by Dennis Butts
The Lutterworth Press
P.O. Box 60
Cambridge
CB1 2NT
United Kingdom
www.lutterworth.com
[email protected]
ISBN: 978 0 7188 4194 2
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A record is available from the British Library
Copyright © Dennis Butts and Peter Hunt, 2013
First Published, 2013
All rights reserved. No part of this edition may be reproduced,
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Contents
Illustrations
Tom Brown and friends. Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown’s Schooldays, Illustrated Edn, Macmillan, 1868
Introduction
1. Difficulties with Dates
2. I Suppose You Have Heard of the Tom Brown Question?
3. Was Ballantyne Really Bothered about Cocoa-Nuts?
4. How Often Does Charles Dodgson Appear in the ‘Alice’ Books?
5. What Did Mr March Do in the War Between the States?
6. How Long John Silver Lost His Leg and Acquired a Parrot
7. The Moon, the French Chef and the Missionary
8. How Did Bevis Grow Ten Years in Fifty-Eight Days?
9. How Much Gold Was in Pevensey Castle?
10. Would Bobbie’s Train Have Stopped in Time?
11. Did Isabel Archer Meet Mr Toad?
12. How Did Mary Get to Misslethwaite Manor?
13. Did Beatrix Potter Really Suffer from ’Flu in 1909?
14. Why Did Wilfred Owen Change The Little Mermaid in 1909?
15. How Many Adults Are There in Winnie-the-Pooh?
16. The Strange Disappearance of Europe
17. How Old Was the Great Aunt?
18. Did John Masefield Ever Meet Hitler or Stalin?
19. How Well Did George Orwell Really Know Billy Bunter?
20. Some Questions of Authorship
21. Exactly How Big Was the Little House in the Big Woods?
22. Did Jennings Ever Grow Up or Learn Anything?
23. Skating on Thin Ice
24. Does Anyone Really Write for Children?
25. Did the Line Really Hold?
26. The Mayne Incident
27. Who is Killing Cock-Robin?
Notes
How Did Long John Silver
Lose his Leg?
and Twenty-Six Other Mysteries
of Children’s Literature
Dennis Butts and Peter Hunt
The Lutterworth Press
Illustrations
Tom Brown and friends. Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown’s Schooldays, Illustrated Edn, Macmillan, 1868
A mining scene. R.M. Ballantyne, Deep Down, Nisbet, 1868.
Charles Dodgson (polishing his lens). O.G. Rejlander, 28 March, 1863
Alice disrupts the trial. Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, illustrated by John Tenniel, 1st Edn, Macmillan, 1865
Jim overhears Long John Silver and the pirates hatching their plot. R.L. Stevenson, Treasure Island, Cassell, 1895.
How Umslopogaas held the stair. H. Rider Haggard, Alan Quatermain, Longmans, 1887.
Dan, Una and Puck. Rudyard Kipling, Puck of Pook’s Hill, illustrated by H. R. Millar, 1st Edn. Macmillan, 1906
Bobbie stops the train. E. Nesbit, The Railway Children, illustrated by H.R. Millar, 1st Edn, Wells Gardner, 1906
Kenneth Grahame, John Singer Sargent, 1912
Illustration from the first publication. The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett, The American Magazine, 1920
Cover. Boys’ Friend paper, Cassell and Company, 1909
Cover. The Box of Delights, John Masefield, 1st Edn, Heinemann, 1935
Cover. Summersalt’s Circus, Dorothy Craigie, Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1947
Introduction
What songs the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, though puzzling questions are not beyond all conjecture . . .
Readers of children’s literature often wonder about the texts or the authors of the books they have just read. They sometimes linger over the question of what happened next, or what else happened to their favourite characters, such as Long John Silver or the Railway Children. They often speculate about incidents or events not fully explained by the writer in his or her tale: how exactly did Mary Lennox get from India to Misselthwaite Manor? Or, how did Tom get hold of Hatty’s skates in Tom’s Midnight Garden? Readers, librarians, and collectors too, for that matter, are often baffled by the identity of the authors themselves. Was P.F.C. Westerman, the author of early twentieth-century adventure stories, the same person as J.F.C. Westerman, who wrote similar books? Were Herbert Strang and Mrs Herbert Strang really husband and wife? And who was A.L.O.E. aka ‘A Lady of England’?
This book of essays, which frankly acknowledges a great debt to John Sutherland’s entertaining studies of puzzles in nineteenth-century fiction, focusses upon our reading of children’s books; many of them often termed ‘classics’. Some of our essays are based upon close reading of particular texts, as we try to disentangle some of the problems in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, in Winnie the Pooh, and in the changes the poet Wilfred Owen made in his version of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid. Other chapters concentrate on individual authors, such as R.M. Ballantyne and Rudyard Kipling, or on literary controversies, as we revisit Graham Greene’s brush with Beatrix Potter and George Orwell’s insightful encounter with Frank Richards, the author of the Billy Bunter stories. As readers speculate about the missing details about the lives of such famous characters as Sherlock Holmes or Elizabeth Bennett, so we speculate about the depiction of Mr March in Little Women, and of the boy-heroes Bevis and Jennings. We look at some of the canon’s best-known books – The Railway Children and The Wind in the Willows – and discuss such problems as the apparent absence of awareness of the turbulent political situation of the 1930s; and we consider the old chestnut of the relationship between an author’s books and his personal life.
The purpose of this book is to investigate and try to explain some of the mysteries and problems found in children’s books. We hope that readers will find our discussions interesting and enjoyable, and that they are not regarded as too frivolous. We take our defence of the project from Sir Thomas Browne’s words in his Urn-Burial of 1658: ‘What songs the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid among women, though puzzling questions are not beyond all conjecture’.
Dennis Butts and Peter Hunt
Reading and Stroud, May 2013
1. Difficulties with Dates
Captain F.W. Marryat, The Children of the New Forest (1848)
There are few more touching descriptions of a children’s writer at work than an anonymous friend’s account of the battle-scarred naval hero, Captain Marryat, writing one of his children’s books at his country home in Norfolk in the 1840s, long after he had retired from the sea:
He was, at the time of which I am now writing, engaged upon some book: one of his children’s stories, I think; but his literary work was never obtruded on his family. There was no time of day apparently when he was to be left undisturbed. The other members of the househol
d went in and out of the room where he sat, and never found him abstracted or disinclined to take an interest in the outer world. He threw himself like a child into his children’s pleasures: one morning helping to make a kite, the next listening to doggerel verses, or in the evening joining with them in acting charades. He would leave off in the middle of writing his book to carry out a handful of salt to his favourite calves upon the lawn; and enter into the fanciful papering of a boudoir with all the enthusiasm of a girl. It always struck me that Marryat was like an elder brother rather than a father to his own children, although I am fully sure he lost nothing in their filial respect and honour by the intimacy and freedom of their love; and I know now, after he has been dead eighteen years, that the hearts of his children cling to his memory as fondly as they did to himself in the days I speak of. It must be something to be capable of inspiring love which will outlast time and absence without diminution. (‘Captain Marryat at Langham’, The Cornhill Magazine, 1867)
By the 1840s, Captain Frederick Marryat (1792-1848) had begun what was virtually his third career. From 1806 he had served with great distinction in the naval wars against Napoleon, being wounded several times and reaching the rank of commander, before resigning from the navy in 1830. He then became a highly successful adult novelist, earning large sums of money for such books as The Naval Officer (1829) and Mr Midshipman Easy (1836), becoming friendly with such writers as Charles Dickens and Harrison Ainsworth. However, in the 1840s he decided to try writing books for children, and achieved success with such stories as Masterman Ready (1841-2) and The Settlers in Canada (1844). But the charming picture of Marryat so informally at work on one of his children’s books may help to explain some of the errors and lacunae in them, which are particularly noticeable in his most popular and enduring work, the historical novel The Children of the New Forest.
The story opens in 1647 at the point in the English Civil War when King Charles I is imprisoned on the Isle of Wight and Parliamentary forces are rampant everywhere. After the deaths of their royalist parents, the young Beverley children are protected from Parliamentary troopers by an old family servant, Jacob Armitage, who hides them in his cottage on the edge of the New Forest. Marryat’s story mainly focuses upon a detailed and exciting account of how the four orphaned children survive, with Edward, the eldest boy, only thirteen after Jacob Armitage dies.
The account of Jacob’s death is where Marryat’s perhaps over-relaxed mode of authorship first becomes apparent, for, although in the opening chapter he has described Jacob as ‘a man above sixty years of age’, on his death-bed about two years later, in chapter 9, Jacob tells the children that ‘I am past seventy-six’. Although it possible to reconcile the two statements, there is a large time-gap to explain. Marryat makes another, more straightforward error later on; in the year 1651 the maturing young hero, Edward, leaves his family in the New Forest to join King Charles II in his attempt to regain his father’s throne. In chapter 23 he is present at the Battle of Worcester, and Marryat dates this event quite precisely as occurring on 3 October. It was actually fought on 3 September.
Marryat attempts to date events carefully, but his chronology at times becomes quite confusing, as he tries to connect the adventures of the Beverley children with real historical events. In chapter 20 we learn that ‘The summer [presumably of 1649] had now advanced’, and the children are told that Cromwell is in Dublin (he arrived in August 1649.) We are told that the King is in Scotland, although in fact he only arrived on 23 June 1650. By chapter 20, in other words, it looks as if we are in the middle of 1650, although the division between 1649 and 1650 has never been made very clear. Another winter passes; it is 1651, when the children hear of King Charles being crowned in Scotland, an event which really took place in January 1651.
Edward leaves his younger brother and sisters behind in the New Forest, and joins the King’s army, which is defeated on 3 October at the Battle of Worcester (really 3 September), after which he returns to the Forest, and life returns to normal for a while. He dismisses the idea of marrying the young heroine Patience in chapter 25, because he feels that, at the age of nineteen, he would be unable to support her. But if we are still in the year 1651, and we were told that he was aged thirteen when the story began in 1647, he can only be seventeen or eighteen at the most.
Marryat wants to end his story with the triumphant Restoration of King Charles to his throne in the year 1660, so he fills in the intervening years by concentrating upon the exploits of Edward. In chapter 26 Edward leaves the New Forest again to join the defeated King Charles II in exile in France, and in the following chapter, at the exiled monarch’s suggestion, he joins the fighting in France in April 1652. A civil war is raging there between the royalists led by the Vicomte de Turenne, and various dissidents led by the Prince de Condé. It seems rather odd, but Marryat tells us that, in France, following the advice of the deposed King Charles, the royalist Edward gives his support to the anti-royalist forces! Eventually Condé takes his troops, presumably including Edward, to fight with Spain against France. Ironically in 1657 Cromwell sent 6,000 British infantry-men to help France in the struggle against Spain – so Edward might well have fought against Cromwell again, but this time on foreign soil.
The Franco-Spanish War ended in November 1659, giving Edward ample time to return to England for the Restoration of King Charles II in May 1660. Various marriages now take place among the leading characters in the story – Edward to Patience Heatherstone, his sisters, Alice and Edith, to their appropriate male suitors, and his brother Humphrey to Clara, the young girl rescued from an attempted robbery in chapter 15. Difficulties about dates and the passing of time continue to the very end of the story, however. In discussing Edward’s engagement to Patience in the very last chapter of the book, Humphrey tells him, ‘It is now seven years since you quitted the forest’, but since this happened in 1651 or 1652, and it is now 1660, it is clear that more than seven years have passed. And exactly how old is Patience Heatherstone now? When she first appeared in chapter 8 in the year 1649, she is described as ‘a girl of about fourteen,’ so by 1660 she must be at least twenty-five. Is Humphrey being gallant or just forgetful when he says that she is now twenty-four?
The Children of the New Forest is often described as one of the great historical novels – but Marryat’s methods of compositing suggest that it is more novel than an historical work!
2. I Suppose You Have Heard of the Tom Brown Question?
Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857)
Although Tom Brown’s Schooldays was not the first school story, it was so skillfully written and so popular that it helped to establish the conventions of the genre for the next hundred years. The formula of the new pupil leaving home for an unfamiliar institution, where he undergoes initiation ceremonies and learns the ‘rules’, where he struggles to find his way among new friends and enemies (bullies and unpleasant masters), and where he learns to cope with exams and sporting rivalries, are all there in Thomas Hughes’s book, to be repeated with many variations ever since. At the heart of these books there is nearly always a great sporting encounter – house matches within the school, or against rival schools.
These sports matches, at least in boys’ books, nearly always focus upon cricket or ‘rugby football’. Tom Brown’s first great successor, The Fifth Form at St Dominic’s (1881-1882) by Talbot Baines Reed, contains both rugby and cricket matches, as do later stories by such authors as Richard Bird, Hylton Cleaver, J. Finnimore and Herbert Hayens. Hugh Walpole’s Jeremy at Crale (1927) and L.P. Hartley’s The Go-Between (1953) show how adult novelists have used rugby and cricket matches in more serious fiction.
P.G. Wodehouse (1881-1975), the greatest British comic writer of the twentieth century, began his literary career by writing school stories, and George Orwell regarded Mike, Wodehouse’s cricketing tale of 1909, as his very best book. Although Wodehouse went on to become more celebrated for his works about Jeeves,
Bertie Wooster and Blandings Castle, he retained a keen interest in school stories, and wrote a comical critique on Tom Brown’s Schooldays in his collection Tales of St Austin’s in 1903.
Here, according to Wodehouse’s short story, while travelling on a train, the narrator is suddenly confronted by a fellow passenger. Seeing that he has been reading Thomas Hughes’s masterpiece, the red-haired stranger abruptly asks him, ‘I suppose you have heard of the Tom Brown Question?’ The question, the stranger goes on to explain, concerns the real identity of the author of Tom Brown’s Schooldays, a problem which he insists is similar to the Homeric Question. Was Tom Brown’s Schooldays produced by a single author, Thomas Hughes, or more than one? The stranger confidently claims that it is perfectly obvious that parts one and two of Hughes’s book were written by different people, and offers what he regards as totally convincing evidence. Part one is a perfectly realistic account of Tom’s early schooldays, written, the stranger agrees, by Thomas Hughes; but part two is clearly the work of another hand. Quoting Professor Burkett-Smith’s learned monograph on the subject, the stranger points out that while the account of the football match in part one is quite truthful, the account of the cricket match in part two is fatally flawed by two errors so significant as to reveal that it has to be the work of a different author. The errors in the description of the cricket match, says the stranger, are clear. First of all, we are asked to believe that, having won the toss on a perfect batting wicket, in a crucial game against the M.C.C., Tom invites the M.C.C. to bat first. ‘Now, my dear sir, I ask you, would a school captain do that?’ Even more devastating proof is provided by the fact of Tom Brown’s admission that, in selecting the school team to play against the M.C.C., he had chosen his friend Arthur to play; not on merit, but because it would do him good to be in the team. These two blunders, the stranger asserts, prove that the Tom Brown who committed them could not have been the same Tom Brown as described in part one of the book. There must, therefore, have been at least two authors of Tom Brown’s Schooldays. The stranger concludes by suggesting that part two was in fact written by the committee of the Secret Society for Putting Wholesome Literature Within The Reach Of Every Boy, And Seeing That He Gets It – the S.S.F.P.W.L.W.T.R.O.E.B.A.S.T.H.G.I. for short!
