Short Stories About Childhood: 10 Classics Explained
Quick answer: Ten classic short stories about childhood, from The Lumber Room and Idgah to The Doll's House and Chickamauga, summarised and compared, with the craft each teaches.
Adults read stories about childhood to check their memories against someone else's, and children read them to see whether the adults in books are as unreasonable as the ones at home. The writers here mostly side with the child, and the few who do not, Chekhov and Bierce, are the ones that leave a mark.
The order runs from mischief to want to catastrophe: Saki's clever boys first, then the children who need something, then the ones the world runs over. Each title links to a page that summarises the story and explains its ending.
The stories
The Lumber Room by Saki. Nicholas, punished for putting a frog in his bread-and-milk, spends the afternoon in the forbidden lumber room with an embroidered hunting scene while his aunt hunts for him. When she falls into the rain-water tank he declines to help, on the grounds that she might be the Evil One in disguise.
Araby by James Joyce. A Dublin boy nurses a devotion to the girl across the road and promises to bring her something from a bazaar. He arrives as the lights go out and stands with his coins, seeing himself clearly for the first time.
The Doll's House by Katherine Mansfield. The Burnell girls are allowed to show their new doll's house to every child at school except the Kelveys, daughters of a washerwoman. Kezia lets them look anyway, and the youngest Kelvey remembers only the little lamp.
Idgah by Premchand. Four-year-old Hamid goes to the Eid fair with three paise and watches the other boys buy sweets and clay toys. He comes home with a pair of iron tongs for his grandmother, whose fingers burn on the griddle.
The Little Girl by Katherine Mansfield. Kezia is frightened of her large, loud father, and tears up his speech to stuff a pincushion for his birthday. She is beaten for it; later, in a nightmare, he carries her to his bed and she feels his heart beating.
The Story of Muhammad Din by Rudyard Kipling. The small son of a household servant builds palaces of dust, marigolds and a broken polo ball in the narrator's garden. The narrator learns his name from the doctor and last sees him wrapped in white cloth.
Vanka by Anton Chekhov. On Christmas Eve a nine-year-old apprentice writes to his grandfather about beatings and hunger and begs to be fetched home. He addresses the envelope to grandfather in the village and drops it in the box.
Sleepy by Anton Chekhov. Varka, thirteen, has not slept for days; the baby she minds cries all night and the household works her all day. A green patch of lamplight swims on the ceiling, and the story ends with what she does to make the crying stop.
Chickamauga by Ambrose Bierce. A six-year-old boy with a wooden sword wanders into the woods and meets a crawling column of wounded men, whom he takes for a game. He climbs on one as if it were a horse. The story's last paragraph returns him home.
The Storyteller by Saki. A bachelor sharing a railway carriage with three children and their aunt tells them about a girl so good she wore three medals, and how the clinking of the medals gave her away to a wolf. The children are delighted; the aunt is not.
Reading them together
The collection's argument is that children see accurately and lack only the words, which is why so many of these stories end on a child's plain, unfinished sentence. The Saki stories defend the child's judgement against adult stupidity; Mansfield and Premchand show a child's judgement outrunning the adults' generosity; Chekhov and Bierce show what happens when nobody is minding the child at all.
Vanka and Sleepy were written by the same man within two years, and together they are the hinge of the theme: one child is saved by not understanding, the other destroyed by understanding too late.
If you want to write about childhood
What writers can take from this
- Read Idgah and The Doll's House together; both hinge on a child choosing against the crowd.
- The two Saki stories make a good warm-up, each under two thousand words and funny before they are anything else.
- Approach Sleepy and Chickamauga with care if reading with younger students; both are honest about violence.
- In Araby, mark where the boy's language turns religious and where it stops.
- Vanka is a good exercise in reading a letter: notice what he includes and what he leaves out.
Try it yourself
Write a story told entirely from a child's viewpoint, in which the child makes one purchase or one trade that the adults around them completely misunderstand.
Questions
What is the best short story about childhood?
Araby is the most anthologised, and The Doll's House the most taught in schools. Idgah holds the same place in Hindi and Urdu curricula.
Which short stories about childhood are good for students?
The Lumber Room, The Storyteller, Idgah, The Doll's House and Vanka are short, clear and open to discussion of fairness and point of view. Araby suits older students.
Which classic story about childhood is the shortest?
Vanka and The Story of Muhammad Din are each about fifteen hundred words. The Storyteller and Idgah are a little longer.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working writers. Updated September 2026.
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