A much, and unjustly, neglected writer, Lucy Clifford was, in her time, friend to such writers as Kipling and Hardy and Henry James and Darwin. The only affordable collection available, it seems, is the clumsily printed Oneiros one, with the grotesque phantasmagoria of d m mitchell to accompany the tales. They’re ostensibly children’s stories, cautionary and fabular, but boiling within them is a kind of terrible dread; in ‘The New Mother’, children called Blue Eyes and Turkey, and an unnamed infant, live with their mother in a woodland cottage – the father is away at sea. Returning from the village one day, after another fruitless quest for a letter from the father, they come across a curious, feral girl (who declares herself ‘very rich’) who speaks to the little people she says live in her strange musical instrument (which she calls a ‘peardrum’) and who she will reveal only to naughty children. Blue Eyes and Turkey announce their intention to be naughty to their mother, who says she would then have to leave them and ‘send home a new mother, with glass eyes and a wooden tail’. And that is what happens. That is exactly what happens. The closing paragraphs left me aghast.

First published in The Anyhow Stories, McMillan, 1882 and in The New Mother and other stories, Oneiros, 2012