Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures

I wasn't a fan of pony stories growing up and so it wasn't until I had a horsey daughter that I became entangled with the genre. With a My Little Pony clasped in each hand, her bedtime stories took us through series such as Pony Tails and Saddle Club by Bonnie Bryant and the Jinny stories by Patricia Leitch, and (as perhaps befits someone who grew up to qualify as a riding instructor) her questions were far less literary than technical. In proposing a link between the marketing of equine collectables such as My Little Pony and "the pony fixation so widespread in popular fiction for girls," Bob Dixon, in Playing them False: A Study of Children's Toys, Games and Puzzles, observes that it is "easy to see how this concept draws upon the caring, 'mother' role," but he also expresses doubts about the suitability of toys that, in his view, are "heavily [End Page 183] overlaid with the sex object role" (30). My Little Pony, Dixon concludes, is one of many "toy concepts" that "leave very little to the imagination," and there is little, he argues, that a child can do with such a toy other than "get another" (267). Perhaps this argument can be applied by extension to pony-series fiction: is there little a reader can do imaginatively with series fiction other than "get another"?

In "On the Tail of the Seductive Horse," Elaine Moss promotes an alternative view of the value of pony fiction, arguing that many "a young reader has climbed up the tail of a horse (the run-of-the-mill Pony Club story perhaps) to sit comfortably in the saddle of literature thereafter" (27). Moss concludes that this is partly because, despite being despised by "trendy journalists and social engineers as middle-class, static, irrelevant to today's social pattern," horse and pony stories are not confined to series or popular fiction but may cross genres, appearing in such forms as social realism, poetry, humour, fantasy, myth, satire, romance, and coming-of-age stories.

It is, perhaps, the quantity of pony-series fiction, and its lack of range, particularly in the years following the Second World War, that has to some extent obscured the wider-ranging material Moss describes. This essay takes a retrospective look at the origins of the pony story in post-Great-War Britain, and explores its causes, contexts, and critical reception as a background to evaluating the style and impulses of six examples of the modern Canadian pony story, four by series writers Sharon Siamon and Angela Dorsey, and first novels by Julie White and Sheena Koops.

The horse and pony story has a persuasive and meaningful history, and the range of texts is not limited to series or popular fiction. Anna Sewell's Black Beauty, the Uncle Tom's Cabin of the equine world, is not only a crusade against the maltreatment of working horses, but also an acknowledgement of the societal forces that pressure humans into such behaviour. As the most famous of several equine "autobiographies," Black Beauty sets, if not a literary standard, a humane standard that has tended to be emulated by its descendants, amongst which Canadian readers will count the classic dog story, Beautiful Joe, by Margaret Marshall Saunders.

Perhaps the best known of these successors in Britain is Moorland Mousie by...