I like the Beano, but I approve of iconoclasm always: I had him read School for Dads, in which useless Dads are re-educated. I would be worried if he was still reading the Beano in his forties but, in a way, I know he will be. He already covets his father’s Viz.

I want him to be a reader almost more than anything else. I want him to imagine the edges of the universe. Books are powerful enough to be dangerous: they can ruin or save you. I am very careful about his reading, because he is so open to it.

He has maps, history and fiction, and some dubious books from my husband’s childhood, which all the counsel the perfect happiness of slotting into a Protestant ethic by the age of seven without faltering. Due to this, he technically knows how to manage a sawmill. But how can I complain? I was so drugged by Enid Blyton’s suburban politesse that I am still undoing the damage. The class system is everywhere is children’s fiction. It is all over Harry Potter. At least Dennis is an antidote to that.

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In praise of uncynical children's books

By Tom Chivers

But as with adults, so with children: there is poison. I hate the Usborne That’s Not My… series. That’s not my fairy, reads one; the fairy is then subjected to a blunt, and very unfair critique: “that’s not my fairy, her wings are too fluffy. That’s not my fairy, her hair too frizzy. That’s not my fairy, her crown is too smooth”. Her crown is too smooth? Others discuss the inadequacies of mermaids, unicorns, elves and even witches, as in ‘that’s not my witch, she isn’t hereto-normative enough?’

Young readers find no ecstasy, then, in these stories — what’s wrong with the fairy? — but only a nagging absence of something. It is the interior monologue of an unhappily married but prosperous woman, which is possibly why so many people buy them. It is literature to incite lack, and it is worse than advertising, because they are not buying a fairy, although if you read too many books like this, you will probably try. Books at least should have ambition, but these don’t; they are infant reading for tiny, soon-to-be unhappy capitalists.

Then there is the superhero genre, which was invented to make nerdy Jews feel better. It’s a genre of denial, a poke of an unhappy man with a stick. I disapprove, but I can’t hide them from him; there is just too much marketing. Every third child in our village is Iron Man, who should really be in psychoanalysis, and the rest are Spiderman, who I can’t bear to analyse for obvious reasons. (He spurts things).

My objections are stylistic, too: a punch is not a sentence. They make him violent and silent — like them — and it’s depressing when a book is completely outdone in characterisation and feeling by a film starring Lego people. Everyone, I tell him, knows that Bruce Wayne is Batman. They just don’t tell him because they feel sorry for him because he doesn’t have any parents.

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Lessons in landing a rich husband

By Tanya Gold

There are, among the dross, glorious things; but I worry that I appreciate them more than he does. Two of Julia Donaldson’s books are masterpieces: Charlie Cook’s Favourite Book and Tiddler, who single-handedly stopped my husband from eating (Little) Johnny Dory: such is the power of the word.

Charlie Cook tumbles into books. He reads a book in which a character reads a book; and in that book a character reads a book; and so on and on, and all back to Charlie Cook. Tiddler is — perhaps I had post-natal madness but I am sure that I am right — both a sophisticated rumination on the art of the novelist and a warning of the dangers of a life that is only lived in the imagination: a small, grey fish, a story-teller — a sort of fish Hilary Mantel — is so “trapped inside his story” he risks his life for dreaming. I adore Tiddler. I see him.

I really want him to read is fairy tales because of their protective magic. They prepare a child for a world of murder, cannibalism and cruelty: surely nothing can frighten a child who has imagined himself inside the gingerbread cottage? Fairy tales are older than gods we invented to protect ourselves from the very fears that they describe; and if you read fairy tales, I suspect, not much can harm you.

But something has happened to fairy tales since I read them. Their marketing has been polluted by the Disney genre: it plagiarised, painted pink, and destroyed. Fairy tale books look like Disney books and my son resists reading them because he thinks they are for girls; he sneers at Cinderella like an ugly sister in a Dennis wig. Gender-specific marketing is awful and profitable and it’s everywhere. It’s like Saudi Arabia in the children’s department. The violence he is offered — dinosaurs and trucks, and most horribly, a splicing of the two into dinotrucks (what?) — seems almost less awful.

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He is willing to read subversions of fairy tales, which miss the point: why be something as dull as cynical at six, when you could travel into myth? He has The Three Little Superpigs and The Three Little Wolves and the Big Bad Pig and a Goldilocks parody whose title is too long to type but, since he does not know what he is supposed to be laughing at, how can he get the joke? I will try the Brothers Grimm on him. If I have to tear off the cover off, no matter.

Two things make me hopeful. I made him watch The Princess Bride and was pleased that, like the boy in the film hearing the story of the princess bride, he was initially repulsed by the kissing, but he stayed for the torture, and he loved it.

The other cause for hope is that we live in west Cornwall. There is a very specific mythology here, and it is celebrated in the stories we buy at the Edge of the World bookshop in Penzance, which has a Cornish myth section. We bought the story of Tom Bawcock, a legendary Mousehole man who went to fish in a storm because the village children were starving, and his cat Mouser, who subdued the storm with song.

If he can see the harbour in Mousehole where the village folk stood in the wind, lighting Tom Bawcock home, he will know the depth of the myths below and around him, all the way to the edges of the universe, and he will, perhaps, write his own myths; just dressed, for now, as Dennis the Menace.

You can find these images in even newly published material. Yet landline telephones with rotary dials were last sighted when I was learning my A B C, most planes haven’t had propellers on their noses for decades, and the last passenger steam train to run in these isles delivered its valedictory “choo-choo” in the summer of 1968. Let’s not even get into what farms look like in children’s fiction versus what they look like in the modern world.

Yet we say to our kids: this is what a train looks like, this is what a phone looks like, this is what a plane looks like. And, being kids, they go: cool, okay. And soon, perhaps, they start drawing these things themselves — with their cute Victorian-era fountain pens, obviously.

Meanwhile, fairy tales and nursery rhymes plunge children into a medieval Albion or a heavily-forested Mitteleuropean never-was. Here are worlds where spinning wheels are a thing; water comes from wells; princes are expected to marry princesses; woodcutters, rat-catchers and huntsman are honourable lower-middle-class occupations; and bears and wolves — rather than, say, off-road motorbikes — are the main thing to be nervous about meeting in the woods.

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Why are children's books so ugly?

By Mary Harrington

The oddity of this is, I think, too seldom remarked on. We register the anachronism and pass over it, as adults, in the same way that we almost unthinkingly shift literary genres. But I bet it confuses the hell out of a five-year-old, at least to begin with.

And yet it also, perhaps, gives them a little head-start in understanding that reality is a moving target; that stories flow out of previous stories and follow a logic that’s at least as much to do with the logic of genre as it is to do with the so-called real world; that, as the poet Elizabeth Bishop put it, “our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown”. In other words, that ease and adeptness with which we adults shift literary genres: we learn it in childhood.

Reading is a form of travel, it’s sometimes said. More specifically, it’s time-travel; and especially in the reading children do. I’m not just talking about books about actual time travel — though my childhood was enriched enormously by Terrance Dicks’s Dr Who novelisations, by A Wrinkle In Time, by time-bending science fiction from Ray Bradbury, Nicholas Fisk and Stephen King and by the timeslip adventures of my beloved X-Men.

I’m talking, more, about this way in which children are bombarded by anachronism. On the one hand, we encourage them to read the classics. I remember being impressed when my daughter was reading something like The Borrowers (lots of bodkins and thimbles and coal fires, IIRC) or Anne of Green Gables or something by Beatrix Potter, and breezed past a mention of someone “putting the door to”. I mean, blimey: I don’t think anyone has put a door to in the last 100 years. WTF’s a parlourmaid? WTF’s a parlour?

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The world needs curmudgeons

By Sam Leith

On the other hand, even modern children’s stories tend to be retro. Like I said, reading is a form of time-travel. Let us not forget that all children’s books are written by adults who draw on their own childhood memories — necessarily at least a decade or two out of date. And they draw on literary conventions and genres which go back further than that. Harry Potter — steeped in the long traditions both of fantasy and of boarding school literature – gives us a Hogwarts that more resembles an early modern than a modern boarding school, all grand halls and suits of armour, arcane rituals and old-fashioned clothes. His Dark Materials is pure steampunk. Even Burglar Bill and Mog are deeply retro.

And the Beano! My eight-year-old son is devoted to this weekly comic, which was first published in 1938. They have done much to modernise, but there’s only so much you can do. Teacher has lost his mortar-board and cane (still present when I read the Beano in the 1980s), but the Bash Street Kids are still basically 1930s schoolchildren, with their collars and ties and Danny’s trademark peaked cap. Minnie the Minx still wears a tam o’shanter, for heaven’s sake. Fish and chips still appear, iconographically, in newspaper, teachers use blackboards, and catapults and conkers are as likely to feature as Nintendo Switches.

I haven’t yet chanced on one that contains a traditional uniformed park warden with sharp elbows, a stick with a spike on it and a fanatical obsession with keeping off the grass — but they loomed large in the Beano! of my childhood even though they had long since vanished from the outside world.

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Children's literature has lost the plot

By Polly Mackenzie

Change, when it has come, has tended to be forced on the comics by the realisation that some of its laughs are #problematic. My son, who has been Googling the history of the comic, wondered why Dennis wasn’t constantly pitted — as he used to be — against Walter the Softy. “To avoid charges of homophobic bullying,” I did not say.

Readers are no longer expected to laugh at Walter’s mincing ways; and as for Plug, Fatty and Smiffy, whose entire raison d’etre was originally to be pilloried for being ugly, overweight and dim — let us say that their identities are treated a little more sensitively these days. It’s a standing miracle that the Native American caricature “Little Plum” has not been entirely erased from history — though he no longer says “um” instead of “the”.

All of this is, I think most of us would agree, progress. But it’s surface tinkering. It doesn’t much alter the very profound ways in which, even if you change Little Plum’s vocal tics or give Gnasher a Kong instead of a bone, you’re essentially introducing children to imaginative worlds which are in many ways deeply out of date.

Is that a bad thing? Quite the opposite. It just shows how much more varicoloured and strange — how much more plural — are the worlds that children are learning to navigate even as they learn to read. It embeds not just the memories of adult writers but the folk memories of the tribe in the stories that we learn. And in turn, as our children grow up with their own image-hoards full of angry parkies, steam-engines and single-prop planes, and as some of them become writers, they will pass those folk memories on to the next generation.