Going straight in at the top of the they’d-never-publish-this-today list is A High Wind in Jamaica. It manages to break almost every modern publishing tabu, from racism through sexism to having pirates that aren’t women but what really makes it verboten to modern tastes is that nobody, absolutely nobody, gets their just desserts. Children’s writing has slowly set in place an inflexible rule: that the characters’ outcomes must reflect their adherence to what publishers now consider the good. You can be a villain but as long as you’re a ‘good’ villain, then you will come out of the story all right (in fact, held up as an example). The hero or heroine will prevail not so much by their actions but by the purity of their modern morals.

It’s the exact opposite in A High Wind in Jamaica. The protagonists, a family of children, are completely amoral, abandon their dead, including a sibling, with barely a backward glance and certainly no tears shed, and set up their saviours, a bunch of good-hearted pirates, to swing from gallows so that they don’t get the blame for all the stuff that had happened. This is the opposite of childhood trauma forming the adult: this is childhood as a state of natural psychopathy, gradually ameliorated by the constraints of civilised adulthood.

So, if you want to read something completely and utterly different from the stock motifs of today’s children’s books, this is the story for you.