The Young Pretenders

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'The Young Pretenders' (1895) by Edith Henrietta Fowler (1865-1944) is a children’s book whose sophistication, humour and ironies are nowadays appreciated by both children (aged about 9-13) and adults.At first Babs lives most contentedly in a large house in the country with her grandmother, her nanny and her brother (their parents are in ‘Inja’). Then their grandmother dies and they are sent to live in Kensington with their uncle and his wife. Having run wild in the country, spent hours with the gardener (very like the gardener in The Secret Garden) and had a great deal to do and to think about, suddenly they are abandoned in a world of artifice and convention and are expected to behave artificially and conventionally. ‘It all came of so much pretending. But then it was simply impossible for the children not to pretend. It would have been so dull to have lived their child lives only as the little Conways, when they might be pretending that they were such exciting things as soldiers or savages, cab-horses or mice.’ Babs cannot, of course, stop playing, and the central theme of the book is that she has not learned how to dissemble (as opposed to playing ‘let’s pretend’) but must learn how to do so.