Clemency suggests

Email registration

Free weekly email update

Great products and special offers for Spectator readers

Click here for great value reader offers and events

Click here for the latest Spectator Wine Offers

Meat and drink for the imagination

Judith Flanders

Saturday, 13th April 2002

Ask any bookish adult, and you will get a very specific 'first book' story. Where, how, what. After all, what other social constructs did you begin aged five or so, and are still performing? Music? Probably not much interest until adolescence. Theatre? Film? Too sporadic in childhood to be important. Television? It's what you did when you weren't doing anything. Everyone reading this review has spent more of their lives reading than they have performing any other type of learned behaviour.

Francis Spufford, in his entrancing new book, The Child that Books Built, understands the addiction, and he returns to his early reading to analyse what his choices reflected, from the 'Once upon a time' stories that were read to him, right up to Borges in late adolescence, where he read stories about reading stories. The books he liked - Laura Ingalls Wilder, E. Nesbit, C.S. Lewis, Maurice Sendak - are classics from the bottom up: classics because children crave them. They feed our imaginations as deeply as milk feeds our bones. They warm us, they explore and explain for us, they socialise us. Hazlitt wrote, 'Without a knowledge of things at a distance from us, we judge like savages or animals from our senses and appetites alone.' Spufford agrees: 'Adjust for the fact that the book in question will be Blyton's The Island of Adventure instead of Hume's Theory of Moral Sentiments, and his manifesto applies.'

Two-year-olds can tell the difference between a story and a narrative of a real event; they understand the concept of rhymes before they understand most words. (Listen to a post-Beatrix Potter child repeat 'Hunka-Munca', then experiment with 'Hunka-Munca-Punka-Wunka'.) They know that some things are certain: Mummy will kiss them goodnight, cake is better than broccoli, and that, no matter how many times he huffs and puffs, the Big Bad Wolf will not be able to blow the third Little Piggy's house down.