Goudge's Preface to A Child's Garden of Verse

Full text of Elizabeth Goudge's tribute to Robert Louis Stevenson

1955 edition of A Child’s Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson with an introduction by Elizabeth Goudge.

“Perhaps a preface should be an impersonal thing, but for me to write an impersonal preface to A Child's Garden of Verses is impossible, because it was the best beloved book of my own childhood…”

🌿 Elizabeth Goudge, preface to A Child’s Garden of Verses

Elizabeth Goudge’s love for Robert Louis Stevenson

By 1955, Elizabeth Goudge was a very successful author, and so she was asked to contribute an introduction to a new red cloth edition of Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses. It is a wonderful thing for us that Goudge found that “to write an impersonal preface to A Child's Garden of Verses is impossible.”

When you begin to look back through this collection of poems, it becomes more and more clear that Goudge was heavily influenced by Stevenson’s voice. Goudge’s biographer, Christine Rawlins, explains in Beyond the Snow how much Goudge’s neo-Victorian upbringing was very like Stevensons. Though he died in 1894, his world of nannies and the British upper class was not that removed from the beginning of Goudge’s life in 1900’s Wells, UK.

A Child’s Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson and Smoky House by Elizabeth Goudge

Join us today for a look at Goudge’s preface to A Child’s Garden of Verses…