So wrote J. T. Knowles, presciently, in his preface to The Story of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table (1862), the first adaptation of the Morte Darthur for children. This book has traced the fulfilment of Knowles's prediction, finding scholars, boys, magic, daring, adventure and ideas of the ‘English’ at the heart of child-focused Malory adaptation since 1862, partly responsible for its origins and influencing its continuation through to the present day. The precise relationship between these aspects has shifted over time. The earliest adaptations of the Morte for children identified its apparent affinity with both boys and adventure, as well as its complicated relationship with ideas of Englishness and heritage. They set the stage for subsequent child-focused Arthuriana in their gendering of the legend and their emphasis upon the medieval as a locus of daring adventure that could also have educational and moral applications. Later adaptations by Howard Pyle and Henry Gilbert were similarly concerned with extracting moral messages from Malory's tale, but instead used the text's ample adventures to contemplate the relevance of chivalry and heroism for boys in an increasingly mercantile twentieth-century society. The adaptations following the First and Second World Wars relinquished both this focus on physical adventure, and on boys. The childness of child-focused Arthuriana became increasingly gender-neutral as the twentieth century progressed, and adventures of the body gradually gave way to the mental adventures of the childhood psyche and the nostalgic adult, enshrined most extensively in T. H. White's idiosyncratic The Once and Future King, which symbolically placed the entire Arthurian legacy in the hands of an imaginative, creative child: the young Thomas Malory.

Influenced by the psychological interpretations of his predecessors but ultimately driven by his own childhood relationship with Malory's ‘magic book’, John Steinbeck placed magic at the forefront of Malory's tale. In doing so, he crafted a new type of Arthurian child. No longer innocent or ignorant, an object of didacticism or a fragile, traumatised being, the child of Steinbeck's Acts is a powerful, resilient figure – albeit an ultimately undeveloped one – used to centre its author's enquiries into the nature of childhood, memory, creativity and fantasy.