Alan Garner · Susan Cooper · Diana Wynne Jones · Ursula K. Le Guin · Madeleine L’Engle · Nicholas Fisk · Robert Westall
THE SIXTIES AND SEVENTIES SAW A FLOURISHING OF genre-writing. The broad sort of magic-and-monsters fantasy, descending from folktale but given its modern shape by Lewis and Tolkien, was taken on and developed by a new generation of writers. A lurid seam of science fiction and even horror material started to enter the mainstream, too. Children’s writing was entering one of its long slaloming swerves between high fantasy and something like realism.
Folk memory has the sixties as the age of sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll – all things we think of as adult or late adolescent preoccupations. But it was an era of change for children, too. Postwar make-do-and-mend was giving way to what became known as the consumer society. Supermarkets colonized the high streets, mail-order shopping became the rage, and after the Conservative victory in the 1959 election a cartoon in the Daily Mail pictured Harold Macmillan sitting in peaceable conference with a whole array of consumer durables.
Children were also becoming consumers. Pocket-money was a concept originally popularized in the work of the parenting guru Sidonie Gruenberg (1881–1974), who argued in 1912 that a regular allowance would help children learn how to manage money.* It had been establishing itself, for better or worse, throughout the first half of the twentieth century. A 1943 survey reported disapprovingly that “school children in the poorer districts had far more pocket-money than those of the better class,” and that they were spending it on sweets, comics and ice-cream.* The historian Hugh Cunningham notes that in the US the 1960s “the balance in the purchasing of toys switched more decisively towards children.”† There’s every reason to suppose that the same change took place across the Atlantic.
More than that, there was a cultural transformation under way that made a few popinjays in feather boas on Carnaby Street look like a sideshow: television had become general. Mary Poppins had been replaced by the one-eyed childminder.
* Sidonie Gruenberg, Your Child Today and Tomorrow (Lippincott, 1912), [p].
* Women’s Group on Public Welfare, Our Towns (Oxford, 1943).
† Cunningham, op. cit., [p].