Alice to the Lighthouse

This is a study of the relation between children's literature and writing for adults. Lewis Carroll's "Alice" books created a revolution in writing for and about children which had repercussions not only for subsequent children's writers Stevenson, Kipling, Nesbit, Frances Hodgson Burnett and Mark Twain but for Virginia Woolf and her generation. Virginia Woolf's celebration of writing as play rather than preaching is the twin of the Post Impressionist art championed by Roger Fry. Dusinberre connects books for children in the late-19th century with developments in education and psychology, all of which feed into the modernism of the early 20th century.