Far away and close to home: Children’s toponyms and imagined geographies, c. 1870 – c. 1950

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Highlights

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    Children’s invented toponyms are a neglected topic in historical geography.

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    Children’s toponyms provide insights into how they relate to landscape.

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    Landscape features that matter to children lack adult names.

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    Transfigurative names reflect class, gender, literary and imperialist discourses.

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    Transfigurative names highlight the reciprocity of security and growth in childhood.

Abstract

This article draws attention to a neglected topic in historical geography: the names children give to places that matter to them. In doing so, it seeks to make a contribution to the rapidly developing field of children’s geography and to bring together two rarely connected research areas: geographical and psychological research into children’s play and literary research on cartography in children’s fiction. Although early studies of the spatiality of children’s play emphasized the need for research into children’s toponymy, there has as yet been little scholarly response. The present study focuses on a specific form of children’s toponymy current in early and mid twentieth-century England: transfigurative naming. This is where familiar places in the child’s home neighbourhood are given exotic names, sometimes in an ongoing, processual dialogue with fictional cartography (as in Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons series). Investigation of four life-writing case studies suggests that transfigurative naming drew on discursive sources that were contingent on time, space and class, but that there were nevertheless important commonalities in the circumstances in which it arose and the purposes it served. The most striking of these was that transfigurative naming was deployed by children and youths in stable affective and residential contexts seeking to explore and extend their ‘home range’. It is argued that this may reflect a developmental dialectic between security and growth. The article concludes by considering some of the methodological and conceptual challenges scholars will need to address to achieve a more comprehensive knowledge and understanding of children’s toponymns.

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.

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