And just as I was thinking they ought to bring the Trinidadian Marxist historian and cricket writer C.L.R. James into the discussion, they did just that. You'll find James's views on the importance of Thomas Arnold, the headmaster of Rugby, of Thomas Hughes, the author of Tom Brown's Schooldays, and of W.G. Grace in his Beyond a Boundary.
Incidentally I blogged about Rugby, Tennessee, back in 2009 - see the interesting comment from David Heath.
The programme got me thinking about an alternative school of children's school of children's literature that I prefer: the holiday adventure story.
The ur-text for this is school is Bevis: The Story of a Boy by Richard Jefferies, though it was first published as a three-volume novel for adults and only later tricked out with the apparatus (a map on the endpapers; illustrations by E.H. Shepard) of a children's classic.
Then come Arthur Ransome, Malcolm Saville and Denys Watkins=Pitchfod ('BB'). I suppose we'll have to let Enid Blyton in too.
This is already a pretty disparate group, but I think you can claim that if school stories are in part about winning battles against adult authority, then both that authority and adults tend to disappear altogether in adventure stories.
And I'd also suggest that, while school stories are generally of necessity about children of one class, adventure stories are more likely to see a mixing of the classes.
As to the material base of adventure stories, I shall quote again the observation of Victor Watson, in his Reading Series Fiction. They grew out of the agricultural depression at the end of the 19th century, which made the countryside a playground for middle-class children, and were killed off by EEC farming subsidies and Dr Beeching's cuts.
Now read my post on the 1971 BBC adaptation of Tom Brown's Schooldays.
It might be worth re-reading George Orwell's essay Boys Weeklies - it's in the Penguin collection called Inside the Whale, and probably elsewhere as well.
ReplyDeleteCould one argue that these stories encapsulate the two strategies for small-scale subsistence communities in the face of state power? Either (1) keep out of the way of states, by sticking to remote areas (forests, mountains etc); or (2) utilise the 'weapons of the weak' (using the term of the anthropologist James C. Scott) to undermine specific instances of state power, without attempting the impossible task of overturning it? Richmal Crompton's Just William stories are another case of option 1: William's gang is called The Outlaws.
ReplyDeleteThank you both.
ReplyDeleteHi, Anonymous #2 – Anonymous #1 here. FWIW, George Orwell seems to disagree with you. He regards the world of children’s literature (or, to be specific, boys’ weeklies) to be inherently statist and “establishment”. “The King is on his throne ... Everything will be the same forever."
ReplyDeleteOrwell suggests the working classes are depicted in a stereotyped manner and regrets the absence of any Socialist perspective; the weeklies avoid describing any form of working class life and do not mention long-term unemployment or the dole. Orwell regards them as serving the function of instilling into the minds of young boys the ideas that "the problems of our time do not exist, that there is nothing wrong with laissez-faire capitalism, that foreigners are unimportant comics and that the British Empire is a sort of charity-concern which will last forever"
“All fiction from the novels … is censored in the interests of the ruling class. And boy's fiction above all ... is sodden in the worst illusions of 1910. The fact is only unimportant if one believes that what is read in childhood leaves no impression behind.”
To be fair, he is talking about weeklies, rather than novels, but I doubt if he would have been impressed by Angela Brazil any more than he was by Frank Richards.
(And thanks to Jonathan for prompting us to think about this subject.)