The Children’s Book was published by Chatto & Windus in 2009 and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. It is Byatt’s most ambitious novel — a panoramic work spanning the period from 1895 to 1919 through the lives of several interconnected families: artists, Fabians, potters, puppeteers, bankers, and the children who grow up among them.
At its center is Olive Wellwood, a successful author of children’s stories who writes a private fairy tale for each of her many children. This creative gift appears generous but is actually a form of control: by writing each child’s story, Olive determines their identity before they can discover it themselves. The private tales (which Byatt includes in full) are beautiful but insidious — each one shapes and limits the child for whom it is written.
The novel encompasses the Aesthetic Movement, the Arts and Crafts revival, Fabian socialism, the suffragette movement, the sexual experimentation of the Edwardian avant-garde, the Dreyfus Affair, and finally the First World War — which destroys the children whose Edwardian childhoods the novel has lovingly detailed. Byatt’s argument is that the Edwardian cult of childhood (Peter Pan, The Wind in the Willows, the golden age of children’s literature) was both beautiful and deceptive: it idealized childhood while adults exploited, neglected, and ultimately sacrificed children to war.
Collecting The Children’s Book
First edition (Chatto & Windus, London, 2009): Cloth with dust jacket. Booker Prize shortlist.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $25–$60
- Signed copies: $50–$125