Far away and close to home: Children’s toponyms and imagined geographies, c. 1870 – c. 1950
Section snippets
Transfigurative naming in children’s literature
Transfigurative naming has been a common trope of children’s literature since the late nineteenth century.33 The best-known example is Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons and its sequels. Ransome’s child protagonists invent a complex transfigurative toponymy for landscape features around a lake that
Transfigurative naming in children’s play
The toponyms children invent and use while playing are elusive even in contemporary settings. Identifying sources that can yield information about specific historical toponymic practices such as transfigurative naming is still more difficult. Indeed, I only became aware of transfigurative naming in a non-fictional context as a by-product of another research project, on the experience of rural landscape in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century England.40
Class, empire, gender and transfigurative naming
Although from a very different social background to Holmes and Rix, William Hallam’s diaries reveal some striking similarities in his relationship to the local landscape. This is reflected in his toponymy, which, although it does not feature any fully developed examples of transfigurative naming, has much in common with it, as well as some interesting differences. Just as with Holmes and Rix, and, for that matter, as represented in Swallows and Amazons or The Far Distant Oxus, Hallam’s
The roots of transfigurative naming
In key passages in her book, Cresswell looks back on her childhood experiences of Dartmoor. As with the extract from Hallam’s diary, these do not feature fully developed examples of transfigurative naming, but there are revealing similarities in the emotional and associative pattern, especially with regard to the dialectic between exploration and security, wilderness and home. Central to this in Cresswell’s case was her relationship with her father, the Reverend Richard Cresswell, to whom she
Conclusion
Why do children give their own names to places? At the simplest level, children like adults need ways of referring to places that matter to them. Landscape features valued by children, such as climbable trees, often lack adult names. As Hart, Heft and Ross have emphasized, children’s spaces are often minutely differentiated, and need to be named as such. Furthermore, children may not know adult names even where they do exist. These considerations, however, do not explain the use of
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Hazel Sheeky Bird, Simon Sleight, David Stack and three anonymous reviewers for perceptive comments; Hilary Matthews for references relating to commensality; John Chandler, Helen Dodd, Ollie Douglas, Ruth Facey, Nicholas Haigh, Miles Ogborn, Erica Tinsley, Blaise Vyner and the Andover History and Archaeology Society.