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School memories: new trends in the history of education, edited by Cristina Yanes-Cabrera, Juri Meda and Antonio Viñao

Just as revealing are Reynolds’ analyses of aesthetically radical children’s books. Her wonderful eye for detail yields insightful close readings of verbally and visually experimental texts that celebrate ‘play and the imagination’ (p. 103) and ‘address children as re-makers of the future, celebrate them as artists, introduce them to ideas of interiority and subjectivity, encourage them to embrace modernity, and provide them with insights into contemporary ways of understanding and representing the world’ (p. 129). Other chapters, especially the chapter on architecture, combine aesthetics and politics, and she also discusses landscape (‘Rural Radicalism’) and ‘Health, Fitness and Sex Education’. Works covered in these chapters also point to the ways in which writers ‘positioned children’s and young people’s bodies in the drive for social improvement’ (p. 148), either literally, by discussing actual bodies, or by considering children’s imbrication in the physical landscape or in the built environment. A concluding chapter examines visions of the future in radical children’s books, and highlights ways in which various visions of the future imagined in radical children’s literature were ultimately incorporated into the British welfare state. Reynolds notes, early in the book, that her ‘aim is not simply to recover forgotten material but also to begin the work of assessing how engaging with this material affects understanding of both the history of children’s literature and of these years in British arts and letters more generally’ (p. 4). Challenging cultural historian Richard Overy’s assessment of the same period (The Morbid Age: Britain and the Crisis of Civilisation, 1919–1939, London, 2009), she concludes: ‘for a significant group – those who created and were the first readers of the radical works discussed here – it was not a “morbid age” but a time of optimism, engagement, effort, and achievement’ (p. 216). Reynolds’ book is full of rich evidence to support this claim. It is also an excellent resource for those wanting to read further on the topic, with a comprehensive bibliography that includes a list of radical children’s books from the period (complete with discussion of criteria used to determine whether a text qualified) and a list of secondary sources that suggests the ambitious scope of Reynolds’ framework. Historians of education and those interested in children’s political socialisation will strongly benefit from reading this book, as, of course, will scholars of children’s literature.