Good Night, Mr. Tom Study Guide

Michelle Magorian was born in the English coastal city of Portsmouth in the southern county of Hampshire in 1947. From a young age, she aspired to become an actor. She studied acting at Rose Bruford College, a drama school in the suburbs of London, and then at L’École Internationale de Mime in Paris, France. After her studies, she worked as a stage actor, performing across the UK. While acting, she began writing her first novel, Good Night, Mr. Tom (1981), about a child evacuated from London to the English countryside at the outbreak of World War II. In the year after its publication, Good Night, Mr. Tom won the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize and International Reading Association Children’s Book Award. In 1998, Good Night, Mr. Tom was adapted into a film of the same name. Her second novel, Back Home (1984), also tells the story of an English child evacuee during World War II. In total, Magorian has written six novels; she has also published picture books, poetry collections, and one collection of short stories. She currently lives in Petersfield, a small town north of Portsmouth in Hampshire.

Good Night, Mr. Tom (1981) takes place in the first years of World War II (1939–1945) and alludes to several major events in the war. Early in the novel, characters see newspaper headlines announcing Hitler’s invasion of Poland, which began World War II on September 1, 1939. The British government, knowing the vulnerability of its population-dense urban areas to aerial bombing, had already made plans to evacuate vulnerable civilians such as children, pregnant women, and people with disabilities from English cities in the event of a war. As soon as World War II broke out, the British government began executing its evacuation plan under the name Operation Pied Piper. The child protagonist of Good Night, Mr. Tom, William Beech, is evacuated in September 1939 as part of Operation Pied Piper. On September 3, 1939, the UK’s Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain (1869–1940) officially declared war on Nazi Germany in a radio address to the English people from which Good Night, Mr. Tom quotes directly. The novel also makes repeated references to “the Blitz,” German bombing attacks on the UK from September 1940 to May 1941 that killed approximately 40,000 English civilians. William Beech’s best friend Zach dies while visiting his injured father in London at the beginning of the Blitz, during the Battle of Britain, an extended aerial battle over the UK between the UK’s Royal Air Force and Nazi Germany’s Luftwaffe that took place between July 10 and October 31, 1940.

Michelle Magorian’s first novel, Good Night, Mr. Tom (1981), tells the story of a young boy, William Beech, evacuated from London to the English countryside at the outbreak of World War II. Her second and third novels also take place during World War II. Back Home (1984) tells the story of another child evacuee, Virginia Dickinson, who returns home to the UK from the U.S. toward the war’s end, A Little Love Song (1991) is about a young woman named Rose who remains in the UK during the war. More recent children’s books about English children sheltering in the countryside during World War II include Marcia Williams’s My Secret War Diary by Flossie Albright (2008) and Jacqueline Wilson’s Wave Me Goodbye (2017). Good Night, Mr. Tom also mentions its child protagonists reading classic English children’s books that may have influenced Magorian’s style, including Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883), a coming-of-age story involving pirate treasure; Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories (1902), fantastic stories about various animals; and Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1908), a novel about anthropomorphized animals including Mole, Rat, Toad, and Badger.