The book is regarded as a classic. The final reunion between Tom, still a child, and the elderly Hatty is, many have argued, one of the most moving moments in children's fiction.[5]
In Written for Children (1965), John Rowe Townsend summarised, "If I were asked to name a single masterpiece of English children's literature since [the Second World War] ... it would be this outstandingly beautiful and absorbing book".[5] He retained that judgment in the second edition of that magnum opus (1983) and in 2011 repeated it, in a retrospective review of the novel.[6][7]
In the first chapter of Narratives of Love and Loss: Studies in Modern Children's Fiction, Margaret and Michael Rustin analyse the emotional resonances of Tom's Midnight Garden and describe its use of imagination and metaphor, also comparing it to The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett.[8]
Researcher Ward Bradley, in his review of various modern stories and books depicting Victorian British society, criticized Midnight Garden for "romanticizing the world of the 19th-century aristocratic mansions, making it a glittering 'lost paradise' contrasted with the drab reality of contemporary lower middle class Britain.(...) A child deriving an image of Victorian England from this engaging and well-written fairy tale would get no idea of the crushing poverty in the factories and slums from where mansion owners often derived their wealth".[9]
Time slip would be a popular device in British children's novels in this period, although this device arguably started with Mark Twain's adult satirical comedy A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), followed by Rudyard Kipling's children's book Puck of Pook's Hill (1906, with a succession of slips back into Britain's past), and Margaret Irwin's Still She Wished for Company (1924, combining ghosts and time slip), and Elizabeth Goudge's The Middle Window (1935, with a time-slip back to the era of Bonnie Prince Charlie). Time-slip was a popular theme in paranormal discussion, such as the Moberly–Jourdain incident, also known as the Ghosts of Petit Trianon or Versailles. This was an event that occurred on 10 August 1901 in the gardens of the Petit Trianon, involving two female academics, Charlotte Anne Moberly (1846–1937) and Eleanor Jourdain (1863–1924). Moberly and Jourdain claimed to have slipped back to the last days of pre-Revolutionary France, reported in their later book An Adventure (1911).Other successful examples of time-slip in children's books include Alison Uttley's A Traveller in Time (1939, slipping back to the period of Mary, Queen of Scots), Ronald Welch's The Gauntlet (1951, slipping back to the Welsh Marches in the fourteenth century), Clive King's Stig of the Dump (1963, with a final chapter slipping back to the making of Stone Henge), Barbara Sleigh's Jessamy (1967, back to the First World War), and Charlotte Sometimes by Penelope Farmer (1969, back to 1918).
