Am I very wrong in thinking that make-believe must be the most universal of all childhood games? We all traveled to far-away worlds, didn’t we? And made-believe to be this or that in castles, jungles, and star-ships? With or without dolls, toy soldiers or plush animals, alone or with other children, recreating stories heard, or making it up, rehearsing work, motherhood, war, fear, society – always halfway between a technical test of life and unbridled What If…

And after all, the similarities between make-believe and theatre, make-believe and fiction are there for everyone to see: a story told from a premise, suspended disbelief, and an exploration of possibilities within the game’s rules. No wonder then, that we often find make-believe scenes in books…  Children’s books, especially – but not just –  and all the more when some budding writer or youthful storyteller is involved.

Louisa May Alcott must have loved the game – and makes frequent and varied use of it in her stories. The March sisters, for instance, used to play as children a simplified version of the Pilgrim’s Progress, reenacting Christian’s travels from the cellar, doubling as the City of Destruction, up to the Celestial City in the attic. And it is left unclear whether the educational game was Jo’s notion – but the scene where the sisters remember it serves to characterise each of them and their upbringing. Under the Lilacs begins with a long scene of make-believe: a birthday party for a favourite doll. reenacting a safe, well-ordered little world – until the hero, a little runaway orphan, arrives to unsettle play, reality and sense of safety. And what about the tableaux vivants in Behind the Mask, where the Scottish governess seems to lose herself in the fiction with her pupil’s handsome brother… only, it isn’t clear just who is actually making-believe… By the time we know the facts, the scene will have acquired a rather different meaning.

But sometimes there is nothing especially complex about it. Take for instance Michael Ende’s Momo, where a group of children plays an epic make-believe adventure, turning a disused open air theatre into a ship… The episode mostly serves to establish each kid’s role within the group – but it vividly brings to life the exhilarating estrangement of those wonderful afternoons that encompassed centuries and went by in a heartbeat…

Possibly my favourite example is from Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill where, on a beautiful Midsummer twilight, little Dan and Una play out a much abridged version of Shakespeare’s play – and they do it on an ancient hill, in the middle of a Fairy circle to boot! It isn’t quite clear (either to them or us, I suspect) whether they are playing theatre or at being the characters – but, in a very meaningful whirlwind of play, literature and magic, Puck himself obeys the summons, and visits the children to show them the history of the Land…

And I only half-remember an Italian children’s book from the Eighties. I forget either title or author – but then it mustn’t have been an especially memorable book, except for this one scene where a couple of young boys slipped into the garden of an abandoned house to recover their football, and happened on a pair of girls playing “Queen and Princess”, with long skirts and paste jewelry. “But what are they doing?” one boy asked. “Playing make-believe,” the other explained. “It’s a girls’ thing.” And not only it was a girls’ thing, as opposed to the boys’ football – but, by the end of the book, the girls commented, as part of their coming-of-age, on the lost appeal of playing “Queen and Princess”. It goes without saying that no similar renunciation of football was required of the boys to “grow up”…

Then again, make-believe is firmly relegated to childhood – and not always in a positive way, either.  Think of Conrad’s Lord Jim, with the heroic daydreaming of his childhood* becoming a mocking prophecy of doom. Or think of Peter Pan – an uninterrupted, particularly magical make-believe that is, in the end, a parable of lost innocence.** Or even that insufferable little Adèle in Jane Eyre, actively discouraged from playing ballerina, because her absent French mother – a dancer – is most definitely not an acceptable role model.

I must say that this disapproving view of make-believe strikes me as odd (or else quite revealing) from Charlotte Brontë, considering the fundamental role that make-believe had in her personal and literary life. And not just her own: the deep and enduring devotion of the four Brontë siblings to their imaginary kingdoms borders on obsession, and Emily was in her late twenties when she wrote in her journal that

Anne and I went on our first long journey by ourselves together – leaving home on the 30^th of June – Monday sleeping at York – returning to Keighley Tuesday evening, sleeping there and walking home on Wednesday morning – though the weather was broken, we enjoyed ourselves very much except during a few hours at Bradford and during our excursion we were Ronald Macelgin, Henry Angorra, Juliet Angusteena, Roseabelle, Ella and Julian Egramont, Catherine Navarre and Cordelia Fitzaphnold escaping from the palace of instruction to join the Royalists who are hard driven at present by the victorious Republicans. The Gondals still flourish bright as ever. I am at present writing a work on the First Wars – Anne has been writing some articles on this and a book by Henry Sophona. We intend sticking firm by the rascals as long as they delight us which I am glad to say they do at present.

And we are back where we started, aren’t we? Make-believe and fiction. After all, Emily Brontë’s writings, prose and poetry, are all in some way based off the imaginary kingdom of Gondal, that she created together with Anne. And Charlotte’s Jane comes from several Angrian heroines, all of them plain and independent girls… I don’t think I’m overstating the case by much by saying that those games, that shared unreality and that daydreaming made the Brontës the novelists they were.

If make-believe is children’s fiction, then fiction is grown-up make believe – and Emily and Anne’s journey to York is there to remind us that the line between the two can be quite blurry indeed.

___________________________________

* And I would argue that, to a lonely child, daydreaming counts as make-believe.

** More cheerful still when you accept the theory that Peter was based off Barrie’s older brother, dead at thirteen, and kept alive and eternally young in the bereaved mother’s mind…