The teenager is an invention of the Cold War. The term was first used in the Forties as a marketing term for clothing. If the 19th century invented childhood, then the 20th century invented adolescence. It's no surprise, then, that the last few decades have brought a proliferation in the publication of juvenilia.

The doggerel of poets and the young scribbling of novelists is now bound between professional covers and prefaced by serious scholars. There is quite an appetite for these early works. Readers devoured Inventions of the March Hare when Christopher Ricks published T. S. Eliot's early poems and enjoyed Hyde Park Gate News when Gillian Lowe edited the family newspaper of the young Virginia Woolf.

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