Abstract
The years following the First World War witnessed an explosion of interest in the British countryside. On the Right and Left of the political spectrum, and every permutation in-between — hikers, campers, preservationists, charabanc excursionists, developers, simple lifers and armchair ruralists — fought both physically and in print to make their idea of the countryside the accepted one. Children’s literature was at the forefront of the literary struggle to control and shape understanding of the countryside as a place of quietude and to ameliorate the effects of mass tourism that many worried would change its character irrevocably. With only a few exceptions, modern scholarship on the development and use of the British countryside in the twentieth century has either overlooked children’s literature or referred to it only in passing.1 This book examines children’s literature through the lens of discourses on the British countryside and in doing so places it at the centre of a range of complex arguments about the politics of leisure, class and national identity.
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Notes
Notable exceptions are David Matless, ‘Moral Geography in Broadland’, Cultural Geographies, 1.2 (1994), 127–55, and
Karen Welberry, ‘Arthur Ransome and the Conservation of the English Lakes’, in Wild Things: Children’s Culture and Eco-Criticism, ed. by Sidney Dobrin and Kenneth. B. Kidd (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004), pp. 82–100, both of which are discussed in Chapter 4. Alex Potts’s observation that ‘it would be quite possible to explore the cultural politics of countryside imagery by looking at its use in fiction, poetry and children’s books’ is representative of the acknowledged potential of examining this subject through children’s literature.
Alex Potts, ‘Constable Country between the Wars’, in Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity, Vol. III: National Fictions, ed. by Raphael Samuel (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), pp. 160–68 (165).
Victor Watson, ‘Camping and Tramping Fiction’, in The Cambridge Guide to Children’s Books in English, ed. by Victor Watson (Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 124–5.
Victor Watson, ‘Camping and Tramping Fiction, 1920–1960’, in Reading Series Fiction: from Arthur Ransome to Gene Kemp (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 73–83 (79, 82).
Humphrey Carpenter, Secret Gardens: A Study of the Golden Age of Children’s Literature (London: Unwin, 1987), p. 210;
Owen Dudley Edwards, British Children’s Fiction in the Second World War (Edinburgh University Press, 2007), p. 44.
Peter Hunt, Approaching Arthur Ransome (London: Jonathan Cape, 1992), p. 99.
Marcus Crouch, Treasure Seekers and Borrowers (1962; London: The Library Assoiation, 1963), p. 38.
The significance and implications of the summer of 1914 have been widely discussed by many critics of both the First World War and the interwar period. Some, such as Paul Fussell draw upon the image of the summer — ‘all agree’ that it was ‘the most idyllic for many years’. See Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (1975; Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 24. It is, however, also possible to consider this golden summer as part of the constructed mythology surrounding the First World War and consequently it should not be considered unproblematically. What is accepted, though, is the cultural significance of the idea of this lost golden summer.
See Dan Todman, The Great War, Myth and Memory (London and New York: Hambledon and London, 2005).
Roland Chambers, The Last Englishman: The Double Life of Arthur Ransome (London: Faber and Faber, 2009), p. 7.
According to the Library Association Review, children’s book publishing in the 1930s was characterised by a ‘few good books’ in an ‘ocean of trash’. Quoted in Peter Hunt, An Introduction to Children’s Literature (Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 107.
Darton’s comments appeared in a letter he wrote to W. C. Berwick Sayers, quoted in, W. C. Berwick Sayers, ‘An Appreciation’, The Junior Bookshelf, 1.2(1937), p. 4.
On radical uses of nostalgia, see Alastair Bonnett, Left in the Past: Radicalism and the Politics of Nostalgia (New York: Continuum, 2010).
William Ready, The Tolkien Relation. A Personal Inquiry (Chicago: Henry Regnery 1968), pp. 81–2;
Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy (London: Methuen, 1981), pp. 91, 1.
J. R. R. Tolkien, ‘On Fairy Stories’, in Tree and Leaf (London: Allen and Unwin, 1964), pp. 56–7.
For a development of the connection between Tolkien’s The Hobbit and camping and tramping fiction see, Hazel Sheeky Bird, ‘The Pastoral Impulse and the Turn to the Future in The Hobbit and Interwar Children’s Fiction’, in Tolkien Casebook, ed. by Peter Hunt (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 48–61.
Letter to Charles Reynold, 19 February 1941, quoted in Hugh Brogan, The Life of Arthur Ransome (London: Jonathan Cape, 1984), p. 379.
Valerie Holman, Print for Victory Book Publishing in England 1939–1945 (London: The British Library, 2008), p. 27. The period in-between September 1939, when Britain and France declared war on Germany, and May 1940, is often referred to as the Phoney War as it was marked by general inactivity.
Sue Malvern, Modern Art, Britain and the Great War (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004), pp. 5–6.
Raphael Samuel, ‘Introduction: The Figures of National Myth’, in Patriotism. The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity, ed. by Raphael Samuel (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), pp. xi–xxxvi (xix).
Patrick Wright, On Living in an Old Country: The National Past in Contemporary Britain (1985: London: Verso; repr., Oxford University Press, 2009) pp. 77–83;
Alun Howkins, ‘The Discovery of Rural England’, in Englishness: Politics and Culture 1880–1920, ed. by Robert Colls and Philip Dodds (London: Routledge, 1987), pp. 61–89 (78).
Andrew Causey, ‘English Art and “The National Character”, 1933–34’, in The Geographies of Englishness: Landscape and the National Past 1880–1940, ed. by David Peters Corbett, Ysanne Holt and Fiona Russell (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002), pp. 275–302 (296).
Raphael Samuel, Island Stories. Unravelling Britain, Theatres of Memory, Vol. II, ed. by Alison Light (London: Verso, 1998), p. 48.
Andrew. S. Thompson, Imperial Britain: The Empire in British Politics, c. 1880–1932 (Essex: Pearson, 2000), and The Empire Strikes Back? The Impact of Imperialism on Britain from the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Edinburgh: Pearson, 2005).
On the subject of Englishness, see Judy Giles and Tim Middleton, Writing Englishness 1900–1950: An Introductory Source Book on National Identity (London: Routledge, 1995);
David Gervais, Literary Englands. Versions of ‘Englishness’ in Modern Writing (Cambridge University Press, 1993);
Roger Ebbatson, An Imaginary England. Nation, Landscape and Literature, 1840–1920 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005).
Peter Mandler, ‘“Against Englishness”: English Culture and the Limits to Rural Nostalgia, 1850–1940’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 7 (1997), 155–75.
Ralph Harrington rightly notes that seemingly seminal works on this subject such as John MacKenzie’s Propaganda and Empire (1984) barely refer to the Royal Navy. I would extend this comment and argue that British maritime island nationalism on the whole has been under-examined in cultural studies of British national identity.
Ralph Harrington, ‘“The Mighty Hood”: Navy, Empire, War at Sea and the British National Imagination, 1920–60’, Journal of Contemporary History, 38 (2003), 171–85 (172).
See Glen O’Hara, ‘“The Sea Is Swinging into View”: Modern British Maritime History in a Globalised World’, English Historical Review, 124 (October 2006), 1109–34.
Alex Law, ‘Of Navies and Navels: Britain as a Mental Island’, Geografiska Annaler. Series B. Human Geography, 87.4 (2005), 267–77 (267).
On the timing and emergence of four-nations history see Raphael Samuel, ‘British Dimensions: “Four Nations History”’, History Workshop Journal, 40 (Autumn 1995), iii–xxii; Raphael Samuel, ‘Four Nations History’, in Island Stories, pp. 21–40. Rebecca Knuth’s recent book covers a far wider time span and so she overtly addresses British national identity.
See Rebecca Knuth, Children’s Literature and British Identity: Imagining a People and a Nation (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2012).
See Siân Nicholas, ‘Being British: Creeds and Cultures’, in The British Isles, 1901–1951, ed. by Keith Robbins (Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 103–36.
Geoffrey Trease, Walking in England (Wisbech, UK: The Fenland Press, 1935), p. 11.
David Mayall, Gypsy-Travellers in Nineteenth-Century Society (Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 3.
Deborah Epstein Nord, Gypsies and the British Imagination (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), pp. 6, 4.
Amit Yadav-Brown, ‘Gypsies, Nomadism, and the Limits of Realism’, MLN, 121 (2006), 1124–47 (1130).
Epstein Nord, Gypsies and the British Imagination, p. 18. Ian Hancock makes the same decision while also noting that it is a problematic term. Ian Hancock, ‘The Origin and Function of the Gypsy Image in Children’s Literature’, The Lion and the Unicorn, 11.1 (1987), 47–59.
See Peter Hunt, Approaching Arthur Ransome, p. 164; Murray Knowles and Kirsten Malmkjaer, Language and Control in Children’s Literature (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 22.
Dulcie Pettigrew, ‘Swallows and Amazons Explored: A Reassessment of Arthur Ransome’s Books for Children’, New Review of Children’s Literature and Librarianship, 15.1 (2009), 1–20 (17).
Hugh Shelley, Arthur Ransome: A Bodley Head Monograph (London: The Bodley Head, 1960), p. 59.
David Cannadine, The Rise and Tall of Class in Britain (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), pp. 142–3.
Quoted in Arthur Ransome and Hugh Brogan, Signalling from Mars. The Letters of Arthur Ransome (London: Jonathan Cape, 1997), p. 303.
Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001).
Ian Wojcik-Andrews, ‘Introduction: Notes toward a Theory of Class in Children’s Literature’, The Lion and the Unicorn, 17.2 (1993), 113–23 (114).
Valerie Krips, ‘A Notable Irrelevance: Class and Children’s Fiction’, The Lion and the Unicorn, 17.2 (1993), 195–209 (195);
Fred Inglis, The Promise of Happiness: Value and Meaning in Children’s Literature (Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 50.
Ross McKibbin, Classes and Cultures. England 1918–1951 (Oxford University Press, 1998);
Simon Stewart, Culture and the Middle Classes (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010); Cannadine, The Rise and Fall of Class in Britain.
Lawrence James, The Middle Class. A History (London: Little, Brown, 2006; repr., London: Abacus, 2008), p. 1.
Some genres, such as fantasy have received a degree of attention, though this is often limited to specific chapters within more general work. See for example, Colin Manlove, From Alice to Harry Potter: Children’s Fantasy in England (Christchurch: Cybereditions, 2003).
The following sources have been particularly useiul; namely, W C. Berwick Sayers, A Manual of Children’s Libraries (London: George Allen and Unwin and the Library Association, 1932);
J.G. Faraday, Twelve Years of Children’s Books. A Selection of the Best Books for Children Published during the Years 1926–1937 (Birmingham: Combridge, 1939);
W. C. Berwick Sayers, ed., Books for Youth. A Classified and Annotated Guide for Young Readers (1930; London: The Library Association, 1936); and
Nerina Shute, Favourite Books for Boys and Girls. A Book Guide for Parents, Teachers and Children (London: Jarrolds, 1955).
Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes. Travel Writing and Transculturation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 6.
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Bird, H.S. (2014). Introduction. In: Class, Leisure and National Identity in British Children’s Literature, 1918–1950. Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137407436_1
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