What you're getting to hear from me tonight
is very much work in progress.
I finished the archive work for what
I'm going to be talking about only two weeks ago.
And I'm still very much thinking through quite a lot
of what I'm doing.
And partially because of that, I will talk until Lars waves
at me and says stop.
Because this isn't written, bits of it aren't written.
What I'm talking about tonight is from a book
that I'm working on with Professor Mike Levy, who
is a specialist in children's literature
at the University of Wisconsin, Stout.
And it might be helpful for you to realize here
that I don't regard myself as a specialist in children's
literature.
I have a reputation in that.
But what I am a specialist in is science fiction and fantasy.
And it's very much those critical tools
rather than the children's literature tools
that I bring to the body of material.
But related to that is I'm rather
interested in reader reception, in ideas
of the child, of relationship between people
and cultural objects and the way they understand the world.
And the chapter I'm talking about today
is interesting in those terms.
Because I'm going to be talking about a period in which you
can't as easily point and say that is fantasy.
That is the fantasy community.
The people who are writing, even though they talk to each other
to an extent, and we know some of the books they have in common
that they read, would not have regarded themselves as fans
or as fantasy writers in the way a modern writer would,
or interestingly, as the way writers in the late 19th
century would.
This is an interim period.
At the end of the 19th century, we
have a body of writers, many of whom
are associated with the pre-Raphaelite movement.
Do most people know what I'm talking about with pre-Raphaelites?
If you go into your big church and you come out of it,
the piece of stained glass above the door as you exit
is classic pre-Raphaelite art.
Long flowing costumes, lots of long hair.
If my hair was still very long, I'd look straight out
of one of these pictures.
You will have all seen pre-Raphaelite painting even
if you don't know what it is.
And associated with the pre-Raphaelites are fantasy writers
such as William Morris, Charles Kingsley, Christina Rossetti.
All of these are part of a movement.
The period I'm talking about in the 1920s and 30s
is not part of a movement in quite the same way,
although a number of the writers have associations
with different groups.
So P.L. Travers, who wrote Mary Poppins,
was associated with the theosophists,
who are what we'd call a new age religion now.
Tolkien, of course, is part of the Inklings group,
which produces a lot of fantasy.
And the interesting things about the Inklings
is that we know they were reading pulp science fiction
magazines from the 20s and 30s.
So they're almost the first British fan group,
which is an interesting way to think of Tolkien and Lewis.
But they're not necessarily all connected with each other,
although you can often, and I actually ought to try this one day,
draw a map of how they're linked to each other through other people.
So just to give you an example of an author I'm not talking about today,
Hope Merlies, who wrote only one fantasy called
Blood in the Mist, which is still in print.
It's been in print since 1970, which is not bad going.
It's originally 1920.
She was a friend of Virginia Woolf.
And through Virginia Woolf, knew a whole load of other people.
So there's all sorts of interesting connections,
but it's not cohesive.
So that's the period.
Now, there are two things about this period.
The first one, which many of you as German speakers
won't necessarily be aware of, is that there is no English speaking
book market in this period in the way we'd understand it today.
Instead, there are two book markets in English.
One is the American book market, specifically the USA.
And the other is the colonial or Commonwealth book market.
And that is a book market that emanates from London
and from Edinburgh.
And that's an anomaly that relates to licensing practices
in the 18th century that you don't have to worry about right now.
But essentially, we had two monopolies in Britain
that were authorized by the Crown.
And that emanates out.
And books printed in London and Edinburgh
are distributed in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Hong
Kong, India, Malaysia, Ireland.
That Commonwealth market lasts right up until the mid-1990s.
It's at least 1995 before you can
assume that USA children and English or Australian children
are reading the same books.
I can sit down with somebody my age from India,
and we can talk about the books we read as children.
If I try that with an American colleague,
we very quickly run into the sands.
We don't have books in common.
So this is a market that both produces
writers from the Commonwealth and projects to the Commonwealth.
And you can quite often see that effect in books like Dr. Doolittle.
I don't know how many people will have read Dr. Doolittle.
It's a couple of people nodding.
It's a story about a doctor who learns to talk to animals
and becomes a specialist vet, and then sails around
to various places.
And it helps to understand the nature of the racism
in the books, which is all about uplift rather than about oppression.
If you know that this book is designed for the Commonwealth, which
has that rhetoric.
Don't confuse rhetoric with behavior, though.
But the rhetoric of Commonwealth racism is very much of,
we have to look after these poor Africans and poor Indians
until they're ready to look after themselves.
The outcome is just as racist, but the rhetoric
is not the same as the rhetoric you get in the USA.
So if you understand the book market,
you can understand the differences in the rhetoric.
Similarly, if you understand that these books are being marketed
to the Commonwealth market, issues of class become much more obvious.
And for those of you who were in the seminar yesterday,
we talked about that a little bit about Mary Poppins.
So we're looking at a very specific market in this period.
We're also looking at a very particular type of period.
Now, I've given the date 1939, but I'm actually
going to be going up through the 40s.
But what we're looking at is the interwar period.
And this is something that I'm going to assume
is as meaningful to you as it is to me.
It tends not to be meaningful to Americans.
They don't have that sense of demarcation between the First World
War and the Second World War.
First of all, they're not involved in the First World
War for more than a year and a half, so they don't lose many people.
I once had a row online with some Americans who said something
like, why are Europeans so sentimental about the First World War?
And you don't know where to begin.
I mean, those of us who are over 40
will remember people whose grandmothers had worn black for 60 years.
So for us, it's this swathe just cut through Europe.
If anybody's read A.S. Byert's children's book, one of the problems
with it is that it goes up to 1914, which
means you spend the last two years thinking, oh, God,
something dreadful is about to happen.
It's that big an impact.
And then, of course, the Second World War changes everything in Europe.
It changes boundaries.
It changes the political system.
But it also finishes off the social changes of the First World War
because both wars between them wipe out the aristocracy of Europe.
And what we see, and we see this in some of the fantasy,
is a growing confidence amongst the middle class, a growing sense
that this is their world.
And if you think about the very end of Lord of the Rings,
the person who inherits the earth is Sam Gamgee.
He is the working class, middle class chap made good
because the aristocracy, the elves, the high class hobbits,
are all swept away.
Note that Frodo's friends don't get married.
They don't perpetuate that aristocracy of hobbit them.
So we get that sense of social turmoil and social change
at the end of that period.
This period is a period of pause.
And one of the things I found interesting in some of the books
I'm going to talk to you about today
is the way some of the books I'm looking at
try to create the sense of stability
and yet have a sense of instability running through them
and how some of the other books embrace a sense of change.
And generally speaking, the ones that embrace the change
are the earlier ones at the beginning of the period.
Those that try to pretend that things are still stable
are the later books in the 1930s.
And that sort of makes sense if you think about it.
Because the 1920s is when people can still convince themselves
that the Great War was the war to end all wars.
Whereas in the later period, we have the Abyssinian crisis,
the Spanish Civil War, the takeover of Czechoslovakia.
People can feel the unease growing up.
None of this is reflected directly,
but you can feel that sense of instability.
Now, I've called this chapter,
Escaping the Influence of Narnia.
And the reason for that is a piece of serendipity.
I never work on one book at a time.
I get bored.
There has to be something else to distract me.
And I'm writing a book on this chap.
His name is Jeffrey Tries.
He's a historical writer
who published his first children's book in 1934
and his last a year after he died in 1998.
That's a hell of a career.
And he seems to have changed quite dramatically
the way children's historical fiction was written,
and also the way history was taught to children.
When he started writing,
children's historical novels were very much
let us ride along with Walter Raleigh or Bismarck
or however, and the only interesting people
were great men.
And his very first book is called
Both Against the Barons.
It's a communist retelling of Robin Hood.
It includes wonderful lines like,
today comrades, it was not the bow and arrow
that won it, it was the hammer and the sickle.
It sold about 500 copies in Britain
and about a million in the Soviet Union,
on the back of which he actually went to travel
around the Soviet Union.
An amazing man.
But one of the things he also started doing
was reviewing children's books.
And he's interesting, because actually
he wasn't very interested in children's books.
And I picked up his book Tales Out of School,
which I was reading, and I read his chapter on fantasy.
And he was not a fan of fantasy,
but he was very fair-minded.
And I'm finding myself thinking,
there's something odd about this chapter.
This chapter doesn't feel like every other chapter
I've read on this period.
And then I realized what it was.
This book was written in 1948.
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe comes out in 1950.
And The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
sets the pattern for what children's fantasy
will look like, really until Rowling comes along.
And even J.K. Rowling still shows those traits.
I mean, technically Harry Potter is set in our world.
Yet he has to get on a train and go through a portal,
which is the archway at King's Cross,
and enter a magical world,
which is the world of the school.
Just because it's contained within a building
doesn't make it not a secondary world.
Essentially, she's still using that template.
If you take away that template,
and forget that that is what children's fantasy
is supposed to look like,
and even when it's not portal fantasy,
I can almost always point out to you the similarities.
What does children's fantasy then feel like
if I just try to forget all of that, okay?
And that was quite a hard question to answer.
Theresa's assessment was that it was mostly folktale,
fairy tale, and dragon stories,
and I'm gonna come back to that as I talk.
And I thought that was an interesting take.
How much of this is true?
So what I set out to do was to make a very long list of books,
and I ended up with about 60, which I then read in order.
Okay, chronological order.
And this, by the way, is why you can tell I'm a historian.
It's a very historian's thing to do.
It matters when a book is published.
And it matters in terms of influence and sensibility,
and reading experience,
because the people who read these texts hadn't read Narnia.
They didn't know about Narnia.
And some of the texts which I read as a child
and didn't get in any real sense,
this time I got because I was doing my best
to forget that Narnia existed,
which mostly worked, not always.
So, the first thing I discovered,
or discovered is the wrong word,
the first conclusion I came to
is that we're looking at a period
in which the elements of modern fantasy
are still very distinct.
They aren't blended yet.
We have stories of fairies.
Now, I don't actually mean fairy tales as such.
I'm not talking Andrew Lang.
I'm not talking Grimm.
I'm not talking Perot.
I'm talking about tales of encounters with fairies
in quite modern stories.
And I'll be going through all of these,
not quite all of them.
First two, I think, as we talk.
I haven't actually written the last two parts yet
or done the research, okay?
Like I said, this is very much work in progress.
So, we've got these tales where people meet
and have adventures with fairies.
And do people know what I mean by Cottingby fairies?
The little girls who took photographs of fairies
at the bottom of their garden in about 1910
and everybody believed they really were fairies,
Conan Doyle is the most famous person
to have been taken in by them.
They only actually owned up about 15 years ago.
And it was only really when we started
getting modern digital techniques
that you could actually dismantle the picture
and figure out what they'd done.
You could tell if you looked carefully
because legs didn't go in quite the right places.
If you want to see a modern take on it,
Brian Froward, a very talented artist,
have Lady Cottingby's pressed fairy book.
The idea is that Lady Cottingby has actually
been capturing fairies and pressing them
like flowers in her book.
It's a brilliant, brilliant piece of artwork.
It's a collection.
So, we're talking about those kinds of fairies.
They're Victorian fairies.
And that's an interesting thing in and of itself.
If any of you read modern fantasy,
right now Elizabethan fairies,
which tend to be our size and rather scary,
think Midsummer Night's Dream, are much more popular.
The Victorian fairies have almost completely disappeared,
but in this period, no Elizabethan fairies.
And I must one of these days sit down
and figure out when the Elizabethan fairies come back.
I think it's in a Rosemary Sutcliffe book
called The Armory's House.
See, research spins off other research.
That's what's so exciting about it.
The other aspect of this is folk tales.
Now, at the end of the 19th
and the beginning of the 20th century,
partially as a consequence of a rise
of a particular kind of nationalism,
which I'm going to hesitate to call left or right wing,
because it feeds into Nazism,
but it also feeds into, and we were talking about this earlier,
a lovely group in Britain called the Woodcraft Folk
who are left-wing girl guides.
And they all get hooked on this revival of ancient myths,
which half the time they make up from whole cloth.
There's a lovely book by Caroline Sumpter
called The Victorian Press and the Fairy Tale,
in which she actually traces one particular Irish legend,
which is always reported in newspapers
as being from the next village over,
and eventually turns out to have been made up by a journalist.
So a lot of these folk tales aren't as folkish
as we quite like to think.
But what makes them distinctive
is that they're often very animist,
spirits of the mountains, spirits of the trees,
spirits of the river.
This is stuff you can recognise in modern fantasy.
To take us back to Lewis,
it's there in Prince Caspian,
where the bridge at Baruna is brought down
by the spirit of the river.
It's almost an attempt to create Greek myth
out of the European landscape.
And we particularly see collections of Celtic tales
as part of the Irish nationalist revival,
which then feeds into the whole revolutions of 1916 and 1922.
Related to these are hero tales,
some of which come from Irish and Scottish traditions,
but actually mostly come to us through the retellings
of Norse mythology,
which becomes very popular in this period.
Beowulf is being reprinted and re-translated.
And also Greek tales, which become extremely popular.
And I don't know if you have an equivalent,
but in Britain there's a translator
called Robert Lancelin Green, sorry, Roger Lancelin Green,
who re-told these stories so effectively
that his retellings stay in print for 60 years.
And they're stories of Greek heroes
like Achilles, they become very popular.
They're not strictly speaking fantasy,
but they're being sold to the kind of people
who might like reading fantasy,
is the best way I can put it.
And then there are courtly tales.
And this one's a bit trickier,
because on the surface they don't look like fantasy at all.
But they're modern versions of the Bacamaran myths.
Eleanor Fargen is possibly one of the best retellers.
And they're often retellings of fairy tales,
but in which they're told in a very courtly, elegant way.
And they're often connected to retellings
of the story of ballads.
Because what I don't have up here is at the same time,
you have the folk song collectors like Cecil Sharp.
And I'm sure there are German equivalents,
because this was going on right the way across Europe.
So all of these are elements
that are going to end up feeding into modern fantasy.
We can see the courtly tales still there
in the work of a children's writer like Tamora Pierce,
in which a young girl takes up the sword
and becomes a warrior dressed as a boy.
Yet this could be straight out of a 19th century ballad.
We can see these traces.
And the hero tales, of course,
end up in modern quest fantasies.
You know, the story of your assistant pig keeper
from the Book of Three,
Garyan and David Eddings' Bulgarian,
they're all Hercules, the 12 tasks of Hercules, yes?
You can see this pattern in almost every quest fantasy.
So this is still a period
where these ingredients are quite separate.
Okay, now I had to try to figure out,
given that I have some very eclectic texts,
there's no, the texts don't obviously look alike.
How I was going to group them
as a way to try and talk about what's going on
in this period.
And the categories I came up with,
ignore the last one for a moment,
it really shouldn't be there.
It's a comment rather than a strand,
was satirical work,
the tales of meeting with fairies,
animal and toy tales,
and I'll explain as we go why I've grouped those,
and magic carpet tales.
And what's interesting about the last category,
and I've just realized I'm supposed to be using a pointer
instead of which I'm actually pointing at the computer,
which is no good for you.
Um,
what's interesting about the last category
is I was at a conference last week
where Diane Perkis gave an entire talk
about magic carpet tales
with exactly the same linkage of
why suddenly magic carpet tales?
Which, because it's not relevant to mine,
I think it's because we suddenly able to fly in the 1920s.
As you'll see, in my earliest texts,
flight involves becoming a bird.
But by the 1920s and 30s,
flight involves getting on something that can fly.
And I think that's a distinct shift in cultural sensibility.
People don't want to be birds anymore.
They want to control something they can fly on.
Okay, and last, which I'll come back to,
whose adventure is it anyway?
Which is about the nature of the way children are treated,
and the role of children in children's literature
in this period.
All right, satire.
And this is where at some point
I'm gonna have to look at this
because there's one book here I don't remember very well.
One of the problems when you work
with this period of children's literature
is that unless you're looking at fiction
written for very small children,
it can often be tricky to work out
what's meant for teens and what's meant for adults.
And that's because the move into adulthood,
not adult itself, but the move into it,
started much younger.
I have a book by Noel Stretfield
called The Children on the Top Floor.
It's a very strange book.
If you want to look at attitudes to homosexuality in 1950,
great book.
It's strange.
Very, very comfortable with the concept,
but not mentioning the word.
Fascinating.
But the thing that really stands out
is that the children are 12,
and they're having conversations with adults about,
and I will be starting work soon.
Because the school leaving age is 14.
And that means that what you're writing is very different.
In my book on the intergalactic playground,
one of the big shifts I pointed out
is that books written for children in the 1950s
assume that teenagers are interested in the workplace.
That's what growing up means.
By the 1970s, they're all about dating
because the workplace for a 15-year-old
could be as much as six years away.
Most of you will not work in order to support yourself
until you're at least 21, okay?
You may have jobs,
but it's still not quite the same thing.
So the whole structure, the whole attitude
to that age group is really quite diffuse.
It's hard to put your finger on it.
And these books reflect that.
They could be for children, they could be for teens,
or they could be for adults.
My first choice here is The Sword and the Stone
by T.H. White.
Now many of you will have actually seen the Disney movie.
It's a really problematic book to talk about
because it goes through several iterations.
And the more it gets revised,
the more it starts to look like
what we understand as fantasy.
But at this stage, it isn't really fantasy
because although technically it takes place
in King Arthur's court,
we're told that the boys can't go to Eaton
because there's a giant on the road
who will stop them getting there.
Eaton.
So the bits we all remember,
like such as Kay and, I can't remember his companion's name.
Somebody can remind me later.
We remember the bits about them being turned into fish
or being turned into hawks,
but we don't tend to remember all the political satire
that the book is larded with.
And this book, if it is connected to anything at all,
is connected to a book by Thackeray
called The Rose and the Ring,
which again, I don't know how many people here will know,
which was originally written as a pantomime
and is a subversion of fairy tales.
A fairy wishes somebody a little misfortune
and she loses her kingdom,
but it helps make her into a good person.
Another young man is wished beauty
and he becomes terribly vain and has to be brought down.
It's a very funny book,
but it's a satire and it assumes a knowledgeable audience.
And Th White is clearly writing in the same tradition.
And then right at the very end,
he tacks on the bit about Kay or Arthur
pulling the sword out of the stone.
The actual last bit, the story of the title
is the last chapter.
The rest of it is these little discreet adventures.
Now elsewhere, I've called this bracelet fantasy
in that you can pull out a link
and it wouldn't make any difference to the story as a whole.
They're really short stories.
And this I think reflects the sense
that White doesn't really know what he's writing here.
And I think it's okay to say that.
This is not somebody writing in a tradition of
this is what a fantasy should look like.
And the effective bits are often the bits
that have things that you can compare them to.
So there's actually quite a lot of tradition
of people being turned into birds in fairy tales.
White does it better because he actually explores
what being a bird and having to figure out
how to fly would be like.
Although I suspect that that also reflects
that this is a period in which people are exploring
the notion of flight.
There's been a lot of talk about what flight would feel like.
But it doesn't hang together
with the kind of coherence we'd expect.
The second book, The Hooty Bars,
is one of those books you see quoted everywhere
and never explained.
And I think again, there's a certain amount of discomfort
because this book shifts perspective.
White's book mostly stays with Kay.
Even when we're seeing Merlin doing things,
it's Kay who's at the heart of it
and it's mostly his adventures.
But in The Hooty Bars, the girl is only brought in
about a third of the way through.
It starts with a village in which normal ordinary people
live and one day everybody goes shopping
and the village is left on its own and it decides
I don't really need people.
So it rolls up all its roads and turns its signs around
so nobody can get to it.
And into it come a group of beings called The Hooty Bars.
And I haven't come across anything quite so original.
It's a fascinating book.
The Hooty Bars aren't human
but they desperately want to be human.
And they've learned bits about being human.
So they know that policemen direct traffic.
So some of them are policemen who direct traffic.
And they know that people rock babies
so they find things to rock.
I mean, they sort of grab little bits of being human.
And they want to know more about being human.
So they kidnap this little girl
and say, teach us to be human.
Which is where the book gets strange
because this isn't a book about the girl.
It's, no, I'm not making that clear.
It's not her book.
It's not her adventure.
What we then watch is her getting it wrong
and teaching people to be human in ways that aren't right.
And in a scene that's almost identical
to a description in Mary Poppins,
which makes me think Mary Poppins got it from this book,
she actually divides all the Hooty Bars
into men, women, and children.
But she does it by size.
So all the biggest get to be men.
The middle ones get to be women.
The little ones get to be children
even if they have beards.
Great.
With a lovely comment on our own prejudices.
And then she knows what women do.
So she explains to women how to keep house.
But all she knows about men
is that they bring home the bread and butter.
So she puts all the men in a room,
men in inverted commas, remember,
and makes them make slices of bread and butter all day.
There's a scene in Mary Poppins
where we're told that they know Mr. Banks
goes to work to make money.
And we're told that he sits there clipping out coins all day.
You can see the connection.
There's clear influence.
So this goes on.
And I actually can't remember offhand
how the book ends except that interestingly,
remember what I said about colonial Commonwealth racism
wanting to uplift people?
The Hooty Bars come to the conclusion
that they don't want to be like humans after all.
They want to be Hooty Bars.
That in its own little way
is actually rather a radical decision
in a book like this.
They're perfectly good Hooty Bars.
They don't need to be human beings.
And they pack the girl off home, which is rather nice,
with the most human of the Hooty Bars
who turns into a doll on the way,
which I thought was really weird as well.
The final book,
and this is the one I really don't remember terribly well,
is another one where I found myself
thinking, is this for children?
Or are we making fun of children?
In A.A. Milne's Once on a Time,
which is a book I'd never heard of,
it's been completely obscured by Winnie the Pooh,
a king starts fighting a war with another king
because the other king's got seven league boots
and keeps marching over his breakfast table.
Go figure.
There's a Countess who wants to marry the king.
There's a little princess who has a magic ring
which will give her a wish
if she's really, really, really, really good.
The Countess plots to marry the king
but gets caught up with the prince
who goes missing from the other kingdom
who has come to court a different princess.
And you don't need the details of this one.
The real point, though,
is that like The Sword in the Stone
and even more like Thackeray's The Rose in the Ring,
this is really a tale of the absurd
in which all the jokes are aimed at adults.
So even though the little girl is the protagonist
and her wish turns out to be the catalyst
for lots of the things that go wrong,
it's not a children's book
in quite the way we would understand it.
Now, one way to explain this
is to understand that in this period
there's something called family reading.
It's more obvious in the states
where they have quite a lot of story papers.
But there is an understanding
that a lot of reading will be done in groups
with somebody reading to a family group of all ages.
So you get quite a lot of fiction
which is structured with these layers
for adults, for children, for different types of interests.
And all of these books, one way or another, reflect that.
But notice how little they've got in common with each other.
Okay, you'll notice that this paper
doesn't wholly link together at the moment.
It's got sections, I don't know how the sections fit.
Very much more specifically for children
are the fairy adventures.
Now, what's interesting about the fairy adventures
is that this is where some of the change
seems to be taking place.
And quite unexpectedly, fairies are the catalyst of change.
A fairy to stay is by a woman called Margaret Hodge.
And what happens in this story
is the little girl is living with her great aunts
who desperately want her to be the kind of little girl
that they approved of in the 19th century.
And they won't let her to go to school
and they won't let her cut off her hair.
And I can't tell you the number of books I've read
in which cutting off your hair
is a symbol of female liberation in this period.
Long hair, not good.
Think of all the pins that used to go into it.
Actually, I had to explain to a male science fiction critic
why it was such a big deal
because he had no idea how heavy long hair could be
or just how complicated, sorry, I'm drifting.
So in this story, the little girl meets,
I think her name's Pamela,
she meets a little fairy in the garden
and she rescues the fairy from something
and the fairy says, you can have three wishes.
And the fairy helps her to try and convince her aunts
that she isn't being brought up in the right way.
But what's really interesting
is that the aunts are really strict.
And what the fairy does is punish the aunts
in ways that the aunts insist
will teach Pamela to be a good girl.
So as was a whole discussion
about what modern childhood should look like,
short skirts, short hair, running around,
playing tennis, sports, very different image
compared to the 10 years previously,
there's also a discussion in here
about ideologies of punishment.
Because the one conclusion you come to
by the end of the book is that harsh punishments don't work,
corporal punishments don't work.
Quite a radical book written in 1927
about something that actually is still a matter
for great debate.
And yet it's presented as this fairy tale,
literally the meeting, the having an adventure with a fairy.
What it does have in common with much earlier books
in the 19th century is that one of the things I noticed
and talked about at the conference
that was here last September,
is it almost entirely takes place
within the house and the garden.
The little girl never leaves the environment
of the house and garden.
And that's a very strong trope in the 19th century.
Middle class children just don't go out.
We're only starting to see this change in these books.
And it's interesting how often it's magic
that facilitates the quite physical escape.
The second book, I looked at,
because everybody told me it was a huge influence on Tolkien.
I don't quite see that.
The snorke's do sound a lot like hobbits,
but the book is much more like T.H. White's,
The Sword and the Stone.
And it's really two books
of which the first bit is fascinating.
In the first bit, we're told that these spinster ladies,
and that's where it's useful to remember what period we're in.
There's a man shortage in the 1920s.
Pretty much every European country's welfare state
was built by single women
who couldn't get married in the 1920s.
It's one reason why we run into a staffing problem
in things like healthcare in the 70s,
because by that point,
we don't have that surplus women population.
Sorry.
Again, I love, there are all these things out there
I want to explore more, but you can't.
So the book starts with these women
who go around and kidnap children
who aren't being looked after properly
and take them to a nice children's camp,
which is something that gets picked up
as a way of looking after refugee children in the 1930s,
which is interesting,
issues them all with rumpers and comfortable clothing.
It's always rumpers, and I'm still not sure what rumpers are,
but I think it's like a one-piece suit with shorts.
Yeah, getting a nod.
And they play around on the beach all day and have wonderful fun,
except for the two children who insist on crossing the bridge
into the land of the snorke's,
where they have adventures that, for some unknown reason,
include King Arthur.
LAUGHTER
Why King Arthur should be in the land of the snorke's?
I don't know.
But remember what I said.
These writers don't necessarily know what they're doing yet.
They're feeling their way.
And one thing they don't yet decide on,
and it is a decision, and it's a post-talking decision,
is that the magical world needs to be consistent.
We mostly assume that once you're in the magical world,
you can't suddenly have an aeroplane fly through it,
unless it already has aeroplanes.
They don't have those assumptions.
The best fantasy for small children of this period
is a writer called Eenie Blyton,
which is something I rather hate admitting,
because she's a really problematic writer,
although there's a comedian called Maureen Litman.
People have read Famous Five?
A few nods.
You remember George the tomboy and Anne the really wet one?
Maureen Litman pointed out that even...
You have to translate it into a poem.
OK, thank you.
Most people will go with it.
Well, Maureen Litman pointed out that even Anne was braver
than most of us were at that age.
So once you actually take away the ideology in which she writes in,
there's some interesting stuff going on.
But in the adventures of the wishing chair,
these two children walk into an antique shop,
and there's a lovely issue about morality and ethics here.
And they get scared by the antique shop owner.
Sit down in a chair and say,
I wish we were at home.
And the chair flies off with them, it grows little wings.
They never attempt to return this chair,
which is actually pretty dubious when you think about it.
But ties in with something that's quite common in this period,
where middle-class children can actually behave quite unethically
to people of a different class to them.
And it crops up over and over again.
It's there in the Mary Poppins books,
it's there in John Macefield's books.
There's a real issue that your morality is owed to people like you,
both in terms of class, colour, sex.
And you get this quite a lot actually in school stories
where boys will say girls have no morality.
And some of that, or no honour, honour is the term they usually use,
and some of that is because they didn't think they owned honour
to their little sisters either, you know?
It was OK to disappoint your sister,
you would never disappoint your male friend.
You owed him a certain kind of loyalty.
So anyway, they basically steal the chair.
And the chair then takes them off on lots of adventures.
The gnome they pick up is called chinky,
which is one of the many reasons why these books don't get reprinted
without being edited.
It's a slang term for Chinese people in Britain.
It's not quite as bad as nigger, but it's pretty damn close.
OK?
So they go on these adventures, and this is what's fun,
because the difference, and why Blyton's books are so successful,
is that the people they meet, the things they're scared of,
are child-sized horrors.
It's the scary wizard who wants to capture them to keep their chair.
It's the nasty man who is signalled as being nasty.
And I love this one, because he makes cocoa with water, not with milk.
You know, you can see how this kind of thing
resolves into children's type adventures.
And it was the first book I read that didn't feel grafted in some way,
that actually felt that she'd started to try and think
what a whole fantasy adventure would feel like.
And in a book a little later, in 1943, called The Magic Faraway Tree,
this really comes into its own.
In this, children climb a tree.
And at the top, there's a cloud with a hole in it.
And the land above circulates.
It's completely flat.
And each time they go through the hole,
they land in a different part of the land above, OK?
So one day, they may be in the land of, oh, I'm going to make this up,
the people who bounce like balls, whatever,
or the people who live on chocolate cake.
And then they have adventures there.
What's interesting, though, about both of these,
and in fact, all of these, is how rarely the children are unaccompanied.
And I'm going to come back to that point.
There's the gnome chinky in The Adventures of the Wishing Chair,
in The Magic Faraway Tree.
There's Moonface.
The Marvelous Land of Snurgs, they have a companion who's a snurg.
A fairy to stay.
The fairy is in charge of the adventure.
OK.
The second type of story, third type of story I'm on, yes?
OK, Animal and Toy Tales, The Adventures of the Little Wooden Horse
by Ursula Murray Williams.
I think people might be more likely to know Gobelino the Witch's Cat.
I'm getting one or two nods.
I will warn you that these are really upsetting books.
They're all about conforming no matter what.
So Gobelino spends the entire book trying to lose his witchcraft
so he can become a farm cat.
The little wooden horse desperately wants to serve his master
and does so even when he's almost completely broken.
And you keep trying to figure out, with modern sensibility, why?
And this is an interesting shift of sensibility.
We tend to place the emphasis in children's books on children
learning to be themselves, on learning to be different.
These earlier books are much more placing the emphasis on children
learning to conform.
I saw quite an interesting CD video from 1950s.
American schools used to have these health and hygiene talks
where you'd have a little video which would tell you
about things like the importance of showering.
I'm so not kidding.
You must be clean because otherwise your schoolmates will think you smell.
That kind of thing.
And one of them was on how to make friends.
And it was really interesting because all the advice
was about dressing like the other people in class
and listening to the other people rather than talking,
almost the direct opposite to what we would tell people today.
And this is very obvious in the Adventures of the Little Wooden Horse.
Here comes Mumfy, which is a strange book
because a little boy is given a toy elephant,
except right from the very beginning the elephant is alive.
And the little boy asks the elephant to go get something and run an errand.
And the elephant goes through a doorway into a magical world
where he's asked by somebody to post an envelope.
So he posts an envelope, but the post box bites him
and then complains to a policeman who arrests him.
And it goes on like that with these weird adventures
with nothing holding them together,
except that their Mumfy goes back and gets the little boy
and says there's this wizard down here who's holding us all captive
and you need to get at the wizard
so the little boy brings in the neighbour girl.
And they all go down and it all ends up in what we would call the land of cocaine
with them all having tea and cakes and lemonade.
There's no way to describe this book in any of the ways
we would describe a fantasy book now.
It doesn't fit into any particular group.
It's not a quest fantasy.
It's not a fantasy in which things come in and change the world.
It's not an intrusion fantasy.
Yeah. OK.
A late Beatrix Potter, The Fairy Caravan,
which is basically about animals who join a fairy caravan
and go around performing, and it's very much a Beatrix Potter.
It's not a great book, but there's some lovely moments.
At one point, the frog is very ill and he's nursed by the cat
and he can't stand how she keeps purring at him.
And she comes over exactly like one of those very fussy grandmas
that you're so ill you just want to die.
And they're saying, can't I get you something? Wouldn't you like some lemonade?
What if I stroke your forehead?
And you think, just go away, leave me to it.
And she really gets the cat as that sort of fussy person.
And the last book is The Midnight Folk,
which is one of the books I find really interesting.
In this, Kay lives with his governess and he wakes up at night.
The cat says, come quickly, there's stuff you need to do.
And he embarks on this adventure,
which appears to be about searching for the treasure
that his great-great-grandfather was supposed to be in charge of
and lost to pirates and restore it to the bishop.
And it's strange because at times the talking animals come in
and then they disappear.
And when the treasure is eventually found,
it's found by the toys that the governess gave away.
And up until then, it's not been a toy fantasy at all,
except the toys that have been mentioned.
They're called the guards, but we don't meet them.
And things come in and out.
But one of the most noticeable things about it
is that Kay isn't really having the adventures.
He's constantly being told, come here, do this, do that.
But it's the animals who do all the things.
Kay doesn't actually, he isn't an active protagonist.
Now I tried to figure it out.
I think he must be about six or seven
because there's a stray comet that he's not looking forward
to going to school and a child of his social class
would have gone to school at about seven.
So he's quite young and that's some of it.
But it's extremely noticeable
how very passive these children are.
Now, why have I linked these together?
Because there's a shift in what we call animal tales
in the 1970s with the publication of Watership Down.
The animal story as we understand it now
is animals very much as animals.
And even when, as in Brian Jake's books,
they're dressed up in costumes and given swords,
they're still basically animals.
But in these books, they're toys.
Think back to Alice Through the Looking Glass,
which begins with Alice dressing up the black kitten
while it struggles.
The Victorians didn't think of animals the way we do.
They might care for them, they might love them,
but they didn't regard them as in any way sentient.
They're basically just more interesting toys.
And in this, the toys often have almost more sentience,
more activity than the animals do.
They certainly have more control over their own destiny.
The animals are often just doing what's needed
to give the child an adventure.
So there's something strange going on there
about attitudes to animals, to toys,
to a child's place in the world and in the adventure
that's really rather interesting.
Children in these books lack that sense of control
over their life, which I think is a fair representation
of the experience of children in this period.
A lot of us tend to be fooled by, in Britain,
and you'll have equivalents,
Arthur Ransom-type children who go off on boats
and do all sorts of adventures.
That's almost more of a fantasy than the depiction
of Michael and Jane in Mary Poppins,
where they're pretty much locked in the nursery
unless they're taken out.
That was the reality for many middle-class children.
Going on adventures, not so much.
Now, this was a book that subverts everything I've just said
about the whole animal toy child nexus.
It's Mistress Masham's proposed by T.H. White.
In this book, a little girl who lives on an estate
with a wicked governess, yeah,
that's a trope that, thank goodness, disappears
until Rowling, unfortunately, brings it back,
discovers that at the bottom of the estate
in a sort of folly temple thing
are hidden a bunch of leftover lilliputians.
After Gulliver comes back,
the captain goes back to lilliput,
captures some of the lilliputians
destroying their city at the same time,
brings them to England and puts them on show,
and eventually they escape,
and they've settled on this estate.
Well, she goes and tells a professor,
there's always a professor there,
somebody to talk to, crops up again in Lewis,
who says, you can make friends with them,
but you can't treat them like toys, they're people.
Well, she's nine, she treats them like toys.
She tries to get them to do what she wants them to do,
and eventually, and it's very clearly written out,
the only one who will play with her
is the one who is considered to be a complete idiot
by all the other lilliputians.
Eventually, he goes horribly wrong,
she manages to hurt him,
the lilliputians just disappear and won't talk to her,
and she has to win back their respect.
And one of the ways she has to do that
is to start with, to learn the difference
between a gift economy and a trade economy.
When she starts out, she's giving them things from,
because she sees herself as superior,
she has all these wonderful things,
and they, because they've been hiding out,
they make their clothes from skins,
they have a leftover civilization,
they can't develop more, she patronizes them.
When she starts to make friends again,
she learns how to give them what they ask for,
rather than what she thinks they want.
And I'd say buried, but it's actually quite ostentatious,
within this book is rather a long discussion
about colonialism, and not just what colonialism does
to the colonized, but what it does to the colonizers.
Very sophisticated book.
Okay.
Right, I've kept hinting at this.
Whose adventure is it anyway?
The children in this period are not having adventures,
they are at the center of the adventures.
In the first Mary Poppins book, Michael and Jane
follow Mary around, while she has adventures
or takes into interesting places.
The very first story, they don't even do that.
We see Mary Poppins on her day off.
We don't see her with the children.
That changes a little in the later books,
because there's two clusters of books,
one interwar and a second cluster post-war.
The post-war, the children are more active.
But in this, they're just admiring the activity
of the adult in their life.
And I would actually suggest that that's the standard
position in children's literature in this period.
It is assumed that children are aspirational
towards adulthood, therefore they want to see adults.
And related to this is one of the things I noticed
when I was looking at children's science fiction,
is that adults almost disappear from children
and teens' literature in the early 1970s.
Children's and teens' literature
becomes much more peer focused.
In the Box of Delights, which is a sequel
to the Midnight Folk, Kay is on a train
where he, when he stumbles into an adventure.
And at various points, he goes through
to see bits of the adventure carried out.
But although he's given a box to look after,
he himself is not really a protagonist
as we understand being a protagonist.
Even when he goes back into the past, he's there to watch.
And there's an earlier book that's quite interesting
in these terms, Kipling's Puck of Pooks Hill,
which is listed as a time travel fantasy.
The children sit on a grassy mound while people
from the past come to them and tell them
about what their lives are like.
Very different to modern children's literature.
And then things start to change.
And when they change, they change very fast.
The earliest of these books is The Hobbit, JR Tolkien.
Now, I love The Hobbit.
And I was a little worried that I wouldn't be able to almost
spend it, that I wouldn't be able to actually put aside
my own memory to read this.
But if anything, this book made an even bigger impact.
Because what I've just showed you
are the best of the books, OK?
I read some really bad fantasies.
I read them so you don't have to.
The confidence of The Hobbit.
All those folk tales, hero tales, fairy tales,
as I've mentioned, suddenly are all knitted together.
We have a sense of a world with depth.
Fairy is not just something grafted onto the tales.
We don't, as some books have not talked about,
but we don't just meet the mountain spirit and say,
oh gosh, it's the mountain spirit
I've never met one of those before.
The mountain spirit is now part of the world.
And the same is true of the tale as it is told.
And there's one thing in particular
that really stands out.
Bilbo is the child in this book.
He is picked up and guided into the fantasy by Gandalf
and to an extent by the dwarves.
There's adults accompanying him.
And then halfway through, Gandalf turns around and says,
I've gone as far as I'm going now.
Bye bye.
And reading it after all these books,
you suddenly realize what a radical thing
Tolkien does at that moment.
He removes the adult guide.
Bilbo, who is effectively the child,
is suddenly on his own.
And then as we move through the adventures,
whereas before in other books, each adventure
could have been taken out and the book would still work,
here it matters that Bilbo finds the ring that
turns him invisible, because that's
going to help him raid the dragon horde.
It matters that he has the adventures with the trolls,
because that teaches him that he's got the gift of the gab.
We start to see the hero tales, the acts of Hercules,
being knitted in to an engagement with a dragon, which
of course, as he creates dragons and also
a smiegel with the riddles, it's straight from Egyptian law.
You used to have to tell riddles to the sphinx.
So you can see how he's pulling stuff in and blending it.
Very different indeed.
The other book, which I actually got the date wrong
when we wrote A Short History of Fantasy,
is A Traveler in Time by Alice Nutley.
And when I realized I'd got the date wrong,
and after I'd read this, I asked a few people,
when did you think this book was written?
Everybody gave a date in the 1960s.
It's actually an early 1940s book, late 1930s.
Young Girl Goes to Stay at a Farmhouse.
It's a farmhouse where her family have lived for generations
and have always served the local aristocracy.
And she steps through a door one day
and finds herself in the past, where they say,
where have you come from?
And she says, my aunt.
And they say, oh, yes, she's our cook.
Why aren't you in the kitchen with her?
We should find you something decent to wear.
That's strange London clothing, that is.
She slips in and out of the past.
And in fact, what happens is the aristocratic family
are involved in a plot to rescue Mary, Queen of Scots.
It's based on a true story.
And all the way through, she knows
it's going to end badly, because it's a famous family story.
And there's nothing she can do.
She's stuck there, watching the past unroll.
Now, Alice Nutley was actually a physicist.
She trained at the University of Liverpool,
where because she was a married woman,
they wouldn't give her an actual job.
And she ended up doing most of her work voluntarily
in the lab.
And all I can say is we got a brilliant fantasy
writer out of it.
But we can see again.
Suddenly, this melding of physics into history,
into a notion of fantasy in a way that's so incredibly smooth.
And the girl is having the adventure.
There is nobody to guide her through the adventure,
but herself.
The same is true of the ship that flew by Hilda Lewis, which
may also have had some influence on Tolkien,
because it's based on Norse myth.
Boy goes into a shop.
He's got some money to spend.
He's told it will cost you everything
you've got a little bit more.
And he ends up spending some of the change
that his father was left over from the dentist fee
his father had given him.
You don't need to know about the dentist.
Oh, except the great thing about the book,
it starts with a dental visit.
And then they talk about what the kids have for supper.
And it's things like cereal with golden syrup and chocolate
biscuits and lemonade.
And they clearly think this is normal.
And you think, oh, that explains a dental visit.
But this is a period when people didn't actually
connect sugar and cavities.
And he gets this little ship.
And the ship, it turns out, when they wish,
turns huge and can take them anywhere.
Turns out to be Odin's ship.
It takes them as well as to various lands into the past.
And they land in 1067 and find themselves
making friends with a young Norman girl who thinks they're
probably, she thinks two of them are Saxons and two are Norman.
So it's all part of what turns up
a lot in later children's literature,
part of a discussion about what makes up the English
and the notion of a cultural hybridity, which
becomes a very strong element.
If any of you see the movie The Eagle,
that's by Rosemary Sutcliffe.
And the book has the same theme.
I gather they've taken it out of the movie, surprise, surprise.
But all of that is in this book.
And they have these series of adventures, which again,
you could take them out.
You could read each adventure separately.
But the children learn from the adventures.
And again, no adult present.
Now, one of the things that I think
may have caused that shift in attitudes to children
is actually the depression and also
the experience of the war.
Two of the books of just before the war, one's just after,
or sorry, just in the middle of.
Because we see children going out
to work on their own during the depression,
because they have to.
And we see children during the war doing firefighting work,
working with the girl guides, the boy scouts.
I've actually just read a wonderful book called
How the Girl Guides Won the War, which is actually
really rather amazing.
I mean, there were Berlin guides in the resistance.
In Amsterdam, they ran most of the newspaper circulation,
because who was going to check a 13-year-old girl guide?
So the book is not exaggerating.
But notions of children seem to be shifting in this period.
Children seem to be becoming a bit more independent.
One of the things that may feed into that
is aiming at a slightly lower class of child,
not at the upper middle class who went to boarding school,
but at the expanding middle middle class
at the New Day school, for high schools, the grammar schools.
So shifts in the market there.
And I'm done.
Do I have a conclusion at this stage?
Probably not.
Let's get rid of that.
Yes, it wants to tell me stuff.
Excuse me.
It's not very happy about something.
There we go.
I can't remember who did this, but isn't this a wonderful map?
All the different places in Fantasyland that just
made the perfect background.
What am I thinking so far?
There are clear cultural changes.
I haven't talked about every book I looked at,
because I don't have time.
But one of the most fascinating books
is a book in which a child is given a gollywog.
Do you know what gollywogs are?
You used to see them a lot.
You don't see them anymore.
They were little black dolls that
were caricatures of black people.
But what's fascinating is that when the doll comes to life,
he's the brave one.
He's the courageous one who leads
the rebellion amongst all the toys on the ship
to put the rats down.
There's ideas being discussed about class
about how children should react, how children should deal
with fantasy, and notions of what fantasy is,
is starting to shift.
So I start in the 20s and early 30s
with these very unrelated texts.
And even before I get to Narnia, I'm
starting to see some coherent strands coming out, some
of which then get obscured.
So if we skip over Narnia and look to the 1960s,
you can already see in 1940s what
we would call urban fantasy, the thing that
comes into the urban world, into your native world,
and disrupts your expectation of the world.
You can see that in the ship that flew.
You can see the magic carpet tail in the ship that flew,
which we then see in Mary Norton's Bedknobs and Broomsticks.
Again, some of you may have seen the movie.
The book is so much better.
Some children go to stay in a small country village
where they rescue one of the local spinsters who
hasn't fallen off her bicycle.
She claims she's fallen off her broomstick.
And she bribes them to keep quiet by giving them
a Bedknob, which when it turns, makes the bed
fly to various places.
And the kids then get caught up.
They accidentally land in a police station.
They land on an island where everybody wants to kill them.
They go back into the past and end up
rescuing a wizard who's about to be burnt in immediately
after the Great Fire of London.
You can see these tropes developing.
You can see this work being done.
Some things that we see later that the strong connection
with local folklore isn't really there yet.
It tends to be mostly imported folklore.
But it's lurking.
By the time we get to the 50s, 60s, and 70s,
we get on to Penelope Lively, Alan Garner, Dyanowin Jones,
all of whom go back and pick up on some of the things
that Tolkien points to in The Hobbit.
And the three names I've just mentioned
all studied with Tolkien and Lewis at Oxford.
So I'll stop there.