ABSTRACT
A writer’s sense of place is unique. Philippa Pearce’s (1985) Cambridgeshire, scene of Tom and Hatty’s magical race on ice skates across the frozen fens in Tom’s Midnight Garden, is as different as can be from Jill Paton Walsh’s (1987) lyrical and sometimes menacing evocation of the same watery landscape in Gaffer Samson’s Luck. Do we, through reading these books, add to our knowledge of the geography of East Anglia? The answer is both yes and no; statistics and facts may remain as hazy as before, but we gain from each writer an unforgettable vision of the area coloured by the sensations, impressions and mood of her book. In the same way, a writer’s sense of an historical period is an imaginative invention that may incidentally inspire and extend historical study. What literature offers us cannot, therefore, be directly harnessed to the service of subject or topic teaching without courting the danger of damaging the integrity of a writer’s intention or a child’s response. Stories, novels, plays and poetry must be read primarily for their qualities of language, imagination and thought so that pupils ‘respond imaginatively to the plot, characters, ideas, vocabulary and organisation of language in literature’ (programmes of study for reading key stage 2).
