Class, Leisure and National Identity in British Children's Literature, 1918-1950

Kenneth A. Loparo, Hazel Sheeky Bird

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781137407429
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137407436
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book places children's literature at the forefront of early twentieth-century debates about national identity and class relations that were expressed through the pursuit of leisure. Focusing on stories about hiking, camping and sailing, this book offers a fresh insight into a popular period of modern British cultural and political history.

1

Introduction

The years following the First World War witnessed an explosion of interest in the British countryside. On the Right and Left of the political spectrum, and every permutation in-between – hikers, campers, preservationists, charabanc excursionists, developers, simple lifers and armchair ruralists – fought both physically and in print to make their idea of the countryside the accepted one. Children’s literature was at the forefront of the literary struggle to control and shape understanding of the countryside as a place of quietude and to ameliorate the effects of mass tourism that many worried would change its character irrevocably. With only a few exceptions, modern scholarship on the development and use of the British countryside in the twentieth century has either overlooked children’s literature or referred to it only in passing.¹ This book examines children’s literature through the lens of discourses on the British countryside and in doing so places it at the centre of a range of complex arguments about the politics of leisure, class and national identity.

In the main this book examines the camping and tramping genre, a term that was coined by children’s literature critic Victor Watson. For Watson, camping and tramping refers to ‘a popular kind of British novel in which the narrative was mostly devoted to the excitements of hiking, exploring, boating, map-reading and the practicalities of camping’, and where ‘children had ready access to camping equipment or a handy horse-drawn carriage, free entry to friendly farm-houses, and the guaranteed loyalty of passing gypsies and circus-folk’.² As Watson has it, it was also an elegiac and ‘fundamentally conservative’ genre, one that projected an image of the countryside as a lovely and mysterious playground for the middle classes.³ The model for the camping and tramping genre is generally regarded to be Arthur Ransome’s ‘Swallows and Amazons’ (1930–47) novels, which form a basis for discussion throughout this book.

In part, children’s literature, especially camping and tramping novels, is absent from wider scholarship on the early twentieth-century countryside as these books are often viewed as anti-modern. Modern critical opinion sees camping and tramping fiction as idealistic, Arcadian, escapist and nostalgic, having more in common with the Edwardian ruralist fantasies of A. A. Milne and Kenneth Grahame than with children’s literature of the 1930s onwards.⁴ Humphrey Carpenter’s assertion that ‘All children’s books are about ideals’ pervades many critical responses to camping and tramping fiction in general, and the ‘Swallows and Amazons’ novels in particular.⁵ Peter Hunt’s observations that Ransome’s books celebrate a lost world’ and that ‘it could be argued that, in fact, [he] pictures a world even earlier than’ the ones in which the books are set, really reflects wider critical views on British children’s literature of the 1920s and 1930s.⁶ Marcus Crouch observes that

The years between 1920 and 1929 witnessed international hopes and disappointments, booms and slumps, industrial unrest and a general strike, which brought Britain nearer to revolution than it had been for nearly a century, queer extremes of fashion and social behaviour. Looking back from the standpoint of 1928, the beginning of the century seemed infinitely distant. The whole pattern of life was fundamentally changed. It is difficult to see much of this reflected in the children’s literature of the decade. The mood was, in one way or another, escapist. Most of the best books were fantasies; the general run of popular books dealt with adventures, at home, at school and abroad, which were equally remote from everyday life.⁷

Crouch’s perspective still holds sway today and it has undoubtedly contributed to the general impression that children in camping and tramping novels live in a pre-lapsarian world, an endless extension of the golden summer of 1914. There are problems with this view, not least of which is the assumption that life before the outbreak of 1914 was either innocent or ideal.⁸ Never the less, this assumption underpins Roland Chambers’s recent description of Swallows and Amazons (1930) as ‘an Edwardian idyll of bun loaf and pemmican, of butter and marmalade sandwiches, of cotton tents and grog and tea at four, and children who say “ripping”’.⁹ Apart from being factually inaccurate, comments such as this greatly oversimplify the novels themselves, and fail to acknowledge the cultural significance of an English idyll before, during and after the First World War.

Camping and tramping fiction is currently submerged in the ‘ocean of trash’ that many still feel characterises children’s publishing at the start of the twentieth century.¹⁰ In 1937 Harvey Darton lamented that ‘three-fifths of the children’s books now published are merest rubbish’.¹¹ Darton’s criticism is felt today in the idea that this particular period of children’s publishing was an ‘Age of Brass’, a term that is both unhelpful and which may well have contributed to the paucity of current specific scholarship on literature from this time.¹²

Escapism and Nostalgia

Underlying criticism of 1920s and 1930s children’s literature is often a misunderstanding of the function of its escapism and nostalgia. In the first instance, these impulses were not unique to children’s literature and they formed part of a wide range of cultural responses in Britain, to the experiences of the First World War, the post-1918 shifts in Britain’s international standing and the approach of the Second World War. By and large, escapism and nostalgia have been interpreted as conservative and regressive drives, ones that eschew modernity by turning back to an earlier, untroubled time and pre-industrial idyll. Certainly in children’s literature criticism as a whole there is little recognition of the radical potential of either escapism or nostalgia.¹³ A notable and important exception is J. R. R. Tolkien’s essay ‘On Fairy Stories’, written in response to criticism of his 1937 novel The Hobbit. For some critics today, Tolkien’s novel is deeply conservative and backwards, seeking to deny the reality of modernity through a rural and feudal vision of England.¹⁴ Tolkien rightly challenges this asking whether the products of the modern age represent ‘real life’ any more than ‘escapist’ features. He writes, ‘how real, how startlingly alive is a factory chimney compared with an elm-tree: poor obsolete thing, insubstantial dream of an escapist!’¹⁵ He also challenges critics’ interpretation of escapism, confusing it ‘not always by sincere error’ with ‘the Flight of the Deserter’, and employing a ‘tone of scorn or pity’.¹⁶ This tone is usually, though not always, absent from children’s literature criticism, but the same fundamental assumption is there. For Tolkien and for many camping and tramping authors, escape, particularly into the countryside, was a dynamic and positive act, one that led to the path of consolation and ultimately recovery and regeneration.¹⁷

This issue of escapism in camping and tramping books is important, as it has been used as evidence that these books ignored the realities of life in Britain. Owen Dudley Edwards particularly criticises the books of Arthur Ransome, M. E. Atkinson and David Severn for failing to address or even acknowledge the Second World War. As Dudley Edwards puts it, Ransome’s Walker and Blackett children ‘sailed through the war regardless of any interruption by outside events taking place after their first appearance in 1930’. He suggests further that the books themselves are ‘sheer escapism’.¹⁸ Dudley Edwards is right in that there are no signs of barbed wire or bombs on beaches, no blackouts, no rationing and no spies (often to be found lurking in the countryside of other novelists).¹⁹ Publishers during the Second World War often saw merit in producing books precisely because they were escapist. For a while in 1941, Ransome considered writing an evacuee story but reported that his publisher Jonathan Cape had told him to ‘steer clear of the war at all costs’.²⁰ Cape’s preference for books that did not address the war was not unique to children’s publishers and the National Book Council, established by Stanley Unwin in 1925, argued that the best cure for boredom during the Phoney War was reading, as it was ‘the only available substitute for a holiday’.²¹ Camping and tramping authors did not survive the rationalising of British publishing that resulted from reduced paper stocks and bomb damage because they were ‘safe’ books, in other words, books that would likely sell; rather they were published because they met and fulfilled a very real and important emotional need.

Englishness and Britishness

A central argument of this book is that the countryside of camping and tramping fiction was not ideal, rather that it was a highly contested space, politically and symbolically. A great deal of this conflict stems from two diametrically opposed views of the countryside, that is, as either a public or private space. It is useful from the outset to recognise how important these different views were to constructions of British national identity, which, according to Sue Malvern, ‘has no fixed essence and [so] supplements this lack with the labour of continuous self-representation’.²² Consequently, a nation is formed by ‘telling stories’ about itself, and particularly its origins, creating what Raphael Samuel calls, ‘national fictions’.²³ A particularly popular national fiction in early twentieth-century Britain was the idea of South Country, or as Patrick Wright has it, ‘Deep England’. This fiction excluded other landscapes, including the urban, suburban, coastal and the wild, and projected a comforting idea of a green, pleasant and socially harmonious land. That this national identity was bound to such a specifically English site did not prevent its being used to encode what was fought for by Britain in the First and Second World Wars.²⁴ Underpinning this encoding was a belief in the continuity and stability of values and traditions that were rooted in the land, and so were thought to be immutable. It is easy to see why this idea was appealing to some Britons throughout the first turbulent decades of the twentieth century and why it prevailed in many children’s books. The message was that England, hence Britain, would endure, regardless of whether it was beset with internal conflicts or besieged by external threats. However, reference to ‘English’ rather than ‘British’ is more symbolic than critics such as Andrew Causey allow; namely that the two are interchangeable when ‘the role of Britain’s constituent parts in the formation of national identity’ is not at issue.²⁵ The use of English rather than British has been seen to reflect a shift in the national psyche, away from empire and expansion, towards introspection and the nation. As Samuel has it ‘English, in its twentieth-century usage, is an altogether more introverted term than “British” and largely associated with images of landscape, beauty and home rather than those of national greatness’.²⁶ Its usage in this book should not be taken as evidence that by the 1920s and 1930s the Empire had necessarily ceased to be an important and influential facet of British identity.²⁷ Equally, this does not suggest that an identity rooted in the English countryside was a heterogeneous national identity.²⁸ Peter Mandler rightly warns that there is a danger of overstating the prevalence of Englishness in constructions of early twentieth-century British national identity.²⁹ It is discussed here as a singular construction that found particular expression in this body of children’s literature.

Other stories of national identity coexisted, not unproblematically with those of Englishness, not least of which was that of British maritime island nationalism. This encapsulated the belief that Britons belonged to a great island race and were an inherently maritime people. Although this construction of British national identity was particularly popular in the years leading up to the First World War, it has since been overlooked for a number of possible reasons.³⁰ It is partly due to the somewhat muted performance of the Royal Navy during the First World War (something that was perhaps inevitable after the naval frenzy of the Edwardian years and the Anglo–German arms race) and it is also the result of the reluctance of maritime and naval historians (until recently) to examine the cultural as well as the strategic role of the Royal Navy.³¹ However, British maritime island nationalism did not simply fade away in 1918, and there were a great number of children’s books published throughout the years 1930–50 that sought to foster British children’s identification with the sea and their maritime heritage. This national fiction appears to work in opposition to that of a rural Englishness, but for Alex Law this is inherent in island nations themselves. As Law puts it, they are ‘caught up in an open tension between the strong centripetal pull of settlement and rootedness and the centrifugal push of mobility and migration’.³² Camping and tramping fiction negotiates a path between these two ostensibly conflicting impulses, whereby travel and migration within Britain is a circumlocutory route back to the core of an ideal type of Englishness, one that situates and knows itself through knowledge of people and place....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series Editors’ Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 A Very Fuzzy Set-Defining Camping and Tramping Fiction
• 3 The Delights of the Open Road, Footloose and Fancy Free
• 4 Landscape and Tourism in the Camping and Tramping Countryside
• 5 Mapping the Geographical Imagination
• 6 The Family Sailing Story
• 7 England Expects: The Nelson Tradition and the Politics of Service in Naval Cadet and Family Sailing Stories
• 8 Conclusion: A Disappearing Act
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index