Tom's Midnight Garden is a children's fantasy novel by English author Philippa Pearce. It was first published in 1958 by Oxford University Press with illustrations by Susan Einzig. The story is about a twelve-year-old boy, Tom, who, while staying with his aunt and uncle, slips out at midnight and discovers a magical, mysterious Victorian garden where he befriends a young girl named Hatty. The novel has been reissued in print many times and also adapted for radio, television, cinema, and the stage.

Pearce won the annual Carnegie Medal from the Library Association, recognising the year's outstanding children's book by a British author.

Margery Fisher wrote in 1961 that "as a child's story it is magnificent. It is at once philosophical, swift and gay. The conversations of Hatty and Tom are natural, the incidents probable and presented with beautiful clarity. The style is impeccable—loose jointed and flexible, colloquial when the occasion demands, at other times rhythmical and poetic."

In Written for Children (1965), John Rowe Townsend summarised, "If I were asked to name a single masterpiece of English children's literature since [the Second World War] ... it would be this outstandingly beautiful and absorbing book".

Researcher Ward Bradley, in his review of various modern stories and books depicting Victorian British society, criticized Midnight Garden for "romanticizing 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 would be a popular device in British children's novels in this period, as featured in successful works 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), Clive King's Stig of the Dump (1963, with a final chapter slipping back to the making of Stonehenge), Barbara Sleigh's Jessamy (1967, back to the First World War), and Charlotte Sometimes by Penelope Farmer (1969, back to 1918).

Allusions

The historical part of the book is set in the grounds of a mansion, which resembles the house in which the author grew up: the Mill House in Great Shelford, near Cambridge, England. Cambridge is represented in fictional form as Castleford throughout the book. At the time she was writing the book, the author was again living in Great Shelford, just across the road from the Mill House. The theory of time of which the novel makes use is that of J. W. Dunne's influential 1927 work An Experiment with Time.

Film, TV or theatrical adaptations

  • Dramatised by the BBC three times, in 1968, 1974, and 1988 (which aired in 1989).
  • 1999 full-length movie starring Anthony Way
  • Adapted for the stage by David Wood in 2001.

Publication history

<!-- is this useful? will a more complete publication history be useful? any should document the interior illustrators if not the cover artists -->

  • 1958, UK, Oxford University Press (), Publication date: 31 December 1958, hardcover (first edition)
  • 1992, UK, HarperCollins (), Publication date: 1 February 1992, hardcover
  • 2001, Adapted for the stage by David Wood, Samuel French ()

2007 recognition

Since 1936, the professional association of British librarians has recognised the year's best new book for children with the Carnegie Medal. Philippa Pearce and Tom won the 1958 Medal.

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  • Tom's Midnight Garden House for Sale at The Independent