Published as part of Oxford's Classical Presences series, this book offers a fascinating consideration of the long and entwined relationship between childhood, children's literature and classical texts. As such, it is of interest not only to those with a passion for Classics and classical reception studies, but to scholars of children's literature and childhood studies too. As the authors acknowledge in the preface, their work is situated at the intersection of classical reception studies and children's literature studies, and it highlights ‘a fundamental affinity between the two fields, both of which are concerned with the construction of a past that is inaccessible but still with us, at once alien and familiar’ (p. vii). This observation encapsulates a main preoccupation of the book, which is to explore the various ways in which the Classics have been presented to (or withheld from) children since the mid-nineteenth century, and how early encounters with the Classics shaped the childhoods of different authors, influencing in turn the constructions of childhood within their literary texts. Laced throughout with various writers’ reflections on what encountering the Classics in their youth meant to them, the book moves beyond a survey of historical developments in writings about antiquity for children to present a study of ‘the lifelong consequences of childhood encounters with the Greco-Roman past’ for a selection of authors and their audiences (p. vii).

In their introduction, Murnaghan and Roberts point out some of the connections between children, childhood and stories about antiquity, including the fact that both childhood and the classical world have been idealised as states that are untainted by later corruption. Antiquity, they note, ‘has often been figured as the childhood of humanity and viewed as an era to which all children have a natural connection’ (p. 5). Throughout their study they investigate how understandings of this connection have shaped how the Classics have been presented to children by adults and how children in turn have received them. This survey is not exhaustive, but rather aims ‘to sketch general trajectories, identify persisting challenges and strategies, and highlight particularly telling or interesting examples’ of works that ‘represent the classical past for children or evoke childhood experience of that past’ (p. 7). Although further limited in its scope to the period 1850–1965, the authors successfully present a comprehensive overview of their topic while revealing that it is still rich ground for further study.

The authors begin by considering some of the early sources of classical mythology that children had access to in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, including those for which young readers were not the intended audience, such as Tooke's Pantheon. Chapter 1 then moves on to an in-depth examination of the influential editions of classical myths for children published by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Charles Kingsley in the 1850s. While acknowledging that these writers from opposite sides of the Atlantic ‘jointly championed the idea of classical myth as a fitting subject for children’ (p. 42), Murnaghan and Roberts are more interested in drawing attention to the differences between Hawthorne's and Kingsley's treatments of classical myth and what these say about their specific views of the ancient past and nineteenth-century children's connections to it, how these reveal different understandings of gender and how the different nationalities of the two authors shape their retellings of classical myth.

Chapter 2 continues the discussion of Hawthorne and Kingsley by considering their ongoing influence on children's reception of the Classics. This discussion of the ‘cultural legacy’ (p. 47) of these collections contains many interesting accounts from historians, authors and librarians regarding how these texts impacted their own childhood readings and later understandings of the myths. Particularly interesting is the discussion of how Kingsley's approach to classical myth, which emphasised ‘classical heroism and its modern lessons’ (p. 51), was in keeping with ‘a general emphasis on heroic self-sacrifice in British fiction for children during the years leading up to World War I’ (p. 52). Kingsley's The Heroes, argue the authors, played a ‘formative role for those who fought in World War I’ (p. 52), and this claim is supported with accounts from contemporary writers of Kingsley's impact on their responses to militarism, from being a source of inspiration to causing disillusionment and bitterness in the face of a brutal war.

Of further note in the second chapter is the examination of different illustrations that accompanied the many editions of Kingsley's and Hawthorne's works that were published over the course of a century, a discussion that continues in Chapter 3. This study of illustrations furthers our understanding of the changing reception of classical myths in different periods within the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as well as of the shifting responses to the collections by Kingsley and Hawthorne, which became classics in their own right, as Murnaghan and Roberts demonstrate. Chapter 3 also offers an insightful discussion of how developing theories of human and social evolution, along with the related disciplines of anthropology and archaeology that arose in this period, had an influence on myth theory, and on understandings of children and what constitutes appropriate literature for them. The chapter's lengthy discussion of the American treatment of myth in the first half of the twentieth century is also particularly valuable. In this section the authors move beyond their earlier focus on collections of classical myths for child readers, to examine full re-workings of classical stories for modern contexts. That such re-workings are also consciously and deliberately a means of Americanising European culture is expertly revealed in the discussions of such texts as James Daugherty's 1938 picture book Andy and the Lion and Robert McCloskey's 1943 children's story Homer Price. These two celebrated children's authors, it is argued, wrote works ‘that fully integrate the cultural heritage of classical antiquity into a vision of down-to-earth American life as typified by white, non-urban communities – in both cases by situating classical myths and fables in archetypal small towns and allying them with the American traditions of the tall tale’ (p. 108). The analyses of works by McCloskey and Daugherty provide excellent examples of how classical culture continued to be reworked and repurposed by writers in the twentieth century to suit new environments and serve different agendas.

In Chapter 4 the focus shifts to historical fiction for children, with a specific interest in its role in constructing American and British national identity. One section that stands out is the exploration of how the topic of slavery in the ancient world was treated in twentieth-century American texts, given that nation's own problematic history. The comparison of some works of historical fiction to American frontier narratives, like Little House on the Prairie, also offers an interesting example of how twentieth-century child readers were invited to connect with stories set in the classical world. This consideration of representations of history continues in Chapter 5, but with a focus specifically on books for girls and the ways in which authors ‘compensate for what is missing or unsatisfactory in the historical record and construct ancient experiences of girlhood that answer to the presumed aspirations of their modern readers’ (p. 204).

Chapter 6 is something of a departure from the rest of the book in that its focus is not on children's literature, but rather on how works for adults (primarily modernist texts by the likes of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce) reveal the ongoing influence of childhood encounters with the history, language and stories of the classical world in the lives of adults. With detailed discussions that range from considering Joyce's Ulysses as a means by which the Dublin of his youth is granted ‘the stature and significance of myth’ (p. 226) to discussing the influence of myth on Sigmund Freud's invention of psychoanalysis, this chapter at times feels a bit disconnected from the preceding discussions, but will certainly be of interest to scholars of the modernist period. Chapter 7 is also somewhat different from the rest of the book as it is the only one to focus on a single text. It is not entirely clear why H.D.’s The Hedgehog warrants this level of attention, especially as the authors acknowledge that it ‘has never had a wide readership’ and has ‘limited circulation and fame’ (p. 255), but the chapter nevertheless offers an interesting analysis of a text that highlights what is often a blurred boundary between literature for children and that for adults.

Childhood and the Classics grapples with a large topic that crosses geographic, temporal and disciplinary boundaries. In spite of this ambitious scope, the authors do an excellent job throughout of situating their discussions within the literary and historical context of each period being addressed. They draw connections between texts and authors who are particularly concerned with the Classics and antiquity, and the broader developments within children's literature taking place at the same time. Consequently, alongside its close readings of classical tales and literature directly inspired by antiquity, the book offers insightful discussions of such wide-ranging topics as receptions to myth in the wake of both WWI and WWII, changing conceptions of masculinity, developments in childhood education, the emergence of archaeology, the growing power of twentieth-century America and burgeoning feminist writings. As such, it is a work that will appeal not only to scholars of childhood studies and classical studies, but also to those with a wider interest in important literary developments of the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries.