A new exhibition opens at the British Library:

Picture This: Children's Illustrated Classics
4 October 2013 - 26 January 2014

This exhibition explores 10 classic children’s books from the 20th century.
Discover how illustrators over the years have interpreted – and reinterpreted – our favourite tales in beautiful and imaginative ways. Be reunited with much-loved characters such as Paddington Bear, Peter Pan and Willy Wonka, and classic works such as the Just So Stories, The Wind in the Willows and The Hobbit.
Free.
Folio Society Gallery.

August 2013: Rudyard Kipling's The Just So Stories for Little Children

This month we read Rudyard Kipling's collection of Just So Stories (published in 1902).  This includes the tale of "The Elephant's Child" which - perhaps above all others - recalls my own childhood and the pleasure of being read to at bedtime, and underlines the story-telling power of repetition and alliteration.  More than fifty years on I can still recall my favourite phrase - and my mother's too - and I am always looking for an opportunity to use it.  It's not easy trying to insert the comment "on the banks of the great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River, all set about with fever trees" into any conversation, but I can manage it occasionally.

The sounds and the rhythms of Kipling's writing are so essential to Just So Stories, as are the many new words that he creates especially to delight and to amuse and even to perplex, and so we also listened to an extract from "How the Leopard got his Spots" in an audiobook read by the unforgettable Johnny Morris.

There is so much humour and sheer playful inventiveness in this collection of stories, but there is sadness too. The "O My Best Beloved" referred to throughout the book and to whom the stories are addressed was Kipling's adored daughter, Josephine, who died of pneumonia aged 6 in 1899.  In 2010, a first edition of Kipling's The Jungle Book was discovered , complete with inscription from father to daughter "for whom it was written". http://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/apr/09/kipling-jungle-book-inscription

Kipling was and is world-famous: there is nothing to write here about him which hasn't already been written elsewhere.  His stories are an essential and familiar element of all our childhoods.  Sadly, however, his name is becoming disassociated from his most famous story.  A recent survey of schoolchildren found that they largely believed someone called Disney had written The Jungle Book.

With its powerful echoes of my own childhood, Just So Stories was a fitting book on which to end my association with Children's Classics for Adults.  It's been nearly three years since I first approached Bath Library with the idea of a book group to read classic children's books, and it's time for me to hand it over to someone else.  It's been a fantastic experience: I've been able to re-read favourite old books encompassing wonderful memories, and to experience a few books I've never read before, but best of all has been making friends with a wonderful group of  clever, knowledgeable and like-minded people and enjoying sharing the pleasure of reading.  Thanks to all.

The next meeting will be on Wednesday 2 October at 1015 am when we will be reading a selection of Hugh Lofting's Doctor Dolittle books (1920-1952).

July 2013: Cue for Treason by Geoffrey Trease and our next meeting

Today we journeyed from the Cumbrian fells to the theatres on London's South Bank as we reviewed Geoffrey Trease's Tudor adventure story, Cue For Treason (1940).

Trease was a prolific author, who has been described as "a defining force in 20th century children's historical fiction, plucking the genre from the post-Henty doldrums and casting historical writing into a new shape".  (http://www.collectingbooksandmagazines.com)  Born in Nottingham in 1909, he went up to Queen's College Oxford but didn't complete his degree, becoming a journalist and a teacher while beginning his writing career.  In 1933, Trease and his wife moved to Bath before living in both Abingdon in Oxfordshire and Malvern in Worcestershire.  The Treases returned to Bath in their later years, and by the time of Geoffrey's death there in 1998 he had produced some 113 books, with other manuscripts yet to be published.  Despite this vast output, there were a number among us for whom he was a new and welcome discovery.

Trease rarely disappoints, and this beautifully told story of Peter Brownrigg -an ordinary 14 year old from the Lake District who falls in with the mysterious but pleasingly alliterative Kit Kirkstone and a band of travelling players, joins Shakespeare's theatre company and becomes a spy in Robert Cecil's secret service - was fast-paced and historically precise without being teacherly.  Cue for Treason provides us with all of Trease's hallmarks: believable characters, refreshingly strong female characters (so unusual for the time it was written), and that strong sense of social justice which is central to all of his writing.

There were so many memorable scenes for us to recall and discuss, from the battle around Peter's home, to the scene where Peter and Kit are on the point of being murdered by miners, and Peter's vertical climb up the wooden wall of a London Thames-side house using knives stuck in the planks to spy on the man in the yellow trousers.

As Jim Mackenzie writes: "The energy of the book is undeniable. If you have never read it and you have grown to adult years, it is still possible to enjoy the uncluttered plot, the marvellous pace and the brilliantly sketched scenes of countryside adventure and London squalour."

Our next book is Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories.  This will be my last meeting as convener and blogger.  After more than two years, it's time for me to sign off.

June 2013: Laura Ingalls Wilder's The Little House on the Prairie and our next meeting

This month we set off across the wide open spaces of the American mid-West to share Laura Ingalls Wilder's closely autobiographical story of the pioneer family trying to make a new life for themselves on the Kansas prairie during the 1870s.

The Little House on the Prairie (1935) was the second in a series of books that recalled the Ingalls family's 19th century adventures as they travelled in a covered wagon from Wisconsin to Kansas in search of a new life.  The ever-optimistic parents - a father who suffered from wanderlust, and a stoical mother - try to make a new home for the young family in Indian territory, where they have been told the land will soon be up for settlement, but they have no legal right to occupy their homestead and soon have to leave again in the face of native Osage Indian hostility.

Wilder's books resulted from a collaboration between Wilder and her daughter Rose who, while not named as co-author, was certainly responsible for the deft editing and promotion that helped to ensure these enduring tales of her mother's life - several of which won Newbery prizes  - were crafted to best advantage and continue to give much pleasure.  The stories are charming and engrossing, with fascinating and authentic period detail providing a real sense of American history.

The structure is formulaic and all the more enjoyable for that: the children are enveloped in a comfortable family with a protective and strong father and a warm, caring mother.  They are allowed to take risks but they can always return to the safety of the home.  There is a real sense of excitement as they leave their familiar surroundings and set off with their dog, Jack, in a covered wagon for an unknown future, crossing the Mississippi river and finding themselves in endless adventures.

Wilder's descriptions are beautiful but dense, and the story is seen entirely through young Laura's eyes, with limited narrative.  For modern readers, the author's attitudes to the native American Indians is unsettling, while entirely accurate from a historian's perspective.  The challenges of living without any of the social or physical structures that we are so used to these days are immense, but father and mother will always win through.

Wilder died in 1957 aged just 91 but 50 years later the Little House stories still endure, and there is now an enormous industry in the United States around her books, with museums in each of the main locations where the family lived.

The story of this endlessly self-sufficient family, getting by on limited resources and always surrounded by love, retains its charm and offers children today a real glimpse into a pioneering Victorian past.

Next month we are reading Geoffrey Trease's Cue for Treason (1940).

May 2013: Alan Garner's 'The Owl Service' and our next meeting

Today we tackled the "myths and legends" genre with Alan Garner's 1967 Carnegie award-winning classic, The Owl Service.  In 2007 this was a contender for the public's all-time favourite Carnegie winner, and was eventually voted as one of the ten most important children's books published in the last seventy years.  Children's book critic Julia Eccleshare credits Garner with having invented the young-adult fiction genre with this book. Quite a reputation, then.

One of our group had met Garner in 1974 during a school visit, and had brought along her signed copy of The Owl Service.  Describing herself as an Alan Garner fan, she remembered him as somewhat grumpy and rather intense, but with a strong aura and a definite sense of place.  Several amongst us had read and enjoyed The Owl Service  previously and preferred it to his The Weirdstone of Brisingamen.

A real sense of mythology and magic dominate the story of Roger, Alison and Gwyn - three hormonal, class-bound and somewhat prejudiced teenagers sharing an uncomfortable summer who become entangled in a human conflict with its roots in the ancient Welsh legend of Bloudewedd, a woman created from flowers who was turned into an owl for inciting her lover to kill her husband. 

There is an almost tangible atmosphere of claustrophobia and suspense, with lots of dark mutterings, rather strange locals and a dominant mother/step-mother who is only ever experienced off-stage, like a secondary character in The Archers.  The ancient Welsh/English hostility runs just below the surface, personified by Roger and Gwyn's tetchy relationship, while Alison is drawn terrifyingly into the myth, like Alice into a very dark looking glass, as she desperately cuts out paper owls from the template she has found on a set of plates.

Garner does not believe in spoonfeeding his young readers; this is a book which could easily be a novel for adults.  It demands you go away and research the Welsh myth on which it is based.  Only then do all the pieces of the story finally fall into place.  We took time to read through the story in the Mabinogion, a collection of ancient Celtic prose stories that were translated into English by Lady Charlotte Guest during the 19th century.  So that left us asking the question: is Garner writing for his own pleasure, or to educate?  The plates on which the story is based belonged to Garner's mother-in-law: the valley is real; this is a very personal tale.

Some described the structure as flawless and compulsive in its opacity; others said the story tailed off rather disappointingly.  It feels a little outdated now, with its class and race distinctions, but its position as a children's classic seems assured.

April 2013: Mrs Molesworth's "The Cuckoo Clock" and our next meeting

We finally took on Mrs Molesworth's The Cuckoo Clock (1877) this month, having put it on our Books We Must Get Round To list at our very first meeting two years ago.  It was the book that established Mrs Molesworth (1839-1921) as a leading children's author, and a prolific one too - the Enid Blyton of her day, perhaps.  By the time of her death in her early 80s she had produced over a hundred books, sometimes writing as many as seven in a year.  Below is a picture of author Rosemary Sutcliff's own copy of The Cuckoo Clock, sitting on the shelf in her library.

Mary Louisa Molesworth was born in 1839 in Rotterdam where her Scottish father, Charles Stewart, worked as a shipping agent.  The growing family soon returned to England and settled in Manchester, eventually moving to Whalley Range (then a select middle class suburb on the outskirts of the city).  As a teenager, Mary Louisa attended classes given by Reverend William Gaskell, husband of the famous industrial novelist, Elizabeth Gaskell.  She also spent a year in Switzerland, studying French.

In 1861 Mary Louisa married well: to Captain Richard Molesworth, nephew of the 7th Viscount Molesworth.  The couple lost two of their children in close succession in 1869, but five others survived into adulthood.  Mrs Molesworth published her first novel in 1870, and her first children's book, Tell Me A Story, was published in 1875.  The marriage was an unhappy one and ended in legal separation in 1879, by which time Mrs Molesworth was an established author.  Her admirers included the poet Swinburne, who wrote: "Any chapter of The Cuckoo Clock is worth a shoal of the very best novels dealing with the characters and fortunes of mere adults."

In The Cuckoo Clock young Griselda is taken to stay with her very old maiden aunts who live with a very old servant in a very old house - reminiscent of Lucy Boston's The House at Green Knowe.  We don't know why she's there, but she's lonely and bored and she's required to be good.  There is something of Katy in What Katy Did about her.  She strikes up a friendship with a magical cuckoo in a clock, who takes her on various gentle adventures.  Eventually she makes friends with a real child: a  boy called Philip, and the cuckoo tactfully flies back to his clock (which turns out to have been made by Griselda's grandfather).

Mrs Molesworth often wrote about lonely children finding friends with magical help.  Her  cuckoo is strict, sharp and quick to chastise.  Using animals as bossy teachers and guides is a familiar technique amongst many of our favourite children's authors - C S Lewis adopted it in his Chronicles of Narnia (1950-1956), as did E Nesbit, whose Psammead (Five Children and It, 1902) was frequently acid-tongued, but Mrs Molesworth's overly-didactic and moralistic approach does become rather heavy-handed by contrast.

Overall, we felt that The Cuckoo Clock was an interesting historic piece, but insipid: Alice without Lewis Carroll's originality.  There were some charming ideas (a nightdress decorated with real butterflies and scented drops of dew for refreshment, for example), but the story didn't make any great progress, the adventures were lacking in punch, and the author was at times frustratingly lazy ("This wonderful thing happened but I can't explain it").  It did bring to mind other more pleasurable books: the Mrs Pepperpot series (Alf Proysen, 1956 onwards) and The Faraway Tree series (Enid Blyton, 1939-1951) were both mentioned, as was The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett, 1911).

Maybe we'd enjoy one of Mrs Molesworth's many other books more (The Tapestry Room, 1879, perhaps, or The Carved Lions, 1895).  As to her reputation as "the Jane Austen of the nursery": on this one reading it doesn't seem to be justified.  The advantages of the e-book generation come to the fore here; no financial outlay is required to give more of her books a try as many are freely downloadable.

Our next meeting is on Wednesday 8 May 2013, when we will be talking about Alan Garner's 1967 Carnegie-winning fantasy, The Owl Service, named in 2007 as one of the top ten Carnegie-winners of all time.

March 2013: Mary Treadgold's 'We Couldn't Leave Dinah' and our April book

This month we finally - and for some of us, reluctantly - got round to reading a "pony" book; but in an attempt to find something rather more complex than the standard "gymkhanas-and-jodhpurs" stories, we chose Mary Treadgold's Carnegie-winning We Couldn't Leave Dinah (1941), brilliantly illustrated by Stuart Tresilian who also illustrated some of Enid Blyton's later books.  

Set in the summer holidays on the fictional island of Clerinel, somewhere south of Plymouth during World War II, We Couldn't Leave Dinah appears to draw on Treadgold's own childhood holidays in the Channel Islands, with the story echoing the de-militarisation by Britain and their subsequent German occupation.  'It combines evocative landscape descriptions with a gripping adventure story, giving a powerful and moving account of the complexities of divided loyalties, collaboration and threatened relationships in an occupied country, seen through the analytical eyes of teenagers.' (Oxford DNB)  Sadly, despite its award-winning status, it is out of print and quite difficult to find.

Born in 1910 into a comfortably well-off home (her father was a member of the London Stock Exchange), Mary Treadgold was educated at the famous St Paul's Girls' School in Hammersmith before graduating with an MA in English Literature from Bedford College, University of London in 1936.  She became a children's editor at Heinemann but, dismayed by the 'staggering number of manuscripts about ponies and pony clubs ... the majority quite frightful', decided 'I could do better myself!' and resigned to write her own.  We Couldn't Leave Dinah was developed during time spent confined to air raid shelters in the last months of 1940, and was published by Jonathan Cape in 1941.  Mary joined the BBC in 1941 where she spent 20 years, editing and producing Books to Read before becoming editor of the West Africa service.  She worked briefly with BBC propagandist Eric Blair (George Orwell) who was also at the Overseas Service between 1941 and 1943, and may even have shared his office, the notorious Room 101.  She published eight books for children amongst other works: her final novel, (Journey From The Heron) appeared in 1981.  Mary died in 2001, aged 95.  She never married.

Most of us really enjoyed We Couldn't leave Dinah, and there was a lot of laughter when  we met to talk it over.  However we agreed that - whatever Treadgold's intentions - it really isn't a traditional "pony book" at all.  It may not be her best work either, but it's a page-turner of a thriller, combining adjective-rich prose with breathless feats of derring-do; focused on a tiny island community's response to invading enemy forces in a story where the ponies turn out to be useful props, rather than central to the plot.  With mother conveniently out of the way in Africa, and their father and younger brother evacuated to ghastly cousins in London's Eaton Square, Caroline and Mick are accidentally left on Clerinel with their ponies, and become involved with the Resistance.  Interestingly, we felt that the Melendy children in far-away New York in The Saturdays (1941) were more acutely aware of the war's impact on London than the children on Clerinel in We Couldn't Leave Dinah.

Unsurprisingly propagandist, and - perhaps more surprisingly - in need of a little prudent editing, with some flat-footed racial stereo-typing ("bullet-headed" Germans, plucky English children, phlegmatic and possibly collaborative French-speaking locals), occasionally inconsistent characters, some poorly constructed German sentences and unlikely plot points (would the head of an invading force really bring along his grand-daughter and her maid?), it was nevertheless a compelling read, with human interest as well as humour.

The book invoked memories of other much-loved island and pony stories including Pat Smythe's much-loved Three Jays series (my favourite was Jacqueline Rides for a Fall, 1957); the Pullein-Thompson sisters' many horsey books; and Enid Blyton's Scottish island jaunt, The Adventurous Four, also published in 1941.  Someone mentioned narrative echoes of John Buchan, while Bedknobs and Broomsticks (Disney, 1971) based on Mary Norton's The Magic Bedknob (1943) and Bonfires and Broomsticks (1945), also sprang to mind.

One of our group had purchased a copy of We Couldn't Leave Dinah which was inscribed as a gift for Christmas 1944 to a little girl called Evelyn: we wondered how Evelyn must have felt to be reading the story while the Channel Islands were still occupied and war was  raging across the world.

Has the "pony genre" improved since Mary Treadgold was so despairing in 1940?  Our view is most definitely not.  Recent publications we've read are more shallowly plotted, with overmuch attention being paid to grooming and schooling rather than any more interesting action.

And finally, with apologies for the plot spoiler, we found that Caroline "Could Leave Dinah" after all ...  

Our next book is one from our "Books to Get Round To" list: Mrs Molesworth's morally instructive The Cuckoo Clock (1877).