by Dennis Butts
Difficulties in identifying the authorship of children’s books continued well into the twentieth century. Even Enid Blyton published six books under the name of Mary Pollock. Graham Greene (1904-1991), the distinguished author of Brighton Rock (1938) and The Power and the Glory (1940), has always been known for his interest in children’s books, having written essays on Beatrix Potter and H. Rider Haggard amongst others. In the 1940s and 1950s he wrote the texts for four picture-books for young children, which were illustrated by his current girlfriend Dorothy Glover (1908-1971). The Little Train (without Greene’s name on the title-page, 1946), The Little Fire Engine (1950), The Little Horse Bus (1952) and The Little Steam Roller (1953) were reasonably popular. But in the late 1940s Greene began to drift away from Dorothy and fell in love with Catherine Walston. Despite this new relationship, Greene continued to feel protective of his former girlfriend. This became apparent when his new publisher, the Bodley Head, proposed to re-publish his four children’s books with different pictures by a new illustrator. Greene dismissed the idea completely because he did not want Dorothy to lose her royalties from the books. Judy Taylor, then in charge of the Bodley Head’s children’s list, recalls Graham Greene announcing that he agreed to the books being re-published with a new illustrator, as ‘Dorothy Glover [Dorothy Craigie] has just died.’ The books were re-published by the Bodley Head in 1973-1974 with illustrations by the great Edward Ardizzone.
But did Graham Greene’s loyalty to Dorothy go further than that? In an article in Children’s Literature in Education (December 2005) the noted scholar and critic Brian Alderson argues that Greene may have helped Dorothy by writing other texts for her to illustrate under her name. He cites three particular works: a picture-book, Summersault’s Circus (Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1947), and two works of science fiction published under the name of David Craigie: The Voyage of the Luna I (Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1948) and Dark Atlantis (Heinemann, 1953). Alderson produces a good deal of evidence from the books to support his suggestion, such as the use of spoof newspaper headlines and a certain fluency of style typical of Greene, and descriptions of journeys by ship and of West Africa, of which Greene also had considerable experience.
Summersalt’s Circus. But was Graham Greene the real author?
A book most easily linked to Greene is perhaps Summersault’s Circus, a brightly illustrated tale about the arrival of Summersault’s Great Circus in a small town, to the delight of the children but to the great annoyance of various stuffy adults who try to cancel it. Fortunately the Mayor, the father of one of the children, returns from a visit to London just in time to put a stop to the obstructionists and to make everything all right. The pompous and officious adults are defeated, and the circus takes place after all. It is obvious that there are many parallels between Summersault’s Circus and Greene’s other children’s stories – a love of animals, the dislike of posh, snobby adults, an understanding of what children really like, and, above all, a passionate sympathy for the dispossessed and ordinary. It is not difficult to see Graham Greene’s hand here, although his authorship has never been acknowledged.
The true author of another curious work, The Gobbling Billy (a light-hearted story about car-racing by ‘Dynely James’ which was published in 1959) has also rarely been named. The Gobbling Billy is a derelict racing-car of 1912 – really a Gobelin-Billet – discovered on a rundown Irish farm by Bob Harcombe, a computer engineer. With the help of some children, Bob restores the car to its former glory, and, despite the machinations of a wicked rival, manages to win the Portaderry Sports Race. The Gobbling Billy, we now know, was partly written by the outstanding children’s writer William Mayne (1926-2010), best known for his witty stories about choir schools, and other imaginative and powerful works. He is the author of such classics as Earthfasts (1966) and The Jersey Shore (1973). His collaborator on The Gobbling Billy was Dick Caesar (1906-1974), a well-known sports-car designer. Presumably the fact that the book was written by two collaborators led to the manufactured pseudonym of ‘Dynely James’. But who would have guessed that in 1959? Mayne, for inscrutable reasons, also published under the names Martin Cobalt and Charles Molin. Discovering the real name of a book’s author can be a tricky business – and perhaps never more so than when some of the world’s biggest selling authors such as Carolyn Keene (of Nancy Drew fame) and Daisy Meadows (producer of over 100 ‘Rainbow Magic’ volumes) do not actually exist.
21. Exactly How Big Was the Little House in the Big Woods?
Laura Ingalls Wilder, ‘Little House’ Series (1932-1971)
The American frontier tales of Laura Ingalls Wilder are almost as well known in Britain as in America. The nine main books were published in the United States between the 1930s and the 1970s and they have never been out of print. In Britain, Methuen published three books, but the remaining six, including The Little Town on the Prairie, The Long Winter and Farmer Boy, were then published by The Lutterworth Press, which sold paperback rights to Puffin. The books were popular in Britain throughout the 1960s and 1970s, and a television series based on the books, Little House on the Prairie, was aired from 1974-1983 and has been frequently screened since then.
The picture of Laura’s development from a very young girl in Little House in the Big Woods (1933) to resourceful teenage in Little Town on the Prairie (1941), and then a young wife in These Happy Golden Years (1943) is one of the books’ main attractions; the reader watches the little girl move from the protective care of her loving parents in the early books towards freedom and independence in the later stories, when she gradually learns to take on more responsibilities. But it is the picture of everyday American life in the 1870s and 1880s that gives these books their greatest appeal – the detailed accounts of butter and cheese-making, of looking after the cattle, of burning hay in the winter months because there is no wood or coal left.
Laura Ingalls Wilder was drawing upon the circumstances of her own life when she wrote these tales. Born in a cabin, the second daughter of a farmer-settler in the timber region of Wisconsin, she moved around with her family as they sought to better themselves – to Missouri, Kansas, Minnesota, Iowa and then back to Minnesota – before they settled in the small town of De Smet in South Dakota. She witnessed and participated in the desperate struggles of her hard-working parents to improve their lot by farming, trading, selling land, in fact turning their hands to almost anything in order to earn an honest dollar. She saw her father’s crops ruined two years running by voracious grasshoppers, lost a baby brother, Freddie, survived an unusually harsh prairie winter, supported her blind older sister, and yet also enjoyed her father’s fiddle-playing, the beauties of the landscape, and the fun of birthdays and Christmas.
All of this is crisply and sensitively realised over the seven books which essentially make up Laura Ingalls Wilder’s story. Little House in the Big Woods introduces the reader to young Laura, living in a log cabin with Pa and Ma, and sisters Mary and baby Carrie, while Pa farms and hunts and starts to clear the forest. Little House on the Prairie (1935) describes the family’s journey by wagon further west till they settle in Indian Territory in Kansas. In On the Banks of Plum Creek (1937) the family move on to Minnesota. By now Laura is eight, and the family’s hopes of a great harvest are ruined by a plague of locusts. They move on to a shanty at Silver Lake where Pa works on the railway for a time, finally settling at De Smet in South Dakota, events described in By the Shores of Silver Lake (published in 1939). But here, in The Long Winter (1940), what many readers regard as the finest book of the series, the family have to endure the terrible winter of 1881. The weather is so severe that the trains cannot get through, and townspeople begin to run out of food. Laura is a teenager now and becomes friendly with Almanzo Wilder, another young settler. His early story was described in Farmer Boy in 1933, and their courtship and marriage are chronicled in Those Happy Golden Years (1943). At this point, Laura had been working on the series for thirteen years – a remarkable achieveme
nt. (After her death, Laura’s account of her first years of married life were published as The First Four Years in 1971.)
How reliable are the books? How authentic are they as both a picture of Laura’s life and as an account of life on the American frontier from the late 1860s to the 1880s? There is some controversy here, but we know that Laura had begun contributing to journals from 1911, and had become quite an experienced writer when she produced a memoir of her childhood and adolescence in 1930. We know that, as well as relying on her recollections of her early life and memories of what her family told her, she did some research into her past. She wrote to libraries for information, and revisited Kansas to find the site of the cabin where her family had once lived. She seems to have made very deliberate attempts to get all the details as right as she could.
However, we also know from other sources of information that her books do not always correspond exactly with the circumstances of her life. There are numerous instances in her books where her description of events does not correspond with what really happened. In her account of the long winter, for example, Laura tells us that her family left their house in the countryside and moved back into town because of the bad weather. But she exaggerates the frequency of the blizzards she describes and also the length of the journey Almanzo undertook to collect the badly-needed wheat, which was probably nearer to twelve miles than twenty. She does not tell us that during this winter a young couple and their baby lodged with them. She also omits any references to her baby brother Freddie, who died at the age of nine months in 1876 and might have appeared in On the Banks of Plum Creek. She coalesces three different girls into the single character of Nellie Oleson, and compresses the family’s journeys between Minnesota, Iowa and Minnesota again in 1874-1878 to read as if they had only lived in Minnesota once. Many of these changes or omissions are relatively unimportant, and might be regarded as the legitimate tidying up of complex material, as, for example, with the simplification of the family’s movements from 1874-1878.
Other changes and omissions, however, are clearly the result of decisions which were not necessarily made in the interests of historical accuracy. The treatment of Native Americans in Little House on the Prairie has raised some questions. While it was perfectly legitimate for the adult Laura to recall her childhood’s fear of the Indians, it has been noted that, while an Indian massacre is referred to in Laura’s story, the brutal murder committed by a white family, which is recorded in her notes, is omitted. It has also been pointed out that when the Ingalls family cross Kansas, Pa at least would have known that they were illegally squatting on Osage Indian territory. When the family decide to leave the area, Pa blames the federal government for encouraging them to settle there in the first place, but history tell us that it was really the enthusiasm of the settlers’ groups to acquire land at cheap prices which created the problem.
Distrust of the federal government seems to have been a permanent feature of the psychology of the Wilder family, and this has led to other concerns about the historical accuracy of the books. Individual enterprise, hard work, independence and thrift are the values Laura praises, and her stories represent inspiring examples as first Pa and Ma, and later Laura and Almanzo, display these virtues. The stories tend to diminish examples of collaboration and co-operation, however, when individuals come together. Laura’s tales concentrate upon the often-heroic exploits of individuals while ignoring the supportive role of government and the relationship between the industrial west and the pastoral west. (The railways are mentioned but their contribution not explored.) Schools and churches play some part, and in The Long Winter we do see individuals joining together in various ways, with Almanzo in undertaking a long and dangerous journey to help the community. Individuals come together in other ways too – forming a literary society, organising entertainments, building a church – but independence is given the highest value.
The Ingalls family were strongly opposed to federal government. They were hostile to the New Deal of the 1930s and regarded Roosevelt as a dictator. They disliked the idea of government ‘handouts’, and Laura was mortified when in 1937 she learned that her younger sister Grace was receiving federal support including food from the government. Laura’s daughter, Rose Wilder Lane (1886-1968), was even more conservative than her mother, and because of the way she helped to edit her mother’s books it has been suggested that she had a serious ideological influence on them.
Laura began writing articles for the Missouri Ruralist in 1911, but it was Rose who became the professional writer, first working for the San Francisco Bulletin, and then achieving considerable success as a freelance magazine writer and novelist, often earning very large sums of money for her work. In 1919 she revised a magazine article which Laura had written and, as the professional writer of the family, became very involved in her mother’s work thereafter.
Between 1929 and 1930 Laura began writing a memoir of her childhood and adolescence which she called Pioneer Girl, and which ran to around 7,000 words. Publisher Alfred A. Knopf liked the material and suggested that if it could be expanded to about 25,000 words, it might make an interesting story for young children. Rose had already been negotiating with the publisher, and, with Laura’s help, she began work on expanding the original manuscript, helping to write, edit and retype the story. She completed her work in a week, and the book was published as Little House in the Big Woods in 1932.
This process, by which Rose encouraged her mother to continue the series, talking about and arguing over the contents, revising and then typing up the final version, continued to a greater or lesser extent throughout the whole series. The earlier books, written while Rose was still living with her parents, show the greatest degree of collaboration. Rose spent five weeks revising Little House on the Prairie, and she and her mother spent two months together working on On the Banks of Plum Creek. But in 1937 Rose moved to New York and from then on the discussion between mother and daughter over the tales was carried on by correspondence. Their letters regarding The Long Winter show that Rose went further in rewriting and expanding Laura’s draft of this book than most of the others. There was only sporadic correspondence and less collaboration over the last books – Little Town on the Prairie and Those Happy Golden Years – as Laura grew in confidence and Rose became more involved in her own affairs.
Both Laura and her husband remained staunch individualists – Almanzo once threatened to drive a government agent off his land with a shotgun! – and Rose was even more reactionary. During the war years she made the national news by writing an anti-Roosevelt pamphlet entitled What is This – The Gestapo? (1943).
In literary terms, what this means is that Laura’s accounts of frontier life in the 1870s and 1880s may over-state the values and the success of complete independence and self-sufficiency. Federal and government action tends to be criticised or ignored, and communal and societal endeavours are minimised. Pa’s ingenuity is praised, but organised social activities are in danger of being forgotten. Inaccuracies and bias only matter if one regards Laura Ingalls Wilder’s fine books as authentic and accurate history. Laura certainly tried to check her facts, but she often made decisions for artistic reasons, manipulating her material, restructuring it, and sometimes omitting details which she felt were unsuitable. In 1938 Laura was invited to speak at a Detroit Book Fair, and she talked about how and why she wrote her books. She said that she wanted to preserve the stories her father used to tell her. But the truth is that once she adopted the form suggested by her publisher, she joined the company of Walter Scott and Fenimore Cooper, and became more a historical novelist than a historian.
22. Did Jennings Ever Grow Up or Learn Anything?
Anthony Buckeridge, Jennings Goes to School (1950)
The formula of most school stories depicts the hero or heroine starting at school in the lowest form at the beginning of the story, being initiated into the school’s rites and rituals, gradually learning to cope with both the
new environment and society, and, over a period of time, developing enough to become a leader in that society – perhaps even Head Boy – and, it is suggested, achieving some kind of maturity. Tom Brown’s Schooldays of 1859 is the classic example of the genre, with Tom leaving school at the end of the novel as a praeposter (or prefect) and proceeding to Oxford in a sequel. J.K. Rowling also follows this template in the Harry Potter series, taking her young hero through six years at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry in seven volumes running from 1997 to 2007. Elsie J. Oxenham (1880-1960), the prolific author of girls’ school stories, sometimes known as the Abbey books, not only shows her girls growing up, but marrying and having children, who in their turn return to their mothers’ school.
Initially, Anthony Buckeridge’s well-loved stories about his young hero, John Christopher Timothy Jennings of Linbury Court School, seem to belong to this genre too. Over twenty-four books, beginning with Jennings Goes to School in 1950, and ending with That’s Jennings! in 1994, Buckeridge traces the schoolboy adventures of his young hero alongside those of his great friend Darbishire.
In Jennings Goes to School (1950), we see Jennings starting school aged ‘ten years, two months and three days last Tuesday.’ He learns the ropes, including the school slang, makes friends with Darbi, and becomes acquainted with the teachers, mainly the irascible Mr Wilkins and the more understanding Mr Carter. It is the autumn term, and Jennings scores a fluke goal in the match against the school’s great rivals, Bracebridge.
