CHILDREN'S LITERATURE

In 1744 the printer and writer John Newbery established the first business that was devoted to publishing children's books. The titles that he issued included The History of Little Goody-Two-Shoes (1765).

J.M. Barrie

Peter Pan

Barrie s elder brother David was killed in front of him in an accident while they were children. David had been their mother s favourite and she mourned him for the rest of her life. She spoke of how he had had to die as a boy so that life should not spoil. This appears to have had a profound lifelong impact upon Barrie. The only thing she ever spoke to him about was that at least if David had had to die so young then he would always be perfect. In Barrie's eyes his brother would remain a boy forever . Barrie experienced pyschogenic dwarfism and stopped growing. He was under 4ft., 10in.-tall.

After Edinburgh University, Barrie became a leader writer on The Nottingham Journal newspaper. He started to publish sketches of Scottish life. In 1891 his novel The Little Minister proved to be a popular hit.

In 1897 Barrie encountered the Llewellyn Davies children playing in Kensington Gardens. They were the children of Arthur Llewellyn Davies (d.1907), a barrister, and his wife Sylvia (d.1910), who was the daughter of George du Maurier. Barrie's identification with the five Llewelyn Davies boys may have been underscored by the fact that he was under 5ft.-tall. Following Arthur's death Barrie assumed financial responsibility for the family and on Sylvia's he took the five boys - then aged between six and seventeen - to live with him.

The six-year-old Margaret Henley referred to Barrie as my fwendy . This became the basis of Wendy.

The character Peter Pan is a boy who can fly and who refuses to grow up. The writer J.M. Barrie created him in The Little White Bird (1902), a novel that was for adults. Two years later the author wrote the play Peter Pan.¹ He attended the rehearsals for Peter Pan. At lunch each day he would ask for brussels sprouts. These would be served. However, he would never eat them. Eventually, a friend asked him why this was so. The playwright replied, I cannot resist ordering them. The words are so lovely to say.

In 1929 he gave the copyright of the play to Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children. From 1945 onwards The Scala Theatre's annual productions of Peter Pan were an integral part of London's pantomime season. This was in spite of the fact that the play was not itself a pantomime.

In the first production the same actor both played Mr Darling, the children's father, and Captain Hook. Barrie had planned for such, however, it became customary.

In 1954 Disney released its animation of Peter Pan.

The Copyright, Designs & Patents Act of 1988 ensured that Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital retained the copyright to Peter Pan despite the author having died in 1937. In 2006 Geraldine McCaughrean's novel Peter Pan In Scarlet was published. This was an official sequel that helped the Hospital to maintain the Peter Pan brand.

Location: The Scala Theatre, 60 Charlotte Street, W1P 1LS. The theatre was demolished in 1970. (blue, yellow)

Website: www.jmbarrie.net www.gosh.org www.peterpaninscarlet.com

¹. Both compositions were to be reworked by their author.

Enid Blyton

In 1924 Blyton married Major Hugh Pollock. He was much older than his wife. The marriage broke down. The major took to retiring to cellar to drink by himself.

Blyton married as her second husband Kenneth Waters, a surgeon. The marriage was to prove to be a happy one.

In 1943 Blyton's The Mystery of The Burning Cottage was published. The book was set in the fictional village of Peterswood. This was modelled on Bourne End in Buckinghamshire. The story involved five children - the Finder-Outers - outwitting P.C. Theophilus Goon, a bumbling policeman. It can be argued that the character was a vicious parody of her first husband. A further fourteen Mystery books followed.

Website www.enidblytonsociety.co.uk

Michael Bond

On Christmas Eve 1956 Michael Bond, a B.B.C. cameraman, went into the Selfridges department store on Oxford Street. There, he saw a teddy bear that was all alone upon a shelf. He bought it as a stocking-filler for his wife. The creature was named Paddington after the railway station that Mr Bond commuted into and out of each working day. In 1958 the first of the Paddington books - A Bear Called Paddington - was published. The mammal had a label on him that read Please Look After This Bear . This derived from the author's memories of children who had been evacuated from London during the Second World War. In 1967 he became a full-time writer. In the early 1970s the author and his wife separated. Subsequently, the bear would spend part of the year with him and the rest of it with her.

The illustrations for A Bear Called Paddington (1958) were drawn by Peggy Fortnum (1919-2016). They were based upon sketches she had drawn of a Malayan sun bear in London Zoo. She illustrated a further eleven Paddington books.

Paddington's stare furnished Britons with a gateway to passive aggression.

In 2007 Paddington started advertising Marmite.

Location: Beak Street, W1R 9RA. The location of the Paddington & Company offices. (blue, yellow)

Paddington Railway Station, Praed Street, W2 1HB (red, blue)

Website: www.paddington.co.uk

The Borribles

Michael de Larrabeiti's (1934-2008) novel The Borribles (1976) was about a Battersea street gang that was made up of pointy-eared, runaway children. It was written as a response to the cosiness and self-satisfaction that he felt he had found in Elisabeth Beresford's (1926-2010) The Wombles (1968), which was set in the neighbouring middle-class district Wimbledon. Mr de Larrabeiti s writing drew upon a vein that was akin to William Golding's The Lord of The Flies (1954). The Borribles s version of Wimbledon was populated by the plummy-voiced Rumbles, whom the gang try to murder. The tome was followed by two more books The Borribles Go For Broke (1981) and Across The Dark Metropolis (1986).

See Also: CLASS

Anthony Buckeridge

Anthony Buckeridge (1912-2004) attended Seaford College. He started a career in banking but swiftly that it was not for him. He studied at University College and then taught at Vernon House school in Willesden. He enjoyed acting. In the 1940s he started writing radio plays for the B.B.C. Home Service. The character Jennings made his first appearance in a one-off play Jennings Goes To School (1948), which was written for Children's Hour. Buckeridge modelled the character of Jennings on Diarmid Jennings (1913-2009), a boy who had been a couple of years younger than him at Seaford College. Books followed.

The stories were set in the fictional Linbury Court Preparatory School. The cast of characters came to include C.E.J. Darbishire, Mr Carter, and Mr Wilkins.

In the mid-1950s Buckeridge created Rex Milligan, a more streetwise schoolboy who attended a London day school, for The Eagle. The series was popular but did not attain the same levels of popularity as Jennings.

Jennings became popular in France, where he was known as Bennett.

Jennings continued on radio until the 1970s.

The real Jennings had emigrated to the Antipodes during the 1930s. In the mid-1990s he was tracked down by the television journalist Michael Crick, who discovered that he had no memory of Buckeridge and was oblivious as to the Jennings books. The author and his muse struck up a correspondence and the real Jennings enjoyed having his namesake's books.

Website: www.linbury-court.co.uk (Fan site)

Frances Hodgson Burnett

Frances Hodgson Burnett lived at Maytham Hall at Rolvenden in Kent. The house and its grounds are believed to have been the inspiration for her book The Secret Garden.

The Carnegie Medal

The Carnegie Medal is awarded to the author of distinguished novel for children or young adults.

Website: www.carnegiegreenaway.org.uk

Lewis Carroll

Carroll had an interest in esoteric matters, such as telepathy. He was a member of the Society of Psychical Research. His interest in wordplay included acrostics. These were derived from Hebrew mysticism.

Website: https://lewiscarrollsociety.org.uk

Alice Liddell

Alice Hargreaves (n e Liddell) (1852-1934)

In 1928 decided to auction off the manuscript that Carroll had written for.

In 1932 Liddell met Peter Llewelyn Davies at the Carroll centenary celebrations. There is no record of what they said to one another. Their meeting inspired John Logan's play Peter and Alice (2013).

Richmal Crompton

The Just William Society

The Just William Society celebrates the literary output of Richmal Crompton. The organisation was founded in 1995.

Website: https://justwilliamsociety.co.uk

Fairy Tales

(In 1697 Charles Perrault devised the fairy tale as a literary form.)

(The Russian folklorist Vladimir Propp concluded that fairy tales had seven-character types and 31 narrative units.)

In 1812 the Grimms revised their anthropological work for a general readership.

Edgar Taylor's 1823 translation of the Grimms Tales sanitised them; the violence there was left tended to be punitive. This was part of a process by which tales moved from the popular folk tradition to become staples for inculcating middle class morality. In 1826 the Grimms published a shorter, sanitised version of the tales.

Hans Andersen's work compounded this development.

Food

See Also: FOOD

Kenneth Grahame

Kenneth Grahame experienced a tension between his ancestral Scottish Calvinism and the life of self-gratification that he found that his own temperament drew him towards. As a young man, he was frustrated in his desire to study at a university, instead he entered the Bank of England. Despite rising to become the Secretary to the Bank, one of the most senior posts within the company, he never took to City life. During Grahame's time on the staff of the Bank it was not uncommon for officials to be so drunk that they would be lain out on tables to try to recover. Some clerks were given to holding dogfights in their offices. In 1903 George Robinson visited the Bank and was seen by Grahame, whom he tried to shoot.

From this time on, the official became more willing to follow his own predisposition to escape from London either to the banks of the Thames or to the shores of the Mediterranean. Grahame's marriage was a poor one. He devised a set of stories that became the basis for The Wind In The Willows while taking his errant son Alastair for walks around Kensington Gardens. The Wind In The Willows (1908) is a cautionary tale for his errant son Alastair. The book is an account of Toad's moral instruction. It consists of three sections that had been cobbled together. The first two are mirrors of one another. The third consists of two interpolated stories: The Piper At The Gates of Dawn and a tale in which Rat is tempted by a sea rat to become a wanderer but is stopped by Mole. The book was not an immediate success. With time it grew into a phenomenon.

The lexicographer Frederick Furnivall is reputed to have been a model for the character Ratty in The Wind In The Willows.

Alastair committed suicide two days before his 20^th birthday.

It was A.A. Milne who adapted the book into the play Toad of Toad Hall (1922).

Location: The Bank of England, Threadneedle Street, EC2R 8AR (orange, turquoise)

16 Phillimore Place, W8 7BU. Grahame lived at the address from 1901 to 1908. (orange, red)

The Kenneth Grahame Society

Website: www.kennethgrahamesociety.net

The Guardian Children's Fiction Prize

The Guardian Children's Fiction Prize was established in 1967 by John Rowe Townsend (1922-2014), the paper's children's books editor.

Website: www.theguardian.com/books/guardianchildrensfictionprize

Illustrations

In 1823 George Cruickshank illustrated the British edition of the Brothers Grimms Fairy Tales. This was to prove to be a foundation stone of children's books being illustrated. Their character helped transform what was a collection of earthy tales into material that was targeted at children.

Walter Crane and Arthur Rackham were to follow.

Gavin Maxwell

Gavin Maxwell's paternal grandfather was the politician and author Sir Herbert Maxwell 7^th Bt.. His mother was Lady Mary Percy, a daughter of the 7^th Duke of Northumberland. Maxwell's father was killed during the First World War. Thereafter, his mother engaged in country sports of shooting and fishing. On the Galloway coast he developed a love of nature and animals. He was to write about his childhood in The House of Elrig (1965).

Maxwell grew up to be romantically-inclined and given to ambitious, impractical schemes. He was generous and had expensive tastes.

His predominant sexual inclination was homosexual, however, he had several affairs with women, notably with Clementine Glock, and was briefly married. He and Kathleen Raine met one another while they were teenagers. Subsequently, they met again. In 1948 she fell in love with him. She proved to be highly possessive. He resented this. Their relationship was deeply dysfunctional and involved numerous bitter rows. She was to become an esteemed poet.

Maxwell acquired cottage on the West Highland seaboard that was called Sandaig. Following one row there Raine ran to a rowan tree and cried out Let Gavin suffer in this place as I am suffering now. Rowan trees had a particular place in Celtic mythology. They were planted to ward off evil spirits.

Maxwell was someone whom people often found to be aloof and even rude. However, to those people who shared his love of natural history, he could be warm.

Maxwell wrote Harpoon At A Venture (1952) about hunting bask sharks. The book sold well on both sides of the Atlantic.

In 1956 Maxwell and Wilfred Thesiger went to the Tigris Basin to engage with the Marsh Arabs. His account was published as A Reed Shaken By The Wind (1957). The book won the Heinemann Literary Award. During the trip, he was given an otter cub called Mijbil. The animal proved to be of a species that had not been scientifically categorised before. He became emotionally invested in the creature, as did Raine.

Raine took Mijbil for a walk. The creature was clubbed to death by a road worker.

The Ring of Bright Water (1960). The book's title was taken from a line in Raine's poem The Marriage of Psyche (1952), which was rooted in her unrequited love for him. Although she had played a large role in his life during his custodianship of the animal, her only acknowledgement was among the publishing details. Saindaig was designated Camusfe rna. The book was to sell two million copies. It was succeeded by The Rocks Remain (1963) and Raven Seek They Brother (1968). That Ring overshadowed his other output grew to irritate him.

Terry Nutkins's lost two and a half fingers to a bite that Edal inflicted upon him.

Edal died in a fire that destroyed Maxwell's home.

In 1969 a movie adaptation of The Ring of Bright Water was released. The film starred Bill Travers and Virginia McKenna. It bore little resemblance to the book.

In 1969 Maxwell died of lung cancer. He continued to smoke heavily and drink whisky until he died. Raine's poetry became imbued by an inner desolation.

Henry Williamson's Tarka the Otter (1927) prompted a shift in attitudes towards otter-hunting. Maxwell's Ring of Bright Water (1960) promoted the change further. In 1978 otters became a protected species. In the wild run-offs from a range of persistent, bio-accumulative, and toxic agricultural chemicals had caused the animal to disappear from large swathes of the countryside.

Location: 8 Avonmore Road, W14 8RL (orange, blue)

9 Paultons Square, SW3 5AP (orange, yellow)

See Also: ANIMALS The Thames, Otter

Website: www.maxwellsociety.com

Michael Murpurgo

Website: www.michaelmurpurgo.com

Edith Nesbit

C.S. Lewis may have taken the idea of the wardrobe being the portal to Narnia from Edith Nesbit's (1858-1924) story The Aunt and Amabel (1912).

Location: 23 Elswick Road, SE13 7SP

Beatrix Potter

Potter was born the daughter of a barrister who was an amateur artist. The family were Unitarians. Her mother's family money came from cotton manufacturing.

The text of The Tale of Tom Kitten (1907) is not necessarily suitable for children.

In summer 1905 Potter became engaged to her publisher Norman Warne. Her parents disapproved of the match. While Potter refused to break the engagement, she agreed to keep it secret. Five weeks later, Warne died of a leukaemia-related condition.

The illustrations of Beatrix Potter were Japanese-influenced.

In 1938 she underwent a hysterectomy and never fuller recovered from the operation.

Location: 2 Bolton Gardens, SW5 0AJ (orange, blue)

15 Bedford Street, WC2E 9HE. The Warne's office. (orange, turquoise)

Website: https://beatrixpottersociety.org.uk

Arthur Ransome

When Arthur Ransome was a child, he was taught to ice skate by the Russian Anarchist exile Prince Kropotkin.

Ransome laboured away on Grub Street. Over the period 1904-15 he had fourteen books published. These included a biography of Oscar Wilde. This prompted Lord Alfred Douglas to sue him for libel. During this trial De Profundis was read out in full, this swung the case decisively in Ransome s favour.

Ransome s marriage went into collapse. He responded to this by going to Russia as The Daily News s correspondent. There his politics moved Leftwards, however, this drift seems to have derived from the revolutionaries making efforts to cultivate him. It was commented of Ransome that he was trying to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds. Ransome became involved with Evgenia Shelepina, who was Trotsky's secretary. She nicknamed the writer Charlie Chaplin. This was because his haemorrhoids gave him a peculiar walk. He witnessed the March 1917 revolution at first hand but was back in England during the November one.

Ransome married Shelepina.

See Also: M.I.6 Arthur Ransome

The Arthur Ransome Society

Website: https://arthur-ransome.org

Norman Willis

As a child Norman Willis borrowed books from his local library. Upon one occasion, he took out Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons. He took it to be the most glamorous book that he had ever read. When it came time to return it he was heart-broken at having to do so. However, when he did so a librarian that there were another three volumes in the series. Subsequently, he stated I knew then what it was like to die and hear trumpets.

As an adult, Willis became an active trade unionist. In 1984 he was elected to be the General-Secretary of the Trades Union Congress. One morning he noticed a national newspaper that had a headline that declared Willis was last night fighting for his job. In reality he had been rereading Ransome's We Didn t Mean To Go To Sea for umpteenth time. He was a member of the Arthur Ransome Society and from 1999 to 2009 served as its president.

Robert Southey

In 1837 Robert Southey started publishing miscellaneous material that supposedly linked by a doctor, Dr Daniel Dove of Doncaster, and his horse, Nobs. It grew into a seven-volume series. The only lasting item was The Story of The Three Bears. This was the first version of Goldilocks & The Three Bears. It was not a folk tale. It can be linked to Snow White story types.

See Also: BEARS

Spot the Dog

Eric Hill (1927-2014) was born into a working-class family in Holloway. During the Second World War he was evacuated to the countryside. However, he concluded that he would rather face the Blitz than continue to have to avoid dodging cowpats. The air-battles that he witnessed over London stirred him to record them through drawings. On leaving school he became an errand boy in a West End art studio and then a draughtsman. After national service, he worked as a cartoonist, an advertising visualiser, and freelance graphic artist.

In 1976 Hill's son Christopher was born. A couple of years later the father devised a flyer that initially appeared to be of a man wearing a bowler hat. However, when its lift-up flap was raised, a bird was revealed to be standing on the fellow's pate. Hill adapted the item into a bedtime story for the child. Christopher was delighted by it. Hill then created a picture story about a mother dog looking for her puppy. Hill's background as a cartoonist prompted him to make the visual aspects of the tale simple and the text brief. At the same, he was also of the view that children have more style, creativity, and intelligence than they were generally being credited with. He created Spot a yellow puppy with brown spots and a brown-tipped tale. The markings drew upon the aircraft markings he had drawn as a child. A friend put him in touch with a literary agent and Where's Spot? was published in 1980.

Within six months, Hill became a full-time author and illustrator. He took to referring to himself as Spot s dad . The books were translated into dozens of language and sold tens of millions of copies. Spot acquired a group of friends. These included Helen, a blue hippopotamus, Steve the monkey, and Tom the crocodile. If he was presented with a commercial idea connected to Spot that he did not approve of, he would declare Spot would not like that.

In 1980 an O.B.E. for services to children's literature was conferred upon Hill. At the bestowal ceremony the dignity was conferred by the Prince of Wales, whose own children's book, The Old Man of Lochnagar, had been kept off the No. 1 position in the children's book chart by a Spot book. Hill remarked of the meeting I was expecting to go for the chop, but he was very forgiving.

P.L. Travers

Helen Goff was an Australian poet and actor. She arrived in Britain in 1924. She assumed the penname P.L. Travers, the initial perhaps being a mark of respect to J.M. Barrie, whose work she admired. Her writing led to her being taken up by Irish poetic circles in London. She came to know W.B. Yeats and developed an interest in mythology and the occult. She took a keen interest in the writings of Georgi Gurdjieff.

In 1934 her children's novel Mary Poppins was published. It proved to be a great success and was followed by a series of others about the character, the last one of which was Mary Poppins and The House Next Door (1988). While Poppins was never described as a witch, her nature was more that of a shaman than of a conventional nanny.

Mary Poppins was composed of a series of stories without a through narrative. For the film, the Sherman brothers created one for the film by focusing on the bird lady and the subject of kindness.

Through her Irish connections learned of a couple who already had several children who had just had twins. She adopted John Camillus Hone but never told him of his background. As a young man, he bumped into his identical twin in a pub in Chelsea. They worked out what had happened.

Location: 29 Shawfield Street, SW3 4BA. (Travers was given to entertaining at the Caf Picasso on The King's Road.) (blue, orange)

Dick Van Dyke

In 1964 Walt Disney released the musical movie Mary Poppins. Travers disliked it intensely.

Dick Van Dyke's portrayal of Bert the chimney sweep, etc. in the film is savoured by many Londoners. In large part, this derives from an appreciation of both the character and the performance. However, an element of the fondness derives from Mr Van Dyke's mangled manner of addressing the Cockney accent. When people who do not speak with such an accent wish to do an exaggerated version of one they adopt one that is modelled upon the one that the actor used in the movie. In 2017 he issued a statement in which he expressed his regret at having deployed it.

Alison Uttley

Alison Uttley (1884-1976) is best remembered for Little Grey Rabbit.

Henry Williamson

See Also: ANIMALS The Thames, Otter

Website: www.henrywilliamson.co.uk

Jacqueline Wilson

Jacky Aitken failed the eleven-plus and so went to Coombe Girls Secondary School. At the age of seventeen she moved to Dundee to become a member of the editorial team at D.C. Thomson. The company named Jackie magazine after her. She married Millar Wilson, who was a printer. The couple moved south and he joined the police. She became a writer of teenage age novels that were printed by Oxford University Press. In order to increase the accessibility of her work, she started using child-friendly vocabulary and writing in the first-person. Nick Sharratt became her illustrator. In 1991 The Story of Tracy Beaker was published by Transworld. The character was an unreliable narrator. The novel proved her breakthrough. By then she had been a published author for over two decades.

(Jackie magazine was folded in 1993.)

Website: www.jw-mag.com https://shows.acast.com/jacqueline-wilson-fan-club

Winnie The Pooh

The writer A.A. Milne wrote the children's books Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) and The House At Pooh Corner (1928). In 1930 Stephen Slesinger (d.1953), a literary agent paid Milne U.S.$1000 for the American merchandising rights of Pooh. He left the collective rights to the stories to his immediate family, the Garrick Club, the Royal Literary Fund, and Westminster School. The Pooh Property Trust administered the rights for the four parties. Christopher Milne, the son of the author, sold half of his quarter share to the Royal Literary Fund for 150,000. The other half he put into a trust fund for his daughter Clare. The Trust sold the stories the television and film rights to Walt Disney, the American movie studio, in a 200m deal, but retained the hardback and paperback book rights. In 1998 the Garrick Fund voted to follow the Fund and the School in accepting the deal. In 2001 Disney agreed to pay 240m to exploit the Pooh characters until 2026, when the copyright was due to expire.

In 2009 it was reported that Pooh Properties had announced the publication of a Pooh sequel - Return To Hundred Acre Wood.

Location: 13 Mallord Street, SW3 6DT. Milne's home. (orange, turquoise)

The Garrick Club, 15-17 Garrick Street, WC2E 9AY (orange, yellow)

Website: https://winniethepooh.disney.com www.poohsoc.org.uk www.garrickclub.co.uk

David Backhouse 2024