‘‘A Chance Child’’: Jill Paton Walsh and the Re-Invention of the Time Slip Story

In this study of Jill Paton Walsh’s one time-slip novel, I attempt to show how she reinvents the genre by giving as much prominence to the dislocated present as she does to the sufferings of children caught up in the horrors of the Industrial Revolution. Where previous time-slip authors had concentrated on the past, she addresses clearly unwelcome changes to landscapes and townscapes in the present time of the novel.