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Christina Stead
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The Man Who Loved Children Paperback – 1 December 2010

by Christina Stead (Author)
3.6 out of 5 stars 261
Edition: 1st
See all formats and editions
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The Man Who Loved Children is Christina Stead's masterpiece about family life. Set in Washington during the 1930s, Sam and Henny Pollit are a warring husband and wife. Their tempestuous marriage, aggravated by too little money, lies at the centre of Stead's satirical and brilliantly observed novel about the relations between husbands and wives, and parents and children.


Sam, a scientist, uses words as weapons of attack and control on his children and is prone to illusions of power and influence that fail to extend beyond his family. His wife Henny, who hails from a wealthy Baltimore family, is disastrously impractical and enmeshed in her own fantasies of romance and vengeance. Much of the care of their six children is left to Louisa, Sam's 14-year-old daughter from his first marriage. Within this psychological battleground, Louisa must attempt to make a life of her own.


First published in 1940, The Man Who Loved Children was hailed for its satiric energy. Now its originality is again lauded by novelist, Jonathan Franzen, in his illuminating new introduction.
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  1. ISBN-10
    0522855547
  2. ISBN-13
    978-0522855548
  3. Edition
    1st
  4. Publisher
    MIEGUNYAH PRESS
  5. Publication date
    1 December 2010
  6. Language
    English
  7. Dimensions
    13 x 4.5 x 19.5 cm
  8. Print length
    568 pages
  9. See all details
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Product description

About the Author

Christina Stead was born in Sydney in 1902, and died there in 1983. Most of her life was spent elsewhere- in London, Paris and other places in Europe, and in the United States. Her first book, The Salzburg Tales, was published in 1934, followed by twelve more works of fiction. In The Man Who Loved Children she drew on her own childhood in Sydney. She was the recipient of the inaugural Patrick White Literary Award in 1974.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ MIEGUNYAH PRESS; 1st edition (1 December 2010)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 568 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0522855547
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0522855548
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 13 x 4.5 x 19.5 cm
  • Customer Reviews:
    3.6 out of 5 stars 261

About the author

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Christina Stead

Christina Stead

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Christina Stead was born in 1902 in Sydney’s south. After graduating from high school in 1917, she attended Sydney Teachers’ College on a scholarship. She subsequently took a series of teaching and secretarial positions before traveling to London, aged twenty-six.

Stead’s first books, The Salzburg Tales and Seven Poor Men of Sydney, were published in 1934 to positive reviews in England and the United States. Her fourth work, The Man Who Loved Children, has been hailed as a ‘masterpiece’ by Jonathan Franzen, among others. In total, Stead wrote almost twenty novels and short-story collections. Stead resettled permanently in Australia in 1974 and was the first recipient of the Patrick White Award that year.

Christina Stead died in Sydney in 1983, aged eighty. She is widely considered to be one of the most influential Australian authors of the twentieth century.

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3.6 out of 5 stars
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261 global ratings

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Top reviews from Australia

Gloria sharp
5.0 out of 5 stars most outrageously original book I’ve ever read
Reviewed in Australia on 15 July 2022
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Extraordinary descriptions, at times long winded, overwhelmingly readable. Stick with it as I’m sure you will be astonished at such a great work.
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Stephanie Edwards
1.0 out of 5 stars Disappointed
Reviewed in Australia on 18 May 2016
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Disappointed. Not an easy read. Slow.
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D2Omaha
5.0 out of 5 stars Sadly Wonderful
Reviewed in the United States on 21 February 2023
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Here is a story of a family in the early twentieth century, full of all the complexity of a family: good intentions and love, self-interest and hubris, spite and hate. The external world’s influences and demands swirl among the members, but in the end they are the family that they are. Gender, age, and social roles of the time period are accepted, rejected and explored. The story is compelling and the characters are vivid—it would make a great short series.
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stillwilling
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent but hardgoing
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 15 August 2018
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i read this on holiday and it was an enjoyable slog, not an uplifting tale. BUT, well worth the journey. I won't tell the plot as you can read that elsewhere.
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John pen.
1.0 out of 5 stars Very convoluted story line
Reviewed in Canada on 13 September 2022
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This is a novel from 1940; which, after being reissued received critical acclaim.. I’m an avid reader but I’m finding the language and story line difficult to understand.
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Ian Anthony Cameron
1.0 out of 5 stars Boring
Reviewed in Germany on 3 January 2019
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Very disappointed in this book. Was recommended to me as a Australian read. Incoherent, jumbeled, somewhat confused narrative. Could not get past the first 2 chapters.
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BOB
4.0 out of 5 stars The man who loved to be worshipped by children
Reviewed in the United States on 29 November 2015
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Christina Stead's 1940 novel, 'The Man Who Loved Children', has acquired a lost classic status over the last several years and has never graduated to a ‘rediscovered’ classic such as ‘Moby-Dick’, despite being praised by many prominent writers and critics. Why is this book not acknowledged by the mainstream literary establishment even after vigorous isolated campaigns to get it recognized as a literary classic?

It is flawed but what literary work, even the greatest of novels, is without flaws or seen as intimidating or repellant to someone? I believe that one characteristic everyone responds to with varying degrees of appreciation or repulsion is the fact that it concerns a highly unique, dysfunctional family, pulling no stops in its intensity, and because there is so little honest compassion in it. Aren't families supposed to love each other, even if they want to tear each other's hair out? There is very little that is reassuring in the novel and readers of the 21st century are probably no more likely to seek it out than the readers of the 1940's.

Christina Stead, an Australian writer, has written an autobiographical account of a family, although she transplanted the fictional family to the Washington D.C. suburbs and, later, to Baltimore. The family in question is the Pollits, headed by the warring parents, Sam and Henny, with most of the action seen through the point of view of Louisa, Sam's child from his deceased first wife. Henny bears six more of Sam's children and the daily atmosphere is a constant tempestuous battleground between bitter, angry Henny, perpetually angry at her selfish husband, with little maternal feeling for her brood of children, and the perpetually childish Sam, a naturalist with the Conservation Corps by day, constant playmate of his children by night and any other moment he can spare:
“Sam was household czar by divine right, but Henny was the czar’s everlasting adversary, household anarchist by divine right.”
And:
“‘He called a spade the predecessor of modern agriculture, she called it a muck dig: they had no words between them intelligible.’

Sam is a supreme narcissist; he creates the world in his own frivolous, whimsical image. He is also a paradox. He espouses the tenets of brotherhood and compassion and patriotism, yet considers himself an atheist. On one hand, he has no knowledge of literature, and yet he alludes to mythological figures (or are they myths of his own imagination?) and is highly creative in his playful use of language and creates extemporaneous rhymes. He has nicknames for everyone. He calls his twins ‘the Gemini’, his daughter ‘little glumpy Looloo’, his other daughter ‘Little-Womey’, females he refers to as ‘shemailes’ and refers to himself as ‘Little Sam’ or ‘Sam-the-Bold”. His playful affection can turn on a dime and transform into prodding humiliation, especially with ‘Looloo’.

Louisa is an overweight, clumsy, homely child, unloved by her stepmother or any of her stepmother’s formerly affluent relatives. Sam considers Louie to be the default maternal figure for the younger siblings and she is considered by both parents to be a maidservant to take up the slack when Sam’s youngest sister, Bonnie, falls down on the job. Louisa lives in the refuge of her own imagination, constantly reading, writing in a diary, writing poems of infatuation with her female English teacher, even creating her own code language. Sam thinks nothing of snatching up her diary to read it or demanding she read her new one-act play, then berating her for writing such nonsense. Louisa sees herself as an ugly duckling that may someday become a swan. Whatever affection she feels for either parent evaporates by the end of the novel, where her overriding concern in life is to leave this nightmarish family.

Henny, from an affluent family, feels that she has come down in the world thanks to her careless husband and tries to wheedle money from any relative that she thinks might spare her a loan. She is a tragic figure who foresees nothing but her own demise when all of her options have been closed and even grows so desperate as to steal from her financially literate favorite son.

Sam is like Dicken’s Micawber or Dostoevsky’s Marmeladov with a dose of shameless whimsicality. He is massive, not so much because of physical stature (he is tall and blond but not hugely muscular) but because of his image of himself as larger than the life that surrounds him. There are as many public scenes at family gatherings as in any Dostoevsky novel, while Sam and Henny are forerunners of Edward Albee’s George and Martha. What was the effect of this ongoing antagonism on the children?
‘That was family life. They were all able to get through the day without receiving any particular wounds; every such thing left its tiny scar, but their infant skins healed with wonderful quickness.”

Yet for all this unpleasantness there is an exhilarating energy in the tirades and a zeal in the creative use of language from the characters of Sam and Henny and Louisa and extending even to the younger children that have only known this world of Pollitry (a term coined by Henny) and in the eloquent, flowing language of the narration. A novel like this appeals to the perverse curiosity in bystanders to stop and look at the extent of the damage of a head on collision.

Despite its excesses, this novel accomplishes one thing far better than any other novel I have ever read. It accurately portrays the climate of family life. Admittedly, this one is highly dysfunctional and lacking in compassion and love. Nevertheless, the private family lexicon, the insistent hammering of the children’s speech, the rhythms of household routines, possess the ring of authenticity. In this sense, it could be seen as the ultimate family novel. A novel about the messiness, the chaos of family life must of necessity, I suppose, contain some degree of those qualities. This novel possesses all of that in abundance.
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