The small publishing house, The Hornbook Press, was
founded in 1999. My desire to write about William
Wordsworth's attitude to education first developed in
the late 1960s, when I was head of the English department
in a comprehensive school in Sheffield. At that
time I used the school holidays to write novels about
urban life for teenagers. I first expressed some
of my feelings about the relevance of Wordworth's ideas
to contemporary issues in A
Song for the Disco (Bodley Head 1976), but it was
not until I had retired from the classroom that I could
write more extensively.
I spent the next eight years
carrying out the research necessary for
what was published as Wordsworth and
Education.
I chose the name 'Hornbook' because this basic
learning and writing device evokes the village schoolroom
in which William Wordsworth himself was reared, and
for which he had so much affection. Part of my
love of Wordsworth and his Lakeland countryside springs
from my own early memories of Wharfedale and family
visits to Derwentwater. We managed to get around on
foot or used bicycles, but for the longer journeys,
buses and trains were all we knew. I grew up in
a privileged, middle-class world, comfortable and
secure despite world war. But countryside then
was much closer to far more people and more immediate
to any class than it is now. To put it at its
simplest - the rural landscape has shrunk.
Lucky Children is my study of four
children's books, and the second title to be published
by The Hornbook Press. These four books from 1943 share
one one quality: the rural England I took for granted
sixty years ago. They describe communities of
a 'Wordsworthian' kind set organically inside an agricultural
landscape that now seems quaint or 'old-fashioned'.
It is a landscape in which wild-life and history flourish
for children, such as in David Severn's Crusoe stories
where the four protagonists explore it under the inspiring
guidance of a Thoreau-esque young man who longs to throw
off the chains that bind him to the city. It is
a landscape that is not difficult to view either nostalgically
or with much regret situated, where it is, before the
arrival of motorways, supermarkets, t.v. advertising
and the culture of the child as consumer.
Barry Pointon 2004
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