The Children

Alice Meynell turned her poet's eye upon the children around her, and what she saw quietly dismantled everything adulthood assumes about innocence. This collection of essays, written in 1897, offers neither sentimental portraits nor psychological studies. Instead, it presents children as complete beings: a little girl composing a letter with grave formality, a boy inventing words for things the language has forgotten, a child confronting fear with disarming honesty. Meynell listens to children with the seriousness they demand and discovers in their observations a wisdom that adulthood, in its hurry to grow up, has traded away. Her prose moves like conversation itself, precise and unhurried, capturing the fleeting grammar of childhood before it dissolves into memory. For readers who suspect that something essential was lost in the process of growing up, these essays offer the chance to recover it, briefly, in the company of children who have not yet learned to speak as if their words matter less than they do.