ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the strength of a particular tradition of intertextual reference, from Richard Jefferies, through Arthur Ransome to Aidan Chambers and Terry Pratchett. The first part of the book contrasts Matilda's virtuously voracious reading with the uncivilised, not to say barbaric, TV-watching non-readers of her family. Early British children's books featured children reading as part of the evangelical or educational message as in Mary Louisa Charlesworth's Ministering Children, whereas in the twentieth century, fictional characters who read are often seen as inferior, deviant beings nerds. Oswald notes: It is the only decent book I have ever read written by Toady Lion's author. His characters are deeply imbued with their reading it enriches and underpins their adventures at almost every point. It can be argued that since the 1950s, with the gradual inundation of communication by television and, later, computing and the Internet, that the position of reading fiction in the cultural or educational world has shifted.
