Children’s book reviews: Dickensian child poverty meets Victorian scientific advancement

Pet O’Connell rounds up a selection of the latest children’s books, featuring history, rhymes, and the surreal

The Last Boy by Eve McDonnell (Everything with Words, €10.50)

The death of 12-year-old George Brewster in February 1875 was statistically unremarkable among the huge numbers of child chimney sweep fatalities in Britain and Ireland over the course of two centuries.

Climbing boys risked their lives daily by climbing hot, narrow flues and if they didn’t suffocate or burn to death, they were at risk of developing deformed bones or scrotal cancer.

Brewster’s demise, after becoming wedged in a chimney at Fulbourn Mental Asylum in Cambridgeshire, was significant, however, as it hastened the passing of laws banning the use of child labour for sweeping chimneys.

Now, the story of the last climbing boy has become remarkable in a completely new context, as Wexford author Eve McDonnell transposes it from Cambridgeshire to a fictional Irish scenario but in the real surroundings of Birr Castle, Co Offaly.

“I hold a very special place in my heart for George Brewster,” says McDonnell. “As a writer, I wondered what might have happened if, on that fateful day [of his death] the proverbial light he saw at the end of the tunnel was not the end but the beginning of his adventure, and so I wrote this story.”

Though still enslaved as a sweep to Master Wyer, as he was in 19th-century Cambridgeshire, McDonnell re-imagines Brewster as a child genius mathematician whose calculations allow him to predict a coming meteor storm.

Brewster, who sweeps the chimneys of Birr Castle, eventually comes to the notice of Lady Rosse, inspired by the real 19th-century photographic trailblazer and amateur astronomer who developed the darkroom at the castle which survives to this day.

Lady Rosse and Brewster both have big and seemingly impossible dreams, which cross trajectories at Birr Castle’s famous telescope, the Leviathan.

Serving as a meeting point between the possibilities of Victorian scientific advancement and Dickensian child poverty, infused with a dash of magic, The Last Boy is at once a story of darkness and hope, as Brewster wishes upon each star that he will be the last climbing boy ever.

McDonnell’s first novel to be set in Ireland, it brings together the hardships of the sweeps’ apprentices, more familiar in an English setting from Oliver Twist and Kingsley’s The Water Babies, and the threat of famine looming large over the townspeople of Birr, who fear the portents of the meteor shower for their precarious livelihoods.

As in her previous children’s novel The Chestnut Roaster, she succeeds in disconcerting her readers by the layering of fiction over fact, prompting them to make frequent historical checks on the veracity of the actions of real characters in an imagined world.

With ghosts also haunting The Last Boy, the reader is required to keep in mind that anything, whether supernatural or scientific, is always possible.

I See the Moon and the moon sees me: favourite rhymes from an Irish childhood by Sarah Webb and Paul Delaney (O’Brien Press, €19.99)

“One for the robin with a chest so red, two for the daisies that I love to thread.

“Three for the ladybird with spots on its wings, four for the blackbird who merrily sings.”

Sound familiar? Though West Cork-based writer ER Murray’s poem ‘Garden Song’ is newly written, it slips so comfortably into the style of counting rhymes of the “one for sorrow, two for joy” and “one, two, buckle my shoe” ilk as to be easily mistaken for an original of the species.

Its inclusion, along with Lisa O’Neill’s lullaby ‘Goodnight World’ in Sarah Webb’s selection of “favourite rhymes from an Irish childhood” may erroneously suggest a somewhat older vintage.

For the young child listening to ‘Garden Song’ read aloud on repeat, however, the metre and rhyme, the music of the verse, and the images it conjures are more important than whether the rhyme was recited by their parents or grandparents before them.

As it happens, Murray’s poem reflecting the sights and sounds of a garden in bloom paints a more familiar picture of an Irish childhood than the London scenes of ‘Oranges and Lemons’ or ‘Do you Know the Muffin Man’, also included here.

Children’s rhymes, of course, observe few geographical boundaries, and Irish children are likely to be just as happy chanting about an English bell tolling “you owe me five farthings” as would their UK counterparts, none of them familiar with farthings as a means of currency.

Webb’s latest collection of childhood rhymes then, is an eclectic mix reflecting a diverse range of historical and societal influences, from the Scottish ‘Aiken Drum’ and Doctor Foster’s ill-fated trip to Gloucester to Spike Milligan’s ‘On the Ning Nang Nong’ and American-composed song ‘When Irish Eyes are Smiling’.

Drawing on the National Folklore Collection’s Schools Collection and including ‘The Dublin Street Boys’ and ‘Aon, dó, trí, luichíní istigh sa tuí’, there’s something old, new, or borrowed here for everyone.

The World Between the Rain by Susan Cahill (Everything With Words, €10.50)

The rain in West Cork can be unrelenting, pelting in slanting sheets over the rugged landscape, but imagine if it was possible for a person to slip between the raindrops and into another world.

That is what appears to have happened to Marina, age 13, a year after her father died at sea.

The family has been immersed in silent grief ever since, but when her mother moves from an obsession with house cleaning to a state of sleep so deep that she cannot be woken, the life of Marina and her younger sister Seri is turned upside down again.

They and their sleeping mother are taken under the care of a grandmother whom the girls have never even heard mentioned, let alone met, despite the fact that she lives nearby. 

Stranger still are the tales their new grandmother Ursula tells them of gods who once lived among the human population of Ireland and have now faded from memory.

Marina, a dreamer mocked by her more confident little sister for once believing she had seen a creature from the other world in Cork city, is about to discover dream-weavers, gods, and demi-gods when during a wild storm she enters the watery world of Ishka.

Beneath the water lurks a monstrous presence, and as Marina attempts to find her way back home she must confront her own nightmares, which are entangled in a web of unspoken guilt and trauma over the loss of her father and the happy family life she once knew.

As portals to other worlds go, the West Cork rain is up there with Platform 9¾ and the wardrobe into Narnia in terms of imaginative plot devices, as Clonakilty native Susan Cahill takes a deep dive into grief in this surreal floating fantasy, co-starring some curious chattering frogs.

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