Rereading childhood favourites: a blessing or a curse?

As a university student seeking some comfort amidst a term of baffling medieval texts, I found myself searching my childhood bookshelves for some familiar favourites: Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden. To my shock, they appeared to have changed in the intervening years and not necessarily in ways that I liked.

I first read Northern Lights when I was 12 and so, as an adult, I was truly shocked to realise that my favourite adventure novel, filled with wondrous mystical references to dæmons and alternative universes, was in many ways a philippic against organised religion. As a young reader, I had not an inkling as to the philosophical and political messages Pullman was using his text to convey. Now that doesn’t mean to say that I no longer enjoyed it; in fact, it was brilliant to engage with the story on a deeper level and I actually ended up writing one of my university dissertations on the series, but it felt like a completely different book!

However, the most horrifying of all these nostalgic encounters has to be The Secret Garden, which appeared to have become something approaching imperialist propaganda since I’d read it as a child. Behind the fairytale of Mary’s revival at the hands of the glorious power of nature lurks racist stereotypes and assertions of British supremacy. Whilst there is still much to love about the novel, I cannot honestly say whether I would feel comfortable reading it to my own children, when the time comes. For me, this experience begged further questions around the (perhaps unwanted) responsibility that children’s authors have in educating their readers, as well as that of parents in framing conversations around difficult or complex texts, if indeed we still choose to read them.

Luckily, there are a host of captivating children’s authors working currently to create the nostalgia of the future and whilst you may choose to dive back into the classics of your childhood, read with caution, as you might not be prepared for what you find!