Tom's Midnight Garden - Themes and Literary Significance

Themes and Literary Significance

The book is regarded as a classic, but it also has overtones that permeate other areas of Pearce's work. We remain in doubt for a while as to who exactly is the ghost; there are questions over the nature of time and reality; and we end up believing that the midnight garden is in fact a projection from the mind of an old lady. These time/space questions occur in other of her books, especially those dealing with ghosts. The final reconciliation between Tom, still a child, and the elderly Hatty is, many have argued, one of the most moving moments in children's fiction.

In Written for Children (1965), John Rowe Townsend summarized, "If I were asked to name a single masterpiece of English children's literature since ... it would be this outstandingly beautiful and absorbing book." He retained that judgment in the second edition of that magnum opus (1983) and recently repeated it in a retrospective review of the novel (2011).

Researcher Ward Bradley criticized the book for "romanticising the world of the 19th Century aristocratic mansions, making it a glittering 'lost paradise' contrasted with the drab reality of contemporary lower middle class Britain.(...) A child deriving an image of Victorian England from this engaging and well-written fairy tale would get no idea of the crushing poverty in the factories and slums from where mansion owners often derived their wealth"

Time slip became a popular device in British children's novels in that period. Other successful examples include Alison Uttley's A Traveller in Time (1939, slipping back to the period of Mary, Queen of Scots), Ronald Welch's The Gauntlet (1951, slipping back to the Welsh Marches in the fourteenth century), Barbara Sleigh's Jessamy (1967, back to the First World War), and Charlotte Sometimes by Penelope Farmer (1969, back to 1918).