It is sometimes said that the main contribution of Edith Nesbit to children's literature is that she anchored it firmly in real life. This may seem a surprising claim, given the magical creatures in some of her books, but the concept is comprehensible when we consider the other works that have survived from the first decade of the twentieth century.

Until Nesbit, indeed, the great classics of children's literature were fantasies, as in the wonderful works of Lewis Carroll –as was seen in the recent film of Alice in Wonderland, where Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter and Helena Bonham Carter as the Red Queen were much more memorable than Alice herself.

Carroll, of course, belonged in the nineteenth century, but the first few years of the twentieth century brought forth two other classics which are still considered at the very apex of children's literature. Interestingly, and perhaps understandably, they were both individual works, and nothing else their creators wrote came anywhere near them in either interest or popularity – quite unlike in the cases of the other writers of children's books I have dealt with so far, and those who dominated the scene in the second half of the century too.

The first of these classics was J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan, which was in fact a play that has been retold and represented in many forms. Most notable of these is its annual reincarnation as the best loved of pantomimes, that strange cultural artifact the British indulge in at Christmas.