ABSTRACT
There is a long history of writing about families in children’s literature, whether these families are supportive and loving or chaotic and miserable. Until the 1960s ‘a middle-class viewpoint was taken for granted in the English family story’ (Avery in Hunt, 2004: 456). There was an exception: in 1937 one of the best-loved classic family stories about a poor but contented family, Eve Garnett’s Family At One End Street, was published and won the Carnegie Prize. Puffin brought out an edition in 2004 with Eve Garnett’s original illustrations and with an introduction by Julia Eccleshare. Children from about age seven or eight enjoy having this read aloud. What is the appeal of a book written more than seventy years ago? I think there is something intriguing about a large, lively family in which the seven children have ‘to-weareach-others-clothes-right-down-to-the baby’. And children being reared in more cautious times no doubt marvel at the freedom of the Ruggles children to go about on their own and sometimes get into scrapes. There is also a strong sense of place and of the wider family in the story. Not everyone is a fan. Some find the book patronizing in its portrayal of the less well off. But, as Gamble and Yates point out, most domestic stories before this one concentrated on better off families and we need books about other families too. Even the family who have descended into more straightened circumstances than they were used to in E. Nesbit’s The Railway Children are able to have help with the housework (Gamble and Yates, 2008: 85).
