FEATURE

Children’s books often fly beneath the cultural radar, belying their ability to work powerfully on the social imagination. In the McCarthy-era US, for instance, they provided both a safe haven and a platform for writers and illustrators whose work was out of favour with the establishment. Subsequent studies suggest that the progressive views many American children absorbed through their books shaped the generation that protested against the war in Vietnam, supported the Civil Rights movement and campaigned for equal rights for women.

The fact that children’s books can have a strongly formative influence upon the young has often attracted the attention of new leaders and regimes. In the early days of the Soviet Union, Lenin and his followers harnessed the power of children’s books to shape culture. Some of the artistically vibrant work that resulted from co-opting leading writers and artists is currently on exhibit at London’s House of Illustration with the title, A New Childhood: Picture Books from Soviet Russia. In interwar Britain too, a group of socially and aesthetically radical children’s books underpinned the work of making Britain a progressive, egalitarian, and modern society. But unlike their Soviet counterparts, these books have since remained a largely hidden secret, with most scholars of the period overlooking them altogether.

In fact, there were many children’s books published during that time that sought to use writing for children and young people to create activists, visionaries and leaders among the rising generation. These radical children’s books were created by writers and illustrators drawn from many quarters, including working class socialists, the liberal intelligentsia and prominent cultural figures, from Hugh Gaitskell through JBS Haldane and WH Auden. Drawing on the latest ideas from the spheres of science, politics, economics, pedagogy, social policy and literature, as well as the fine and applied arts, they encouraged young readers to look with fresh eyes at how people were living, interacting, and organising them-