THE CHILDREN’S BOOK
By A.S. Byatt
Vintage. 624 pages. £7.99
ISBN 978-0-09953-545-4
Philip is discovered hiding in the basement of what will become the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1895. He has run away from the Potteries with their poverty, disease and smoke with a desire to make something beautiful. He is discovered by other children and is drawn with the reader into the overwhelming and confusing world of middle-class Bohemia.
Phillip meets an intertwined group of families who live in Kent and London; Olive Wellwood is an adored writer of clever children’s stories and her husband Humphrey a left leaning banker. Their large family roams wild in the Kentish Weald, material for the stories, but not nutured; Benedict Fludd is a terrifyingly unpredictable potter whose wife is drowsy with laudanum and whose daughters seem remote and cowed. Between these two families are other individuals and groups: writers, curators, and anarchists. The atmosphere of the times is portrayed memorably, with all its preoccupations with ideas of nature, primitive life and art.
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