Eve Cynthia Ruth Garnett's The Family from One End Street (1937), a pioneering novel about the life and times of the working-class Ruggles family, assured her and the Ruggleses a place in the history of children's literature. The book was really the first work of children's literature in the twentieth century that for a young audience (ages seven and upward) seriously represented working-class family life. E. Nesbit had touched briefly on working-class themes in Harding's Luck (1909). Books for young children, like Constance Howard's Ameliaranne and the Green Umbrella, had appeared in 1920. Howard's story is similar to Garnett's; both have daughters of washerwomen as child heroines. Despite these early efforts by Nesbit and Howard, it was Garnett's book that, at least in 1937, authentically reproduced working-class conditions in children's literature. Along with the middle-class Walker and the Blackett families from Arthur Ransome's famous Swallows and Amazons series (1930-1947), the Ruggleses became...