Сад Тома в полночь

1958 novel by Philippa Pearce

Tom's Midnight Garden is a children's fantasy novel by English author Philippa Pearce. It was first published in 1958 by Oxford University Press with illustrations by Susan Einzig. The story is about a twelve year old Tom who, while staying with his aunt and uncle, slips out at midnight and discovers a magical, mysterious Victorian garden where he befriends a young girl named Hatty. The novel has been reissued in print many times and also adapted for radio, television, cinema, and the stage. Pearce won the annual Carnegie Medal from the Library Association, recognising the year's outstanding children's book by a British author. In Written for Children (1965), John Rowe Townsend summarised, "If I were asked to name a single masterpiece of English children's literature since [the Second World War] it would be this outstandingly beautiful and absorbing book". Researcher Ward Bradley, in his review of various modern stories and books depicting Victorian British society, criticized Midnight Garden for "romanticizing the world of the 19th century aristocratic mansions, making it a glittering 'lost paradise' contrasted with the drab reality of contemporary lower middle class Britain. ( ) A child deriving an image of Victorian England from this engaging and well written fairy tale would get no idea of the crushing poverty in the factories and slums from where mansion owners often derived their wealth". Time slip would be a popular device in British children's novels in this period, although this device arguably started with Mark Twain's adult satirical comedy A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), followed by Rudyard Kipling's children's book Puck of Pook's Hill (1906, with a succession of slips back into Britain's past), and Margaret Irwin's Still She Wished for Company (1924, combining ghosts and time slip), and Elizabeth Goudge's The Middle Window (1935, with a time slip back to the era of Bonnie Prince Charlie). Time slip was a popular theme in paranormal discussion, such as the Moberly–Jourdain incident, also known as the Ghosts of Petit Trianon or Versailles. This was an event that occurred on 10 August 1901 in the gardens of the Petit Trianon, involving two female academics, Charlotte Anne Moberly (1846–1937) and Eleanor Jourdain (1863–1924). Moberly and Jourdain claimed to have slipped back to the last days of pre Revolutionary France, reported in their later book An Adventure (1911). Other successful examples of time slip in children's books include Alison Uttley's A Traveller in Time (1939, slipping back to the period of Mary, Queen of Scots), Ronald Welch's The Gauntlet (1951, slipping back to the Welsh Marches in the fourteenth century), Clive King's Stig of the Dump (1963, with a final chapter slipping back to the making of Stone Henge), Barbara Sleigh's Jessamy (1967, back to the First World War), and Charlotte Sometimes by Penelope Farmer (1969, back to 1918).

The historical part of the book is set in the grounds of a mansion, which resembles the house in which the author grew up: the Mill House in Great Shelford, near Cambridge, England. Cambridge is represented in fictional form as Castleford throughout the book. At the time she was writing the book, the author was again living in Great Shelford, just across the road from the Mill House. The theory of time of which the novel makes use is that of J. W. Dunne's influential 1927 work An Experiment with Time.

Since 1936, the professional association of British librarians has recognised the year's best new book for children with the Carnegie Medal. Philippa Pearce and Tom won the 1958 Medal.