Alice in Wonderland

Who would be a child made famous by a book? A.A. Milne’s son, immortalised as the teddy-trailing Christopher Robin in the ‘Pooh’ books, became a global celebrity and was remorselessly bullied at school for the privilege. Alastair, the spoilt offspring who inspired Kenneth Grahame’s Mr Toad in The Wind in the Willows, felt moved to step in front of a train at university in return. And it is perhaps best for Alice Liddell that she never lived to read contemporary concerns about Lewis Carroll’s true motives for immortalising her in his Wonderland. This cost to children for enabling, even fuelling, an adult’s artistic ambition, is the starting point for the American YA author Melissa Albert’s first novel for adults, The Children.

‘If Eve had had a spade in paradise, we should not have had all that sad business with the apple,’ claims the narrator of the novel Elizabeth and her German Garden (1898). The author, Mary Annette Beauchamp, eventually adopted the pen name Elizabeth von Arnim, merging her identity with the fictional character she had created. Both Elizabeths lived in Nassenheide in Pomerania (now Rzedziny, Poland), but whereas the fictional one had a spectacular garden, with a majestic clematis ‘Jackmanii’, giant poppies and delphiniums, the real Elizabeth, according to E.M. Forster (who was briefly employed as a tutor to the von Arnim children), did not have much of a garden at all.