Accommodating the Overlooked: The Restorative Power of the "Child's-Eye View" in British Postwar Children's Literature

Abstract: This article examines "miniaturization" and what we might term the "child's-eye view" in three British children's novels from the 1940s and 1950s: T. H. White's Mistress Masham's Repose (1946) and Lucy Boston's The Children of Green Knowe (1954) and The River at Green Knowe (1959). It argues that these fantasies of miniaturization posit the playful child as a solution to, rather than a victim of, the literal and discursive broken homes that characterized postwar Britain and that home in these novels is a fantasy structure through which authors envisage potential reparation for the ruptures of war. In their depiction of unstable space, these fictions can be productively connected to the wider discourses of regeneration that operated around children and the welfare state during the postwar period in Britain.