allen

This came via calimac: The 14 children's classics every adult should read

Oh yeah?

I read Ballet Shoes but as I recall, the first Streatfeild that actually crossed my reading eyes was Party Frock, okay, not so iconic a work.

I have to confess that I was recommended The Hobbit in my first year at uni in that unprepossessing circumstance of 'bloke I was not terribly impressed with' pressing it upon me.

I was well past childhood when Watership Down became a lapine phenomenon, but have read it.

As far as I can recall, I read Treasure Island when I was 7 or 8 and have never returned to it, perhaps I should.

Have no memory of The Enchanted Wood as such, but am pretty sure Miss S in primary school read us The Magic Faraway Tree one afternoon.

My first contact with Anne of Green Gables was retold in pictures in either Girl or Princess but we subsequently acquired copies of this and ?one or two of the sequels, or were these in the school library?

Little Women: now that one I did read at a very early age.

Ditto the Alice books.

My Family and Other Animals was one of offerings of my parents' book club - how has it become a children's classic?

The Secret Garden and The Wind in the Willows (also the Pooh books which are shamefully missing from this list) were Christmastime special offers from aforementioned book club.

I have never read The Little Prince, though I've osmosed a certain amount about it.

I don't think I read The Railway Children until I was of maturer years: my first Nesbit was The House of Arden, borrowed from Our Friends Along the Street, and I think maybe The Treasure Seekers and The Wouldbegoods on primary school library shelf?

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was a Christmas present (Penguin edition) when I was 10 or 11, and I went on to read the rest via the good offices of the local public library.

These all seem a bit somehow obvious? Without disputing their classic status, it's still a somewhat banal line-up.

Charles Dickens exhibition to shine light on powerful women in author’s life: 'Novels only ‘reinforced Victorian stereotypes’ of meek women to give readers what they wanted, says curator'.

Oh, come on.

Query, did readers (as opposed to various gate-keepers in publishing houses, Mudie's and other circulating libraries. etc) want meek women?

(Do I need to cite Victorian novelists who did quite well out of women who were not meek.)

I would also contend that any input from women in Mr D's life was going to filtered through a lot of his Own Stuff, and the article actually points out some of the things like His Mummy Issues.

There is no-one in the novels at all like Angela Burdett-Coutts, whom one suspects very unlike saintly Agnes Wickfield (and married a much younger man at an advanced age), in fact as I think I have complained heretofore, he was happy to work with this renowned philanthropist while the women philanthropists in his novels are mean and merciless caricatures.

One can make a case that he did worse than 'dilute' the women he knew when portraying them on his pages.

Also I am not sure what the 'debate' is over his relationship with Ellen Ternan!