British Children's Fiction in the Second World War

If you have a hundred and fifty smackers to spare and seek immersion in a swirling miscellany of reflections on the war-time stories of Enid Blyton, Elinor Brent-Dyer, Richmal Crompton, Capt. W E Johns et al., then this is the book for you. (As a bonus you get a lot about ‘Frank Richards’ too who did not publish much at this time but whose spat with George Orwell gets the miscellany going and crops up frequently as you go along.)

Rumours of Dr Edwards, barricaded into a reader’s slot at the National Library of Scotland by barrow-loads of books, are probably true. For although those popular authors noted above (along with a quantity of comics and magazines) feature regularly throughout his massy tome, he has read his way through much else in the way of primary and secondary sources. And since he comes to the subject as an historian rather than as one of the customary juvenile academics his angle of vision is different. Thus there are many unexpected collocations and obiter dicta – a theory, say, about the effect of Johns’s common-law wife on his reputation, or comments on the ambiguous role of Eire during the hostilities – which give a freshness to his approach.

And freshness is often much-needed since Edwards has fixed on a rather murky procedure for displaying his erudition – stringing together bundles of descriptive accounts, accompanied by hefty quotations, with a plenitude which leaves the reader struggling to find a coherent purpose behind it all. The book’s division into two parts does not really help since the chapters within them are conducted in a similar temper: the first part being a promenade of couples where wartime subjects are (tenuously) linked: ‘Rations and Quislings’, ‘Evacuees and Gurus’ etc., the second being ‘Lessons Which May Have Been Learned’, which rambles its way through discussions of such matters as religion, Empire, and today’s predictable trio of gender, race and class. It all gets very wearing, like one of those nature-walks of the period where one stops every hundred yards to have teacher explain yet another phenomenon. (There is however no critical consideration of illustrations; the book’s ‘figures’ consist merely of a badly-reproduced full-page black and white picture at the start of each of its eleven chapters.)

Nor does the apparatus offer much help. Every chapter is heavily annotated at its conclusion so that you have to read it with one finger stuck in the notes in order to follow the thesis back and forth. (It might be advisable to buy two copies of the book to save this tiresomeness.) The thirty-eight page Index serves also as a partial bibliography and source of dates for books and authors, but Edwards’s use of, and judgement upon, some of his secondary sources are treated discursively elsewhere in a chapter on ‘Sources, Guides and Regrets’. In a peculiar way too, by the time you get to that point (on page 683), you are beginning to wonder first whether more should not have been said more systematically about the publishing background to the creating of these books, and second whether isolating ‘fiction’ from the important, but neglected, area of picture books and stories for young children does not distort the account of what’s going on. At the other end of the spectrum, one might also ask if the Second World War, as it manifested itself in novels by such as Neville Shute and ‘Flying Officer X’, might also deserve a look-in. Those best-selling chaps had more to offer the young adolescent than idiotic fantasies like Biggles Defies the Swastika.