Stephen Johnson – Introduction – ‘ A menacing enchantment’ – that memorable phrase occurs in The Sculptor’s Daughter, the childhood memoir of Tove Jansson, creator of the Moomins. It captures the sense of both magic and encroaching darkness that was so much part of the infant (and adult) Jansson’s imaginative world. And yet there was one thing that made little Tove feel safe amid the blackness of the long Finnish winter nights: stories, particularly the stories told to her by her mother, the illustrator Signe Hammarsten-Jansson – later the model for Jansson’s wise, practical, endlessly loving Moominmamma: The log-fire is alight and we draw up the big chair. We turn out the lights in the studio and sit in front of the fire and she says: once there was a little girl who was terribly pretty and her mummy liked her so awfully much . . . A soft gentle voice in the warm darkness and one gazes into the fire and nothing is dangerous. Everything else is outside and can’t get in. Not now or at any time. But not everyone is blessed with a mummy like Signe-Hammarsten-Jansson. For those who aren’t, 1