A forgotten Victorian children’s book helped me grieve my father

The stories in Mrs Leicester’s School, written by a woman who killed her own mother, were suffused with grief, and finally triggered mine as I was teaching a class of students When my dad went into hospital for what would be the final time, shortly before Christmas last year, I had been finishing up a lecture series on early children’s literature for the university where I teach. My dad had had a drinking problem practically my whole life, but his alcoholism had worsened across decades. Then ...

By Chris Townsend