Why the Moomins are fiction’s perfect family

Tove Jansson’s Finnish troll creations have beguiling adventures with a host of strange characters. But, at heart, their strength comes from being a loving family

Thinking about all the “family” favourites which inevitably accompany this season, I was struck by how few families featured in my childhood classics. The Pevensie children are evacuated, away from their parents, to Professor Kirke’s in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Neither the aloof banker Mr Banks nor his slightly drippy wife (she only becomes a suffragette in the Disney film) have any adventures with Jane, Michael, John, Barbara and Annabel and their nanny, Mary Poppins. While Wendy, John Napoleon and Michael Nicholas all go to Neverland in Peter Pan, their parents do not – and it’s heavily implied in the eerie final chapter when Peter visits Wendy as a new mother, with the moonlight glinting off his milk-teeth, that parents can’t go to Neverland. Huckleberry Finn, Harry Potter, Frodo Baggins, Anne of Green Gables and Heidi are all orphans.

There are good reasons why so few children’s books feature adults. Part of their charm is in children finding their own way, their own moral compass, without an intervening grown-up. The threats are threats because there is no bigger person to pick you up.

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