3.3 A text of its time?

Children reading these books today may find the idea of Tom being quarantined with measles and sent to live with relatives quite an alien one (the first measles vaccine was introduced in 1963, and measles then became a fairly rare disease in the UK). Horse riding lessons may also be outside the normal experiences of many children reading these books.

More generally, Tom’s Midnight Garden and Marianne Dreams present the reader with a very white, middle class, anglophone world. For white children growing up in Britain, this may not be something that they notice. However, many child readers presented with these or similar books may feel excluded on grounds of ethnicity or simply not fitting into the nuclear families presented as normative. While still regarded as ‘classic’ texts (Tom’s Midnight Garden was the winner of the 1958 Carnegie Medal in Literature and Marianne Dreams was adapted into an opera in 2004), these books could be described as quintessential middle-class white English children’s novels.