A New York Times Book Review of the 150th anniversary newly annotated edition for adults of THE WATER-BABIES: A Fairy Tale for a Land-Babies, by Maria Tatar
The golden age of children’s literature — beginning in the 1860s with Charles Kingsley’s “Water-Babies” and Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” and ending with the publication of the Winnie-the-Pooh books in the 1920s — earned its name by turning stories into luminous contact zones for adults and children. A million golden arrows point to Neverland, and you can reach Oz by passing through a gate studded with glittering emeralds. The heft of “Or else!” in cautionary tales about children going up in flames after playing with matches was replaced with the incandescent beauty of “What if?” Writers aspired to lure children into fantasy worlds that would leave them, as Frances Hodgson Burnett put it, “breathing quite fast with excitement, and wonder, and delight.”