Published in 1939, this is by Alison Uttley (1884-1976).

It's the story of Penelope Taberner Cameron. Born and raised in Chelsea, she's a somewhat lonely youngster, prone to illness, and often left to herself by her more robust brother and sister. She delights in stories about the past, loves rummaging in her mother's chest of old things, and has a gift for inventing stories about the items she unearths there. She's what her sister calls "fey", full of imagination, and prone to discerning the ghostly and unearthly.

The three children are sent on holiday to relatives who own Thackers, a farm in Derbyshire. And that's where Penelope discovers that she can move backwards and forwards between the present (the 1930s) and the past (the 16th century, when a thriving Thackers community already existed).

It's actually a children's book, but it's a very intelligently written children's book, and therefore works quite well for adults too. I was interested in some of the comments on this quality:

1. "Whilst this is ultimately a children’s story, the broad range of complex emotions it portrays feels very adult."

2. "This is a fearlessly well-told story in the manner of something very eternal in British children’s literature; complex, challenging, wildly magical, ferociously melancholic..."

3. "One of the things I like so much about this book is the way that it shows a kind of continuity between past and present: the people, for example, change little over three hundred years; the countryside is the same and many of the methods of working the soil and caring for the animals do not change. Even the same, local words are used; and I particularly like that Uttley does not pander to children in explaining such things, but uses the words which are appropriate anyway... The book is partly fantasy and partly pastoral idyll -- it is, in my opinion, much more than 'just' a children’s book."

I never read it as a child, but I think I would have loved it. (What is it about the Elizabethan period that fascinates children? I remember being very keen on a story involving a Tudor house, and a ghost called Chloe -- which, at the time, I thought was pronounced Cher-low.)

Why read it now? Well, initially because of its Derbyshire connection. Uttley (originally Alice Taylor) was born at Castle Top Farm, near Cromford. (She also studied at Manchester University, my first-degree uni, and lived in Ashburne House, which later became Ashburne Hall, my first undergrad residence.) And the area featured in the book includes Wingfield Manor, where we already knew that Mary, Queen of Scots, had been intermittently imprisoned.


A corner of Wingfield Manor, November 2024

Uttley explains the topography quite carefully in her Foreword:

"All my early years were spent at the farm across the hill-side from the small manor-house I have called 'Thackers' in my story, and often I climbed to the crest and looked down the well-known fields to the church tower with its emblazoned shields which rose from among the barns and haystacks of Anthony Babington’s birthplace. My father talked of Anthony Babington as if he had recently lived in the old farmhouse of his neighbour. He spoke of the secret passages underground which he had entered in his own childhood. The tunnels had been filled in, but the memory remained. Country tradition is strong, and they say that Anthony Babington tried to help the Queen of Scots to escape from Wingfield along these hidden galleries to the little manor farm. This unsuccessful plot took place two years before the great plot which shook England and brought the Queen to the block and Babington to the gallows."

It's this tunnelling episode that forms the central action of A Traveller in Time.

It seems that the model for Thackers is Dethick Manor (a great destination for our next Derbyshire foray...). The farmhouse, and the pursuits of its inhabitants, both in their 1930s and 1580s contexts, are beautifully and evocatively described. This is definitely one of the strengths of the book.

There's also plenty of tension, as we learn of Anthony Babington's dangerous devotion to the imprisoned Mary, and his plan, once she is moved to Wingfield Manor, to dig her out.


An illustration from the version available at Internet Archive

The time travel element is also managed very impressively. It starts with little ghostly glimpses of a bygone era, and artefacts that seem to have a special resonance for Penelope. Then she walks through an unfamiliar door in Thackers, and straight into the past. Time in the present always stands still while she's in the past, so her visits are dream-like, and she feels she has been there more times than she can consciously remember. We are constantly worried, as is she, that one day she might not be able to return to the present, but she feels a real kinship with her family of many centuries ago, and finds herself irresistibly drawn back. Sometimes, as she just peers into the past, rather than visiting it, the more susceptible characters of that time perceive her as a ghost.

The theme of irreversibility is also developed in a way that's quite sophisticated for a children's book. Penelope-in-the-past retains, albeit incompletely, the knowledge of Penelope-in-the-present. In the following exchange, for example (if we ignore the improbability that an important gentleman would take time to have a serious conversation with an oddly dressed young girl), that tension is explored very nicely:

"'Her blessed Majesty, Mary Queen of Scotland,' said [Anthony Babington]. 'My beloved and sacred queen. One day she will be Queen of England, on her rightful throne, and the true religion will come back, and all will be well on earth as in heaven.'
"I knew something. I struggled to speak. I had foreknowledge, I could remember. The very air I breathed was vibrant with sorrow and foreboding of disaster, and the words came unbidden to my lips.
"'She was executed,' I whispered, but Anthony heard me.
"The effect of my word was startling. He sprang back with his hands to his head as if shot. Then he raised his fist as if he would strike me, and I shrank against the wall, terrified of his twisted face.
"'Unsay those words, vile wretch,' he cried. 'How dare you! Who are you to speak ill of the queen?'...
"'We can alter the future, we have free wills, Master Anthony,' I cried, but the words came from me against my common sense, for his future was in my past. The fate of the queen was written in the Archangel Michael's book."

And, wisely, although there's mention among the present-day characters that Anthony Babington was hanged, drawn, and quartered, the book stops before the big plot of a couple of years later -- the one that led to his gruesome end.

At one point, Penelope tries to explain her status to Francis, Anthony's brother, her friend-in-the-past: "I belong to the future, ... and the future is all round us, but you can’t see it. I belong to the past too, because I am sharing it with you. Both are now."


The countryside around Wingfield

Uttley explains in her Foreword: "Many of the incidents in this story are based on my dreams, for in sleep I went through secret hidden doorways in the house wall and found myself in another century. Four times I stepped through the door and wandered in rooms which had no existence, a dream within a dream, and I talked with people who lived alongside but out of time, moving through a life parallel to my own existence. In my dreams past and present were co-existent, and I lived in the past with a knowledge of the future. I travelled into that secondary dream-world, seeing all things as if brightly illuminated, walking in fields and woods dazzling in their clarity of atmosphere. I sat on the stone walls in the sunshine of other times, conscious of the difference, knowing intermediate events."

It's her absolute conviction of the reality of this proposition that makes her depiction of it so vivid. As her biographer, Denis Judd, writes: "It's an amazing paradox... [She was a physics graduate but] she believed in fairies and in time travel -- that people can move in between different worlds. She was both a completely practical, scientific person, and would also talk about ghosts."



A couple of footnotes:

-- Sir Ralph (or Rafe) Sadler (1507-87), whom we knew and liked from Hilary Mantel's Thomas Cromwell trilogy, was the custodian of the Queen of Scots from 1584-85. This thankless task essentially belonged to Bess of Hardwick's husband, the Earl of Shrewsbury. But occasionally he drafted in aid. Sadler was lucky to get away with a comparativly short stint. For 14 years, Mary "would be carried back and forth between Chatsworth, Sheffield Castle and Wingfield, with Bess and Shrewsbury bearing the brunt of the dislocation of their lives, and the huge expenditure involved. [Queen] Elizabeth never provided enough cash, and, unsurprisingly, Mary was reluctant to use her dower on the costs of imprisonment." There are some fascinating details here about the lifestyle of the prisoner... Sadler's correspondence "reveals the pressure he came under to provide for his charge as cheaply as possible... The accounts reveal that Mary continued to be treated as a queen during her confinement. She was attended upon by a large household, dined under her canopy of state and enjoyed elaborate food."

-- You can't visit Wingfield Manor at the moment, but Julia Hickey offers an impression of what it was like when you could: "Passing through the door to the left, one gains a sense of the confined spaces and warren of rooms in which Mary Queen of Scots found herself... Looking up, it is possible to see the remains of great stone fireplaces set into the walls above and behind the kitchen area. Mary wasn't impressed by the medieval drafts or the medieval stench from the garderobes. She claimed that the smells made her unwell and demanded to be moved. Her gaoler and the manor's owner at that time, the Earl of Shrewsbury, felt that the stench was more likely to have been caused as a consequence of Mary's own sizeable household, her stable full of horses and the exotic pets with which she filled her time rather than the lack of plumbing in the old manor."

-- Hickey also offers a gloss on the plan to dig a passage from Wingfield to Thackers/Dethick: "Legend adds to the story of Anthony and Mary by stating that the young man often went to Wingfield to visit his queen from his home at nearby Dethick. In order to gain entrance to the manor he used to disguise himself as a gypsy, and to make the disguise more convincing he stained his skin with walnut juice... There is another local legend that in order to get Mary out of Wingfield Manor, Babington dug a tunnel with the idea of coming up into Mary's suite. Given Wingfield's rocky foundations, this would have been an impressive feat of engineering. No real evidence for the existence of Babington's tunnel to Wingfield Manor has ever been found. In the late 1950s, however, workmen demolishing Crich Manor House found steps leading downwards from a room known as the Queen's Room to a passage heading towards Edge Moor. The passage was blocked. It is possible that Babington intended to use a short length of tunnel and then for Mary to make good her escape under the cover of sunken lanes shrouded by canopies of leaves."

-- Uttley had a fairly tough life. The mental health of her husband, James Uttley, was badly affected by his service in WWI, and he committed suicide in 1930. She supported herself and her son by writing a series of children's stories about animals (the Little Grey Rabbit etc). Her diaries indicate, however, that she may not perhaps have been an entirely congenial character. I've only read reviews, so I can't judge for myself. I would only say that it's definitely best not to leave your diaries hanging around after death...