John Rowe Townsend, who has died aged 91, was not only a dominant figure in the academic study of children's literature, but, as the author of Gumble's Yard (1961), a seminal influence on the entire development of modern children's books. This, his first and possibly most famous, book in print for 50 years and now available as an ebook was written when he worked on the Manchester Guardian, and was born of his shocked awareness of the unbridgeable gap between the comfortably jolly lives of the young characters in the books he reviewed and the harsh realities faced by the children he had seen while researching a feature on the NSPCC.
Gumble's Yard, with its deliberately uncosy ending and depiction of a working-class life that sometimes skirted the law, flung open a door that before the second world war Geoffrey Trease had pushed ajar, through which eventually the sociological activists of the 80s anti-racist, anti-sexist could march. By then, ironically, many of them regarded Townsend as an opposing literary purist, but it is mainly due to him that their own radical aims and his radical view that children's literature is a discipline worthy of serious analysis should both be accepted today as mere conventional wisdom.