A Valley Grows Up

A Valley Grows Up is a history book for children, written and illustrated by Edward Osmond and published by Oxford University Press in 1953. It features an imaginary English valley over the course of seven thousand years, from 5000 BCE to 1900. Osmond won the annual Carnegie Medal, recognising the year's best children's book by a British subject.[2] In more than seventy years only a handful of nonfiction books have been so honoured.

A Valley Grows Up
Cover of first edition
AuthorEdward Osmond
IllustratorOsmond
Cover artistOsmond
CountryUnited Kingdom
SubjectEngland from 5000 BCE to 1900
GenreChildren's non-fiction, landscape history, cultural history
PublisherOxford University Press
Publication date
1953
Media typePrint (hardcover)
Pages81 pp. (first edition)
OCLC4676338
914.2
LC ClassDA110 .O72[1]

Description

Ten full-colour double-page paintings and numerous black-and-white drawings combine with a simple, fluent text to tell the story of the changes in a valley's landscape and its gradual settlement from prehistoric to Victorian times. "[A]n uninhabited stretch of forest ... [becomes] a hillside, a swamp, a village and eventually the bustling Victorian town of Dungate."[2] The same bend in the river, rounding a hill, appears throughout, as on the cover.

Origins

Edward Osmond, a well known illustrator, was asked to help students with learning difficulties: "I illustrated on a blackboard my lectures by means of an imaginary village which, together, we created 'from scratch'."[2] The educational effectiveness of the concept in seizing the imagination led to the idea for a picture book. The text was always secondary. Marcus Crouch describes the resulting book as "an imaginative interpretation of history".[3]

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See also

References
  1. "A valley grows up" (first edition). Library of Congress Online Catalog. Retrieved 2012-09-06.
  2. Carnegie Winner 1953 Archived 2009-06-08 at the Wayback Machine. Living Archive: Celebrating the Carnegie and Greenaway Winners. CILIP. Retrieved 2018-02-27.
  3. Marcus Crouch, Treasure Seekers and Borrowers, Library Association, 1962, p. 131.
Awards
Preceded by
The Borrowers		 Carnegie Medal recipient
1953		 Succeeded by
Knight Crusader
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