Earlier this year I wrote an essay called The Sixpenny Fairytale, about how fairy tales learned to dream. You can read that essay here. The essay opens with a place I have long wished to visit – Buscot Park in Oxfordshire, to see the Briar Rose paintings by Edward Burne-Jones.

Well, in July this year I made my pilgrimage.

The only problem was that I visited the place right in the middle of a thirty-four degree heatwave. I am used to living a few yards from the sea where it is nearly always cooler than inland, and thirty-four degrees in landlocked Oxfordshire is hot.

But there was an advantage to the heat. No people.

I spent the morning at Kelmscott Manor, William Morris’s house, and in the afternoon drove the few miles to Buscot to see the paintings I had wanted to see for decades. No doubt because of the heat, the house was virtually empty, and I had the Saloon and the Briar Rose paintings to myself.

I have known these paintings all my adult life, four canvases telling the story of Sleeping Beauty: the knight in the thicket, the sleeping king and his council, the women fallen asleep at the loom, and the princess herself. Burne-Jones finished them in 1890, and Alexander Henderson, later Lord Faringdon, bought them straight out of their exhibition at Agnew’s in Bond Street.

They had always been intended as decoration for the drawing room at Buscot, but when Burne-Jones came to see them not long after they were hung, he thought the room was unsuitable and suggested they be moved to the Saloon. He was not happy about the frames either, or about the gaps between the paintings, plain intervals of wall where the story simply stopped. So he went back to work. He designed a frame of carved and gilded wood to bind the four panels together into a single narrative, and for the spaces between them he painted narrow panels of briar and thorn, continuing the rose motif, so that the thicket runs unbroken from the first canvas to the last.

Standing in the room, you understand the decision immediately. The briar panels link the paintings into one continuous narrative.

I moved back and forth in front of them for half an hour, trying to absorb the place. And what struck me, more than the beauty of the paintings, was the temperament of the man who painted them. Here was a man who had been painting this one story, on and off, for twenty years. He had exhibited the paintings to enormous acclaim, sold and delivered them, and then looked at the finished work hanging in Buscot and decided the job was not done. There was nothing wrong with the paintings themselves, he just felt that the story was not quite complete.

He did the same thing with the six panels of The Days of Creation. He designed the single enormous frame himself, wrote the inscription along the top, and then glued a small card to the back of each painting stating that the picture was not complete in itself, that it was one of a series of six, and that he desired they should never be removed from the frame he had made for them.

Edward Coley Burne-Jones was born in Birmingham on the twenty-eighth of August 1833, in a room above his father’s shop on Bennett’s Hill. His father was a carver and gilder, and made picture frames.

Edward grew up above a shop where his father created beautiful frames, and he learned that a painting, its frame and its setting were one and the same thing.

Six days after Edward was born, his mother died, and his father never recovered. He would look at his son, remember his dead wife, and weep. Edward was raised by the housekeeper, Ann Sampson, whose devotion to him was fierce, close, and suffocating. He was small for his age, and when he started at King Edward’s School he had a miserable time of it as he was terribly bullied.

Along with the bullying and a school he dreaded, he had a grieving father who was emotionally detached, a caring but smothering mother figure, and a city that made ugliness by the ton and cared nothing for beauty, and so, to escape the harsh reality of life, Burne-Jones read – voraciously. The Romantic poets, Byron and Keats especially; Coleridge; the Arabian Nights; Percy’s Reliques and the old ballads; and Sir Walter Scott’s romantic medieval work, which for a boy of that generation was the standard way into the romance of the Middle Ages. Also Ruskin, and by the late 1840s he was reading Modern Painters.

In 1853 he went up to Exeter College, Oxford, to read theology, intending to be ordained and become a priest. Within days he had met William Morris, who was there for the same reason, and they recognised something in each other at once. Both were drawn to the high Anglican revival then sweeping Oxford – to incense, vestments, ritual, plainsong. It was beauty smuggled back into English religion under cover of doctrine.

Together they planned a brotherhood which was to be half monastery and half workshop. They gave it a name: the Order of Sir Galahad.

In 1842, Tennyson had published his Arthurian poems, which Morris new by heart. Ruskin was preaching that Gothic work was morally superior to anything the nineteenth century could produce, and in his book Past and Present, Carlyle had set a medieval monastery against industrial England and found the present age wanting. Burne-Jones and Morris had arrived at a beautiful university of spires and plainsong at precisely the moment when England was inventing a romantic vision of the Middle Ages.

And then Morris came across and bought Southey’s edition of Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, a book Burne-Jones could not afford but Morris could, and after only a short time both men knew it virtually off by heart, reading it to one another in the evenings.

Then, two years later, at the end of a long walking tour of the French cathedrals, Burne-Jones and Morris stood on the quay at Le Havre and decided to abandon the church altogether. Morris would be an architect and Burne-Jones would be a painter. Fom that evening until Morris died forty-one years later, the two men would work closely together and remained very close friends.

Burne-Jones was twenty-two when he decided to become a painter, but he had never had a drawing lesson in his life. What he had instead was a habit of drawing constantly and an absolute conviction about the kind of world he wanted to paint. That world was myth, legend, and above all, King Arthur.

Le Morte d’Arthur had given him a world made by hand. A world where loyalty costs something. A world of quests, a beautiful romantic world rather than the harsh ugly reality of 19th century industrial England. Burne-Jones had found the world he longed for, and he stepped into it, and remained there for the rest of his life.

From 1861 he worked for Morris’s firm, Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Co, and once he started he never really stopped. Something close to a thousand stained glass designs over forty years, most of them going into quiet parish churches around the country. Tapestries, including the Holy Grail series woven for a Staffordshire businessman’s dining room. Tiles, embroideries, mosaics for a church in Rome. Painted cabinets and piano cases. Costumes and scenery for Irving’s King Arthur at the Lyceum. Eighty-seven illustrations for the Kelmscott Chaucer, which he called a pocket cathedral. And the paintings, always the paintings, some of them so large they outgrew the rooms they were meant for.

Galleries, houses, churches, the theatre, books. Burne-Jones was prolific and his romantic vision could be found everywhere.

And he knew exactly what he was doing. A picture, he said, is a beautiful romantic dream of something that never was and never will be, in a light better than any light that ever shone, in a land no one can define or remember, only desire.

And there is one more thing, which I keep coming back to.

Burne-Jones went up to Oxford intending to found a brotherhood named after Galahad – the pure knight, the one permitted to see the Grail. It is exactly the sort of thing a devout, bullied, motherless young man might name his hopes after.

But it was not Galahad he painted.

He painted Merlin, the enchanter trapped by his own longing for a woman who wanted only his power. He took him as his subject in the summer of 1857, up a ladder in the Oxford Union and, before he could properly paint, and he came back to the subject twenty years later for The Beguiling of Merlin.

He painted Lancelot asleep on the chapel step, shut out by his own failings, with the thing he most wants shining on the other side of a door he cannot go through.

He painted a knight who has stopped at the edge of a thicket of roses and never crosses it, and a princess who never wakes.

Burne-Jones almost never paints the moment itself, he paints the moment just before. In my view he preferred the moment before because he was a born storyteller. The moment before holds the maximum amount of emotional suspense, which by it’s nature, makes the painting more captivating. The viewer, unconsciously or not, is already asking the question – what happens next?

Which brings me to The Last Sleep of Arthur in Avalon, which I was lucky enough to see at the Tate in 2008.

Nothing had prepared me for the size of it. It is over six metres wide, with King Arthur lying on a bier beneath a great gilded canopy and surrounded by his court.

Burne-Jones began it in 1881 as a commission and the painting grew until it had outgrown any room that might have held it. He worked on it, on and off, for the last seventeen years of his life, and said of it that he needed nothing but a hill and a sky, and that Avalon had become the place he went to when the world became too much for him. The painting was quite literally a world he could escape to. Towards the end of his life he went out to the studio not so much to work on it as to step into it, and be gone for the afternoon. He was still working on it when he died, on the seventeenth of June 1898, at the age of sixty-four.

Consider what the legend actually says. Arthur is not dead. He is sleeping in Avalon, and one day, when the need is great enough, he will come back. Alone among the stories England tells itself, it is built entirely out of the moment before.

Edward Coley Burne-Jones created a medieval romantic vision around the moment before, a vision that people are still drawn into today, be it in a gallery in London, in a parish church on a Sunday morning, and or in an empty Oxfordshire house on a sweltering July afternoon.

I have begun several of these essays by talking about connections – the unlikely, unplanned convergences that reveal themselves only when you look back across enough time. James Burke made a television career out of tracing them in his Connections series in the late seventies. Well, this essay is another one about connections.

My parents moved to Bognor Regis in 1969. In 1974, I started attending Felpham Comprehensive School, a brand new school, and I was in the first year through the place.

At eleven I did not really have any academic interests, other than reading and art. My first love was the television show Doctor Who. Tom Baker was my Doctor. I never had the hat, but I wanted one, and I did have the ridiculously long scarf that my grandmother had knitted me, which I wore to school with the devotion of a true believer. I had even converted my bedroom wardrobe into a blue police box. I was fascinated by the TARDIS, Time And Relative Dimensions In Space, and what fascinated me most was not the travelling through space but the travelling through time. The idea that you could step into something ordinary and come out somewhere extraordinary. That you could go back and see what people and places were really like.

That is most likely where my love for history comes from. It is also, as it turns out, not a bad description of what happens when you walk into a thatched cottage on a village lane in Sussex and discover what was written there.

But I didn’t know that yet. I was eleven.

I found most of school a massive yawn, even English. I remember trying to get through Graham Greene’s The Quiet American and E.M. Forster’s Where Angels Fear to Tread with my English teacher, and struggling badly with both. However, despite not being in her class, I soon discovered another English teacher when I became involved in the school drama club. Her name was – and still is, at the time of writing, as she is still alive – Beryl Kingston. She started out as an English teacher, but went on to become a bestselling author and has published nearly thirty novels.

Beryl Kingston had arrived in Felpham herself, thirty-five years before I did, under rather different circumstances. She was eight years old in 1939, evacuated from London to Felpham at the outbreak of the Second World War. She would later go on to read English at King’s College London, and it was there that she discovered William Blake and realised that she had been living in his village during the war. By the time I met her, she was teaching English at Felpham Comprehensive School. As soon as I met ‘Mrs Kingston’, I learned that William Blake was her hero.

Beryl Kingston not only taught English, she was also a massive fan of the theatre, which is how I met her, when I became part of her after-school drama club. She wrote, directed and cast the productions herself. I was in several of her plays, including an adaptation of Chaucer’s Wife of Bath – although I cannot for the life of me remember which part I played. What I remember is the thrill of acting in front of an audience. The sense that words and stories could come to life.

That was Beryl Kingston’s gift. She didn’t teach literature as something to be studied. She taught it as something alive and as something you could inhabit.

And William Blake was her first true love, the man was ever present from classroom to conversation. Although it’s over fifty years ago now and the memory is vague, she knew I really liked art and could draw, and I’m sure my first encounter with Blake was when she showed me a print of Blake’s Ancient of Days.

My very first ‘adult’ encounter with poetry was also one of Blake’s, via ‘Mrs Kingston’, and the poem was The Tyger. I can remember the first verse of the poem to this day, which was more than Graham Greene’s Quiet American ever managed.

But the thing that really came through about William Blake was the fact that he claimed he saw fairies in his back garden at Felpham. Also, my eleven-year-old self would swear blind that William Blake, at a dinner party, said to a woman next to him: ‘Madam, I have been looking for a person who disliked gravy all my life; let us swear eternal friendship.’ Yet the only attribution I can find for the quote is Sydney Smith, an English clergyman born in 1771.

In any event, William Blake got through to a dreamy eleven-year-old boy who found most of school a massive yawn, and it did not come from a textbook. It came from a wonderful English teacher who adored his work.

William Blake arrived in Felpham in September 1800 with his wife Catherine and very little else. He was forty-two, depressed, ground down by years of commercial engraving in London, and had been invited to the Sussex coast by the poet William Hayley. Hayley had commissions for him – engravings for his books, portraits for his library, illustrations for his ballads. It was bread-and-butter work, and Blake needed bread and butter. But it was another man’s vision, not his own, and the friction between the two would eventually help drive Blake back to London.

In the meantime, though, Felpham did more than lift Blake’s spirits. It set him on fire.

The cottage was small and thatched, and had been built for agricultural labourers. Blake thought the place was beautiful, and he and Catherine rented it and set to work – not just writing, but making. Blake was a poet, a painter, an engraver, and a printer. He did not just write poems and send them to a publisher; he carved them in reverse into copper plates, letter by letter. He and Catherine inked the plates, pressed them, and then hand-coloured every page – in watercolour.

This matters, because we have spent a century crediting William Morris with the idea that art and craft are not separate things. Morris was right, and he deserves the credit, but William Blake was doing it a hundred years before William Morris was born.

Blake and his wife stayed in Felpham for three years. He wrote much of Milton: A Poem in Two Books. He quarrelled with Hayley, and he had visions on the shore – angels in the trees, the whole of human history unfolding above the sea. And then, in August 1803, a soldier called John Scofield wandered into his garden and Blake, by Scofield’s account, cursed the King. William Blake was arrested and charged with sedition.

He was tried at Chichester, in the Guildhall, in January 1804, but was acquitted. He and Catherine went back to London, and he never returned to the little Sussex village of Felpham. But he never forgot it either. His Felpham years remained, by his own account, the most creatively charged time of his life.

And somewhere during those three years, in that cottage, he wrote a short preface to the Milton poem. It begins: And did those feet in ancient time / Walk upon England’s mountains green?

It would not become the hymn ‘Jerusalem’ for another century – not until Hubert Parry set it to music in 1916, so Blake never heard it sung. He wrote it by hand, carved it into copper, printed it on his own press, and Catherine coloured it. It is the most recognisable poem in the English language, and it was handmade in a village I grew up in, eight miles from a city that would train a teacher who would go on to shape the education of millions of children – Charlotte Mason.

Charlotte Mason taught at the Bishop Otter College in Chichester. The same Chichester where Blake stood trial. The same small cathedral city, eight miles north-west of Felpham, where a poet had been hauled before a magistrate for saying what he thought, and a young woman would later develop a philosophy of education built on the conviction that children deserve the best that has ever been written and made.

Charlotte Mason was specific about Blake. In her writings on what children should encounter in poetry, she did not merely include him on a list. She named him as the standard. Let Blake’s Songs of Innocence represent their standard in poetry. Not a suggestion, not one option among several – the standard.

She knew what she was doing. The Songs of Innocence are not simple poems dressed up for children. They are poems that take children seriously – that speak to them without condescension, in language that is musical and strange and alive. They assume that a child can hold mystery. That a child can meet a lamb and a tiger in the same collection and not need the contradiction resolved. Charlotte’s entire philosophy rests on that assumption: that children are born persons, capable of encountering real things. Blake had taken children seriously a century before Charlotte Mason made it a philosophy. His reasons were not hers – he saw childhood as a visionary state, not an educational one – but the poems he made from that conviction refuse to condescend, refuse to simplify, refuse to explain the mystery away. That is what Mason recognised in them. That is why she chose them as the standard.

I don’t know if Charlotte Mason knew that Blake had lived eight miles from where she taught, and I don’t think it matters. What matters is the convergence – that the poet she held up as the standard for what children should meet, and the place where she learned to teach, and the village where he wrote ‘Jerusalem’, all sit within a few miles of each other in Sussex.

Enter, once again, Beryl Kingston. In the intervening years, Blake’s cottage sat in private hands, slowly decaying. During my school years, I remember ‘Mrs Kingston’ being quietly but continuously outraged about the state of the place. Many years later, still in touch with and taken by Beryl, a small group of us were invited into the house and garden. I remember it being small and pokey, and the smell of damp in one of the upstairs bedrooms due to the thatch being in such a poor state. My abiding memory of Beryl is that she laughed like my grandmother. That, and her continuous efforts to save Blake’s cottage.

The cottage was bought by the Blake Cottage Trust in 2015, but restoration proved agonisingly slow. The building was placed on the Heritage at Risk Register. The roof – Blake’s ‘roof of rusted gold’ – was failing. Rain got in. Timbers rotted. There were plans and counter-plans, local opposition, frustration.

And through all of it, Beryl Kingston, my old teacher – by then in her eighties – would not stop. She wrote about the cottage on her blog, she spoke at local meetings, she called out delays and mismanagement by name. She was not about to watch Blake’s cottage collapse while committees deliberated. Beryl had written a novel about his years there – Gates of Paradise, published in 2006, her twentieth book – and she had won the Blake Society’s Tithe Grant Award in 2014. But it was not the literary connection that drove her. It was the building. The physical, actual, thatched and crumbling building where the work had been done.

Beryl Kingston did not campaign to preserve Blake’s reputation. His reputation is safe, she campaigned to preserve the place where he and Catherine had stood and made things with their hands, because she understood – as Blake understood, as Morris understood, as Mason understood – that the making and the meaning are not separate. Lose the cottage and you lose something that no collected edition can replace.

In early 2024, the roof was on the point of collapse. A new board of trustees formed. By the end of 2025, the roof had been saved – new timbers, new thatch – and the later extensions stripped back to the single storey the Blakes had known. The cottage is being restored for the bicentenary of Blake’s death in 2027.

That is how the tradition survives. Not in heritage plaques or national curricula. Not in institutions, which forget, or in movements, which rise and fall. It survives in the unplanned, unengineered way one person hands something to another and trusts it to find its way. A poet to a village. A village to an evacuee. A teacher to a boy in a school play.

During my school days, I lived a few miles from a cottage where a man had made some of the most extraordinary work in the English language, and for much of the time I walked past it without a second glance. The TARDIS was already there, but at the time it looked like a cottage rather than a blue police box.

Beryl left Felpham long ago. She lives near me now, a twenty-minute walk from the village of Pagham, where I am writing this – in her nineties and still laughing like my grandmother, and still fighting for a roof of rusted gold she has never stopped loving.

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.

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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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

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).

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.’

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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4 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.