disgusted that his fortune, his gentlemanly life, his fine clothes, his great expectations, came from a convict’s hands.

And that is the moment the novel breaks Pip open. Because everything he came to value was shallow and without depth, and everything he despised was honest and real. The forge was real. Joe’s love was real. Magwitch’s love was real. And Pip has to find his way back to it through shame, through illness, and through the stripping away of everything false.

When Pip is at his lowest, sick, broken, abandoned by the world he pursued, it is Joe who comes. Joe who nurses him. Joe who sits by the bed and calls him ‘old chap’ again, as though nothing has changed, because for Joe, nothing has changed. Joe does not forgive Pip, because Joe never felt there was anything to forgive. That is the most devastating kind of grace: the kind that does not even know it is grace.

And Pip’s redemption, unlike Havisham’s, is not too late. He is given time to live differently. To return to the forge. To become worthy, at last, of the love that was offered to him from the beginning.

Dickens famously wrote two endings for Great Expectations. In the original, Pip and Estella meet by chance, speak kindly, and part for good. His friend Bulwer-Lytton persuaded him to change it, and in the published ending they do not part. I have always preferred the published version, because it is the ending that offers hope. Estella was not cruel by nature. She was a child, Magwitch’s own daughter, moulded into a weapon by another woman’s grief. And if even she can be saved, if even the girl who was made to be incapable of love can find her way through to the light, then the novel’s deepest argument is complete. Anyone can be redeemed. Anyone.

Dickens understood that redemption comes in different forms. He had written it before, in Ebenezer Scrooge, that other great miser of the heart, who is shown the consequences of his cruelty and wakes to find he still has time. Scrooge’s redemption is joyful, almost ecstatic. He buys the turkey, he raises Bob Cratchit’s salary, he becomes the man he should have been all along. It is redemption as Christmas morning. Pip’s is quieter, harder, sadder, earned through loss rather than vision, through the slow recognition of what he threw away.

And Miss Havisham’s redemption is the shadow of both. Recognition without time. Sight without the chance to change. The fire takes her before she can become someone different. A spiritual lesson for all of us, if there ever was one.

Three kinds of redemption and Dickens gave us all of them.

And then there are all the other characters, and I could write about them all for pages.

Pumblechook, whose name alone, that pompous, plum-pudding sound, tells you he is a fraud before he opens his mouth.

Orlick, all hard consonants and dull menace, lurking at the edges of the story like something that crawled out of the marshes and never went back.

The magnificent Jaggers, who washes his hands with scented soap after every client, literally scrubbing the criminal world off his skin. But I think Jaggers has more heart than he allows himself to show. This is the man who quietly placed Estella, a convict’s daughter, a murderer’s child, into Miss Havisham’s care, and never once took credit for it. That is not the act of a man without feeling. It is the act of a man who has decided that feeling is a liability in his profession. The hand-washing is not merely about keeping his dirty criminal business at arm’s length. It is about keeping the dual aspects of his nature and his life separate. If Jaggers allowed himself to emotionally engage with what passes through his office every day, he could not function.

Wemmick solves the same problem in a similar way. The hard little postbox of a man at the office, and the warm, eccentric son who fires a cannon at sunset and tends his Aged Parent behind a miniature drawbridge in Walworth. Both men are responding in similar ways to the same unbearable world of crime, and Dickens lets you feel the cost of each without judging either.

In my view, all Dickens’s character names in all of his novels are handmade. Dickens creates his character names in the same way a blacksmith chooses a piece of iron, for the weight, the grain, the way it rings when you strike it. Magwitch. Havisham. Jaggers. Pumblechook. Wemmick. The name is the character. The language is doing the work that lesser writers use explanation for. The name is a door into the character’s soul, and the reader imagines so incredibly vivid, so completely realised, that you feel they might simply step out of the novel and into the room.

That is what Great Expectations has taught me more than anything else.

That character is the highest form of craft a writer can practise. That a name can contain a soul. That the deepest moral truths in fiction are never stated; they are experienced, felt, arrived at by a reader who has been trusted to do the work. That redemption is not a moment but a life lived differently. That forgiveness, real forgiveness, looks like Joe Gargery sitting by a bed, saying nothing that needs to be said.

I fell in love with words because a convict said wittles. I fell in love with story because a hardened criminal had the warmest heart and a simple blacksmith forgave a boy who did not deserve it. And I fell in love with character because Charles Dickens trusted me, as a reader, to see the whole of a man in a single mispronounced word.

I have read Great Expectations more times than any other novel I own. I will read it again. And I will find something I have never found before, because that is what a living book does. It changes, not because the words have changed, but because I have changed, as we all change on our continuing journey through life.

I very much admire the artists of the Golden Age of Illustration, and have been meaning to write an article about them – Rackham, Dulac, Pyle, and many more – that extraordinary generation of artists who, between about 1880 and 1930, elevated the children’s book into something to be treasured. I had been browsing their work one evening, when I came across this.

It’s Badger from The Wind in the Willows. Badger in a worn russet jumper and trousers, seated on the roots of an enormous beech tree and reading the paper. Dappled spring light gives the picture a wonderful spring-morning feel, whilst tucked into the roots below, almost hidden if you aren’t looking – a little gabled window. Badger’s home.

The illustration is deeply romantic and pure magic. Something went yes, this, and I fell instantly in love.

On reflecting on my admiration for the piece, it opened up a broader question.

Why do I – along with so many others – love the work of the Golden Age of Illustration so much? Well, I would argue that it’s more than nostalgia. Society today dismisses nostalgia all too readily as trite, dusty, sentimental weakness. But nostalgia is so much more than this. Nostalgia is reaching back into the past when the present fails to give us adequate intellectual and emotional nourishment. In my view, it is not a coincidence that so many people crave nostalgia, and seemingly more so now than ever before. Tolkien called this recovery – the act of reaching back as a way of seeing and understanding the present more clearly.

Nostalgia and reaching back is not weakness or sentimentality – it’s diagnostic. Reaching into the past tells us exactly what is missing in the present – truth, beauty, and craftsmanship.

And what I felt looking at Badger reading his daily paper was not only the longing for a simpler, less complex, less selfish, and less disposable world – it was also the craftsmanship of the piece itself, let alone its sheer beauty. Every line, every brushstroke, every colour choice of the painting had been considered. The lichen on the bark, the moss on the roots, the soft, spring-green light. This was not an image made quickly or carelessly. Badger was painted by someone who is not only very talented, but by someone who takes pains with the act of craftsmanship and cares about their work.

I think that what we respond to in the golden age illustrations – in Rackham’s gnarled trees, in Dulac’s luminous skies, or in Beatrix Potter’s meticulously observed hedgerows, is exactly what we respond to here. The beauty of the piece, along with the skill and the craftsmanship of the artist, but there is more to it than that. I think there are two more important pieces to understand and complete the picture as to why we respond the way we do.

The first is that paintings like this nearly always illustrate a story we treasure.

The second is that when we add in our conscious knowledge that the illustration is from a children’s story, we unconsciously and emotionally respond, becoming a child once again – instantly, re-living and re-loving the romance of that story.

Excellent illustrations like this resonate because they connect us back to our own childhood wonder.

I went to find who had painted it, expecting a name from 1910.

The artist’s name is Chris Dunn. He is a contemporary artist working in a Wiltshire studio here in England.

Chris Dunn is a superlative draughtsman and watercolourist. Not a digital artist recreating a watercolour effect on a screen, but a man using real pencils and real paint on real paper, slowly, the way Rackham did, the way Beatrix Potter did. The patience shows. His paintings reward the kind of looking that most contemporary illustration has stopped asking for – the sustained, unhurried attention of a child lying on the floor with a book, chin on hands, finding delight and wonder on every page.

And it is all in service of the story. Badger is not floating in front of a backdrop – he belongs in the painting. The beech tree is his home. You can feel the weight of him, the coolness of the shade. The small details are not charm for charm’s sake. The mug, the newspaper, the half-hidden doorway: they are visual storytelling at its best. They tell us who Badger is before we read a word.

Chris Dunn was born in Keighley, Yorkshire, studied illustration at what is now Bath Spa University, and spent years working as a freelance editorial illustrator before finding the subject that would define his life’s work. Inspired by Beatrix Potter and Brian Jacques’ Redwall, he began painting the anthropomorphic animal world he is now known for – a world of hedgerow kitchens and moonlit rivers, of creatures in waistcoats and rolled-up sleeves, going about the ancient, ordinary business of living. His paintings for The Wind in the Willows, commissioned by Galerie Daniel Maghen in Paris and published by Éditions Caurette, are – in my view – the finest illustrated interpretation of Grahame’s world since Shepard’s original line drawings. They earned Chris a major Parisian exhibition, representation by one of Europe’s foremost illustration galleries, and a following that now numbers in the tens of thousands.

He is, by any reasonable measure, one of the most accomplished children’s book illustrators working in Britain today.

Charlotte Mason had a word for the thin, the cheap, the work that underestimates a child. She called it twaddle. She used the word about prose – the books that talk down, that simplify what needn’t be simplified, that offer a child less than they are capable of receiving. But the word very much applies to art and illustration as well.

I would argue that a child raised on living books that contain living illustrations like Chris Dunn’s, attains a different kind of eye from a child raised on the flat, quickly created, and equally quickly consumed and dismissed stories and illustrations. Not a better child, or a more virtuous one, but a happier child whose visual imagination has been nourished so effectively that it has naturally grown in strength and capability. Charlotte Mason understood this. She hung real paintings in her classrooms and trusted children to look at them properly, without condescension and dumbing down, and this principle extends naturally to the illustrated book.

So where has this kind of illustrated beauty and craftsmanship gone?

Not from the world – Chris Dunn is the living proof of that, and he is not alone. But from mainstream children’s book publishing. Browse the catalogues of the major publishers and what you overwhealmingly find, are children’s illustrations optimised for a different set of priorities: clean lines that read clearly as a thumbnail on a screen, bold flat colour that suits a modern interior, and minimalist compositions designed to be glanced at rather than dwelt upon and enjoyed. There are commercial reasons for this – simpler art is cheaper and quicker to commission and reproduce.

The appetite for the richer tradition, meanwhile, has not disappeared, but it has become much rarer and more difficult to find. In the main, work such as Chris Dunn’s has migrated to galleries, to collectors, and to the enormous, passionate communities online who share Beatrix Potter and Brambly Hedge and Wind in the Willows imagery as though it were a living thing rather than a historical curiosity – because for them, it is, and I include myself amongst them.

Beautiful, well-crafted illustration is not dying – it is thriving, just outside the institutions that once made it their stock-in-trade. And there is something both heartening and sad about that. Heartening because the tradition is tougher than the market’s indifference. Sad because the children who would most benefit from it – the ones Charlotte Mason was thinking of, the ones lying on the floor with a book, chin on hands – are the ones least likely to encounter it on the shelves of their local bookshop or library, or increasingly – Amazon.

Imagine a bookshelf where children’s books illustrated with this kind of care were not the rare exception but the norm, and it is entirely within the industry’s gift to make that happen.

I would argue that more expensive illustrated works like Chris Dunn’s didn’t so much become less fashionable as less profitable. Not profitable enough, at least, for the corporate ledger.

In my view, corporate greed has disproportionately influenced the world of children’s book publishing in a negative way, and the biggest losers are of course – children.

What I find most heartening is that even though there are far fewer artists of Chris Dunn’s calibre living and working today, they are out there, keeping the light of the Golden Age of Illustration burning, because the fuel of that light – care, craft and beauty – is impossible to put out.

All illustrations in this essay are © Chris Dunn and are reproduced with his kind permission. You can find more of his work at chris-dunn.co.uk.

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.

The idea is a simple one. Five minutes, a little music, no commentary to speak of: just enough to give you a taste of a place, the way you might catch it if you’d wandered in yourself.

These will not be regular posts, they’ll simply turn up now and then, like a postcard from somewhere good.

I hope you enjoy them. We begin in Surrey on a beautiful spring morning.

Watts Memorial Chapel and gallery is located Compton, Surrey, England – a small terracotta jewel built at the turn of the last century, every inch of it decorated by hand. Just along the lane is the gallery and Limnerslease, the home of George and Mary Watts.

If you would like to read more about the chapel, you can read my accompanying article Seventy Pairs of Hands, here.

I hope you enjoy the visit. - Vincent

Written and read by Vincent Shaw.

One wet and miserable afternoon last November, I was walking across Soho Square in London, when the sky simply gave up pretending and opened. Not drizzle or a shower – soaking, big-droplet, wet rain.

Soho Square is actually Soho gardens, and right in the middle of them is a little mock Tudor cottage, slightly lopsided and very dolls house like in appearance. The cottage has been there, in one form or another, since the 1870s, although the current version was built in 1925 by the Charing Cross Electricity Company, to disguise the entrance to an underground substation. During the Blitz the substation served as a bomb shelter. Now it stores spades, wheelbarrows and garden tools. The cottage is Grade II listed, which tells you something about England – we will heritage-protect a garden shed if it has a good enough story to go with it.

Luckily I was almost upon the cottage as the heavens opened. The cottage’s upper floor overhangs the lower part of the building, and it is an ideal spot for sheltering under during a downpour, so I ducked under the overhang. After fifteen minutes of staring to get cold and bored, and with no sign of the rain stopping, I tried one of the building’s two doors, just out of curiosity, as I had always wanted to see inside, and surprisingly, it opened, and even though I shouldn’t have – I went in.

The inside was just as I thought it would be, a garden shed with a very low ceiling. Against one wall there was a collection of garden tools – spades, rakes, a leaf blower and a hedge trimmer. There was also a large sit-on lawnmower that smelt of petrol and grass clippings. I could also smell seeds and that curious tang-warmth, of compost. On the far side of the room, there was a large, heavy-looking steel trap door, firmly bolted and padlocked shut. On it were a couple of bright neon signs – Danger of Electrocution and Authorised Persons Only – the shaft down to the old substation, presumably.

Meanwhile, the rain continued to hammer onto the roof just above my head, loud and close, the way rain sounds when you’re in a space too small for it. The room was wonderfully snug, and had that particular cosiness of being a dry space whilst the weather outside does its worst, which is one of the better feelings a wet November afternoon has to offer.

There were also stairs. Steep, narrow wooden steps grey with dust – the kind of dust that hasn’t been disturbed in years. I could see from outside that the cottage had low windows on the upper floor. I couldn’t resist it. I just had to go up and have a look.

As I reached the top of the stairs, the rain stopped. Not easing and then softening to a patter. Stopped, as though someone had turned it off. The silence after heavy rain is a very specific thing – it has a ringing quality, that is almost a sound in itself.

The stairs had emerged into a high-ceilinged room, the beams following the shape of the roof, with windows on all sides – the same windows I had seen from the outside. However, there was something very, very wrong with the room. The room was far too big to be inside a mock-Tudor cottage that was little more than a garden shed. I shouldn’t have been able to stand up, and the windows were in the wrong place as well. They should have been at my knees, but they weren’t. How on earth could this room be bigger on the inside than the outside? I crossed over to one of the windows to look out.

Soho Square was not there.

The trees were not there.

The grass was not there!

The benches, the railings, the office buildings with their lit windows – none of it. The London of 2025 had gone. What I was looking at, through rippled and filthy glass so old it had turned yellow, was a street. Narrow, cobbled, and very dark, despite it being the middle of the afternoon. The buildings opposite, leaned towards each other across the gap, timber-framed and jettied, their upper storeys so close that a tall man could have reached across from one window to the other. Everything was black and slimy-looking, darkened by centuries of smoke and weather, until it had turned to the colour of wet charcoal.

The street itself was busy and full of people of all ages. A few filthy looking children artfully dodged between the larger adults, who would occasionally give them a swipe which never connected – the children were far too quick.

Most people moved quickly, collars turned up, heads down, and none of them were dressed for the London I had just left. Robes, mostly – heavy and long, and in colours that might once have been bright but were now darker, most of them a variation of black, or black – with dirt. And hats of every kind. Tall, pointed witches hats, bonnets, top hats, derbies, flat caps. Most of them pulled low over the brow the way a man pulls a cap down when he doesn’t want to be recognised. One old lady was wearing a hat with a brim so wide it looked like an umbrella, but it also looked terribly cumbled, as though it had been sat on it. Everyone’s clothes were threadbare and dirty.

Below me, a woman crossed from one doorway to another without looking up, her heavy cloak held closed at the throat as though whatever she carried beneath must not be seen. Her face, in the few moments I saw it, had eyes that moved nervously from side to side. She had the complexion of someone who had not been outside in daylight for a very long time – a sickly yellow, indoor pallor, like old candle wax.

Passing her, without acknowledgement, was a big, sour-faced, man with a dangerous look as filthy as his overcoat. On his head, he wore an extremely battered top hat that was as grimy as he was. He was pushing a barrow, his hands thick and scarred, and he was missing a finger. On his barrow was a load wrapped in dirty sacking, shifting and settling as the wheels hit the cobbles. For a moment the cloth glowed a faint, sullen red. It then went dark again.

Further along, two figures stood at the entrance of a dark side alley, heads together, hands moving over something held between them that pulsed with an unhealthy yellow-green light. One of them had a long, raw looking scratch running from his temple to his jaw. The other kept glancing up the street and then back to the object, the quick automatic scan of a man who has been caught before and does not intend to be caught again. His robes were patched at the elbows and the hem was stiff with mud.

I stepped back from the window, half tempted to go back downstairs. This was all too peculiar, and I had the overwhelming feeling I was somewhere I had no business to be. The sensible thing would have been to retrace my steps, find my way back down to the lawnmower and the bags of compost, and back out into the reassuring London rain of 2025, but I didn’t. I never do the sensible thing. On the far side of the room, half in shadow, I saw what looked to be a large cupboard. On its door I could see a battered wooden sign, so I crossed over to look. The painted lettering was faded, but still legible. It said.

Knock, and then turn – to the right or to the left. You decide.

I knocked and the door swung inwards. Inside there was a small landing. Stairs led down to both the left and the right. From the left, came the smell of wet grass and rain, and the sound of distant London traffic splashing through the puddles. From the right, came the rotten smell of decaying river mud and the distant trot of horses’ hooves.

The smell of reading is pink paraffin.
My father collected antique Victorian oil lamps. Not a huge number, five or six, and for most of my early childhood they sat unlit on shelves and windowsills, doing nothing in particular but gather dust.

One lamp I remember well. It had a big heavy base, a tall brass decorative column, on top of which was the oil reservoir or font - glass and etched with flowers. Crowning this was the rest of the lamp and the glass chimney. I remember it well because in the UK, during the 1970s, there were winter power cuts, and I learned to read by the light of that lamp.

About ten minutes before the power was due to go off, my father would carefully check and trim all the wicks and fill the fonts with paraffin - pink paraffin, the colour of rosé wine, and I remember it colouring the etched glass flowers of the font. But what I remember most was the smell, and even though I haven’t smelled pink paraffin for over forty years, I would recognise it again in a moment. It was an odd, chemical but at the same time sweet smell, like a cross between petrol and barley sugar, and when the lamps were lit that smell filled the whole room, not overpowering, but there as an ever present, distinctive and quite comforting smell.

The smell changed when the lights came back on and the lamps went cold. The top of the glass chimney had a fine coating of dense black soot on the inside, and the soot had its own acrid scent that was nothing like the warm sweetness of the burning oil. Even now, more than fifty years later, I could tell you the difference between those two smells with my eyes closed.

It turns out there is a reason why these kinds of memories stay with us. Of all our senses, smell is the only one with a direct line to the parts of the brain that handle memory and emotion. Everything else - what we see, what we hear, touch, and taste - gets processed and filtered before it reaches the brain. Smell bypasses that filtering and arrives unedited, and carrying the raw memory with it. Scientists call this the Proust effect, after the famous passage in which the smell of a madeleine dipped in tea sends the narrator tumbling back through decades of memory. Proust got it exactly right, even if he did take several thousand words to describe what most of us experience in the space of a heartbeat.

The smell arrives first. The memory follows. And the emotion that comes with it is complete and unfaded, as though no time has passed at all.

I think that childhood memory is often built on smells that no longer exist.

Before my dad’s paraffin lamps, I remember coal being delivered by a horse and cart. The coalman heaving sacks down from the cart and pouring them through a small hole in the pavement and into the coal bunker below. The noise of it, that rush and clatter, the dust, but mostly the smell. Coal has a smell like nothing else - dense, mineral, sulphurous and ancient. I got into trouble more than once for playing in the coal bunker. It was the smell that drew me in there, not the dirt.

When I was old enough, I was allowed to light the fire. First on the cold grate, newspaper, loosely bundled and newspaper has a smell not unlike pink paraffin. On top of paper, you place dry kindling, and then on top of this, coal.

I loved lighting the fire. It wasn’t that I had a fascination with flame. It was more that it was such a transformative act, and there was an art, a craft to making up the fire. If you didn’t get it just right then the newspaper would go up in flames too fast, going out without catching the kindling. Then you would have to take the fire apart and start again.

And there were stages of smell. The burning newspaper. The resinous bubble of the kindling. And then the coal itself, slow at first, reluctant, before it finally took, smoky and sulphurous. After an hour, when the coal had settled onto its glowing orange ember bed, the whole room filled with that deep, earthy warmth that central heating has never come close to replicating. I remember our chimney sweep too, how the smell of soot was so deeply ingrained in him that it preceded him into a room like an announcement.

These are not nostalgic observations from a man who wishes it was still 1973. Central heating is far better than a coal fire in almost every practical respect, and I do not miss carrying a bucket of ash out to the garden on freezing mornings. But in not having the coal fire, we don’t have the smell of something real happening in the middle of the house.

Everything has a smell and primary school is another distinctive one for me. The particular tang of powder paint mixed too thick in a plastic pot. Coal tar soap in the toilets, that sharp medicinal scent that I can still summon instantly. And whilst not a smell, it is a distinct memory: drinking ice cold milk from a small glass bottle, so cold it gave you brain freeze and smelled of nothing but cold itself.

Every one of those smells is an anchor. Pull on any one of them and a whole memory comes with it, complete and immediate, and more real than any photograph.

For me, this matters because we are increasingly living in a world that has no smell at all. A screen has no scent. A digital photograph carries no trace of the darkroom. An email does not arrive with the faint whiff of the sender’s desk. We are conducting more and more of our lives through a medium that is, from a sensory perspective, completely sterile. Clean, efficient, frictionless, and empty.

I am not saying this to wag a finger at anyone’s screen time. I am typing this on a computer, after all. But I do think it is worth noticing that it is what we lose when our lives become too digital. Not just the pleasure of physical creation, but the smell that goes with it. And without the smell, we lose the anchor that memories often latch onto.

When we are doing something creative - when we bake, paint, carve, read or write - the smell of what we are doing makes a connection so direct it can quite literally transport us back through time.

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.

Charlotte 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.

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.

Charlotte 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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3 months 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.