HUMAN CHARACTERS

The great children’s books are those which most fully accept our fallible humanness. We’re so familiar with Alice that we tend to forget what a snobbish little nasty brat she was. And truly Mary in The Secret Garden is as nastily human a child as anyone could find. Hans Christian Andersen deals with death, the death of the body but worse, the death of the heart—the death of the body of the little match girl, the death of the heart in the Snow Queen.