Classics in Short No.29: Winnie-the-Pooh

In which an exposition is made from 100 Aker Wood to Holly Wood; or, isn’t it funny how merchandise makes money? Boo, hoo, hoo, poor old 

There was a sound of revelry by night.

Nothing to do with Waterloo – although it did occur on the sports ground of the Honourable Artillery Company. Rather it was members of the Garrick Club, in their jolly ties, enjoying a little smackerel of something by way of celebration.

The immediate sponsor

of the jollifications was the Walt Disney Corporation who had recently handed over many millions of pounds to the Club, as also to the Royal Literary Fund and to Westminster School. The true founder of the feast though was A A Milne, whose happy legatees which had also included his son, Christopher Robin, were here receiving a modest competence for the sale of some merchandising rights.

And that meant Pooh.

It meant other things as well, of course, but the origin of the wealth lay in Milne’s four famous books and Winnie-the-Pooh is the outstanding emblem of their presence. In fact, he made an appearance, as Mr Edward Bear, in a Bellocian ballad, in the first of them, When We Were Very Young (1924), and since he was clearly a notable resident in the Milne nursery it is unsurprising to find him becoming the hero of a bedtime story as well.

Winnie-the-Pooh: ‘a new story for children’

was printed as a Christmas Eve treat in the Evening News in 1925, and next day figured among the festive wireless programmes. It was the tale of the bear and the bees, cast in the awkward narrative frame of a dialogue between teller and listener that was retained for the first chapter of the book ‘in which we are introduced …’ Although no further instalments were envisaged, the success of that story (as concept and in its execution) inspired Milne to sequels, seven of which were printed in the Royal Magazine before the book itself was published in October 1926. (This year’s 75th anniversary is deemed by the publishers to be fit occasion for some commercial junketing.) The ten tales of Winnie-the-Pooh were followed by the ten of The House at Pooh Corner in 1928 and the total amounts to the Pooh Bear Canon.

His name

has been the subject of near-metaphysical debate, not greatly helped by the author’s Introduction to the first book (the second one, on advice from Owl, had a ‘Contradiction’). Apparently ‘Winnie’ comes from a brown bear deposited at the London Zoo during the First World War by a Canadian soldier who had called it after his home-state, Winnipeg. As for ‘Pooh’, said implausibly to have been borrowed from a swan, that’s anyone’s guess, although cloacal explanations are barred as anachronistic. Christopher Robin himself insisted on the masculinity of the name: recte Winnie-ther-Pooh. ‘You know what “ther” means?’

His adventures

have also been the subject of critical debate, most memorably by Dorothy Parker, as ‘Constant Reader’ in the New Yorker: ‘it is that word “hummy”, my darlings, that marks the first place at which Tonstant Weader thwows up’. Any assessment more objective than that runs serious risk of being idiotic – as demonstrated in Frederick Crews’s Pooh Perplex of 1963 which used the text to guy the language and critical dispositions of contemporary academics. (Alas, it came too soon to deal with Deconstruction, Post-modernism, Post-colonialism, and Gender Studies. The thought of what it might have done for them should deter the editor of BfK from any ambitious plans for a competition to bring Winnie-the-Pooh up to date. Useless to hazard a female support-group for single-parent Kanga, or a full clarification of the relationship between Pooh and Piglet, or a transfer of the whole shebang to Finsbury Park.)

The only Rissolution

for critical doubts seems to me to lie in an assertion of the Absolute Integrity of the texts as originally published by Messrs Methuen. Those chaste octavos make no extravagant claims for themselves. Take the authorial voice or leave it as you choose, but accept (even without the help of Alan Bennett) that this urbane storytelling is not subject to modification. The word-play, the self-reflexiveness, the jokes that fly over the heads of a nursery audience are (pace Tonstant Weader) a necessary defence against an incipient banality. Furthermore, you find in those early printings the one, true, authentic manifestation of the work of Pooh’s other creator: E H Shepard. The perfection of his visualisations and of their sequencing through the text stand among the triumphs of English book illustration.

Which is to bewail the merchandisers.

Like Peter Rabbit and Babar and other nursery heroes, Winnie-the-Pooh early fell victim to the exploiters of his popularity, and the integrity of those early printings has been compromised more damagingly than most. Shepard himself was responsible for colouring-up the drawings, thus obliterating much of their expressive line, and the publishers have compounded matters with their tumult of excerpts, adaptations, novelties, and fatuous cook-books, work-out books etc. Disney accelerated the band-wagon over thirty years ago, sullying what was left of the Enchanted Places, and on the evidence of seven pages of ‘character marketing’ in Egmont’s latest catalogue the welcome ‘Special Facsimile Editions’ of the original books are hopelessly outweighed by the kitsch. But the Garrick chaps did have a sportive evening on the dodgems.

Ann Thwaite’s definitive biography, A A Milne: His Life, is still in print (Faber, 0 571 16168 5, £14.99), but not her lively study of The Brilliant Career of Winnie-the-Pooh (Methuen, 1992) nor yet Brian Sibley’s account of Shepard’s drawings in The Pooh Sketchbook (Methuen, 1982).

The cover shown is from the Classic Hardback Colour Edition (Egmont, 0 416 16860 4, £11.99).

Brian Alderson is founder of the Children’s Books History Society and children’s book consultant for The Times.