British Children's Fiction in the Second World War (Societies at War)

Citation

Ray, S. (2010), "British Children's Fiction in the Second World War (Societies at War)", Library Review, Vol. 59 No. 5, pp. 379-381. https://doi.org/10.1108/00242531011047127

When the Edinburgh University Press published the hardback edition of this book in 2007 at the price of £150, they may not have realised just how large a market it would appeal to, nor how much publicity it would receive. Now, two years later, they have sensibly produced a paperback edition at a price that will enable individuals who were children during the war and afterwards to buy their own copies. Children's books tend to have a long life in terms of availability and the books of many of the authors who were published during the Second World War are still in print.

The book is divided into two parts, “The School of War” and “Lessons which may have been Learned” [sic]. After a survey of children's fiction before 1940, the chapters in Part 1 deal with topics – Rations and Quislings, Evacuees and Gurus, Women and Fathers, Officials and Genteel‐men – while Part 2 consists of essays on themes that are often explored in relation to children's books today such as Religion, Identity, Gender, Class and Race. The chapter titles do reflect a sort of focus but each chapter ranges widely and the general approach is discursive. As children's books tend to have a long life, Edwards was presumably familiar with many of them as a child. He also discusses comics and story papers, which, being cheap and cheerful and easily obtainable, formed an important part of most children's reading.

The nine illustrations seem to have been selected on a rather haphazard basis and are used to make a break between chapters, not necessarily relating to the books or authors mentioned in the adjacent chapters. They reflect Edwards's major preoccupations – references to Frank Richards, George Orwell (Animal Farm being regarded as a story for the young), W.E. Johns, Richmal Crompton and Elinor Brent‐Dyer are to be found throughout the book and there are long quotations from Enid Blyton but no complementary illustrations.

Some vital information appears in the Notes and in a section at the end entitled “Sources, Guides and Regrets”. The notes are indexed but the “Sources… ” section is not. In fact I ended up reading virtually every word, notes, index and all, in order to be sure that I hadn't missed anything. In view of what is best described as a discursive style, it is fortunate that there is a fairly comprehensive index, although checking this throws up a few errors. As might be expected in a volume of 752 pages, based on wide‐ranging and painstaking research, there are a few errors. However, I would not wish to nit‐pick such a valuable publication – I am too full of admiration for all the work that Edwards has done.

The most distinctive feature of Edwards's work is the way in which he praises authors such as Enid Blyton, Frank Richards, Richmal Crompton and W.E. Johns – authors who received a lot of publicity in the period from the late 1950s to the early 1970s when the press made great play of the fact that some public and school libraries did not buy their books. He also praises Elinor Brent‐Dyer, a writer of school stories and particularly famous for her “Chalet School” series (these books were my own favourites when I was a schoolgirl during the Second World War) and regards The Chalet School in Exile as one of the best books written during the period. There are frequent references throughout the book to the Chalet School books, even the ones set in post‐war England, Wales and Europe. Malcolm Saville also scores highly as differing from other great mass‐producers in opening his authorial career in 1943 with his best book, Mystery at Witchend, which Edwards says should have been awarded the Carnegie Medal. Mary Treadgold's first book, We Couldn't Leave Dinah (1941), is considered by Edwards to be her best, and was awarded the Medal.

He provides a lot of information about the Carnegie Medal and has discovered facts of which I have hitherto been unaware, although I was a member of the selection committee for some years in the 1960s and have always taken an interest in it. In 1939, apparently, the selection committee was told by the LA Executive to choose Elinor Doorly's The Radium Woman (1939). This is a rewriting for young people of a biography of Madame Curie, a Polish woman although she and her husband carried out their later research in France, and it thus provided a blend of “wartime alliance and technical aspiration” – and I'd always assumed that it was a happy coincidence! It is perhaps his respect for the Carnegie Medal that causes him to excuse Arthur Ransome (the first medallist) for not mentioning the Second World War, although he criticises M.E. Atkinson, who wrote a long series of holiday adventure stories about the Lockett family at about the same time, for doing the same thing.

Although the Tintin books by Hergé were not translated into English until 1951 and were thus not available in Britain during the war, quite a lot of information is provided about them, included because it gives a sense of the fate that might have met British children's fiction if the Nazis had invaded Britain. Tintin stories had been published in Belgium since 1929 and Edwards describes how Tintin books fared in occupied Belgium. Edwards also puts forward the idea that authors invented Ruritanian countries, as Hergé did, in order to demonstrate what life might be like in a country dominated by a totalitarian government. He cites Noel Streatfeild's The House in Cornwall, Enid Blyton's The Secret of Spiggy Holes (these two were published about the same time and have similar plots), and mentions Percy F. Westerman and W.E. Johns as other authors who did the same.

Apart from the Chalet School books from which readers would get a fair idea of what was happening in wartime Europe, authors such as Dorita Fairlie Bruce and Catherine Christian included Czech and Polish references and characters – as these two countries were the first victims of the Nazis they tended to be the European countries that featured in children's books.

Edwards points out that Angela Brazil, another writer of stories about girls at school (and another favourite of mine), wrote books set in both the First and Second World Wars, and points out that she made much of evacuation during the Second – from 1940 to 1944 she produced an annual book about an evacuated girls' school, beginning with The New School at Scawdale, which I remember reading at the time.

Edwards tends to combine two styles in his writing – at times academic, at other very down‐to‐earth and populist – which can be disconcerting, although the second option predominates. I don't like “Englished” as a substitute for “translated” (and my computer objects too), although I appreciate that in the case of children's books they sometimes need more than a strict translation, and I would have liked much more information about how this book came into existence. There seems to have been a conference, presumably in the late 1990s, at Edinburgh University organised by Paul Addison and Jeremy Crang [sic], then Director and Assistant Director of the Centre for Second World War Studies, which is/was attached to the Department of History, and Owen Dudley Edwards was asked to contribute. His research presumably continued afterwards and British Children's Fiction in the Second World War (Societies at War) is the splendid result. Any academic library buying this book is likely to find plenty of readers amongst staff and students, whether or not they are studying the subject of children's literature.