Criticism:This is a remarkable book. It is cogent, intriguing and illuminating. It assesses the literary value of certain prominent children's authors - with some surprising parallels drawn and conclusions reached - and applauds unexalted juvenile fiction as an incomparable resource of children in wartime.
" . . . One of the clearest images through the early months of the Second World War is the child sheltering behind its comic," the author says. Its main drift, though, is to do right by popular authors in the genre, including Blyton, Brent-Dyer, Johns, Richmal Crompton and so forth, whose achievements are substantially and sympathetically appraised. Owen Dudley Edwards politely challenges various kinds of received opinion, and his book should encourage misguided grown-ups to take a second look at fictional old favourites before succumbing to condescension.
British Children's Fiction in the Second World Waris, indeed, very far in spirit from an Arthur Marshall levity (though that has its pleasures too). The author has immersed himself in all manner of morale-boosting, spy-catching and squadron-leading works, and comes up with his gravity fairly unimpaired. He only gives way to a tongue-in-cheek impulse on page 684, when he cites A J P Taylor's Essays in English Historyas a means of relaxing the mind "when self-exhausted by wrestling with textual problems of Enid Blyton and her fellow-sources". Well, by this stage, with all his chosen authors reinstated, placed in a historical context and given their due, he's entitled to a tiny frivolity.
Not that his book is without a high entertainment quotient throughout: his doughty and persuasive manner makes for lively reading. What he shows, above all, is that children's literature can be taken as childish or quite the opposite ("Blyton produced . . . a serious sociological reflection on Britain at the war's end: The Put-Em-Rights"); and he endorses what some of us have held to be true all along: that an appreciation of juvenile fiction isn't incompatible with an interest in the classics (say). Or, to put it another way, you can commend George Orwell and Frank Richards - even, if, in the famous exchange between the two (Orwell's 1940 article on Boys' Weeklies in Horizon and Richards's riposte), you come down on the side of the Bunter author.
Actually, Owen Dudley Edwards is very nearly unprecedented (but right) in singling out Richards's "elegant ironies and classical comedies", and in deploring the elevation of Bunter, somewhat at the expense of the other Greyfriars characters, in the post-war books. (The cartoon Bunter in Knockout, nothing to do with Frank Richards, he rightly relegates to the trash can.)
Writing against the grain of conventionally limiting judgments, Dudley Edwards attributes a satirical purpose to the Greyfriars author, and praises the wartime feminist advancement of WE Johns (with early titles in his Worrals series). Quoting Eileen Colwell's celebrated comment on Blyton's The Sea of Adventure- "But what hope has a band of desperate men against four children?" (actually more wry than reproving) - he judges it to be both spot-on, and wide of the mark. Blyton, he says, was still - in 1948 - composing her fictions with second World War presumptions in mind, "and a Britain in arms against Nazis at the height of their power had to believe the apparently absurd dream".
ALL THIS IS interesting and stimulating. But the most ingenious Dudley Edwards reappraisal concerns Malcolm Saville's children's novel, Seven White Gates. The wartime implications he draws from this book are really striking. Black-bearded Uncle Micah is the UK, his estranged son Charles is the US, "the unknown quarrel is the American Revolution, the injury during the process of return is Pearl Harbor . . . ". And it doesn't stop there. Even the perilous cable-car ride depicted on the dust-jacket, and Saville's plucky nine-year-old twins in the story, Mary and Dickie, have a place in Dudley Edwards's retrieved topical symbolism. Whether you go along with this or not - and whether it happened subconsciously on the author's part or not - this reading of the novel makes an impact.
The war was naturally at the forefront of everyone's consciousness, but some writers edited it out of their fiction altogether, or kept it firmly in the background, proffering stability, normality or fantasy instead, as a form of protection for children already distraught or dislocated by the effects of enemy action. Others, with considerable gusto, threw themselves, and their readers, into the war effort - the incomparable Richmal Crompton, for example, who, via William, makes as merry a business of its exigencies as is possible (though not without a sombre undertone or two, as Owen Dudley Edwards reminds us).
It was a good time for adventure and excitements of all kinds. Evacuees and refugees, spies and double agents and airmen and bombs and upheaval, and mysterious signals flashing in the middle of the night . . . The war was, in some ways, a gift to those writers prepared to make the most of it. And British Children's Fiction in the Second World Warprovides the last word on all of them. It is a large book (a pity that its cost will put it out of the range of many would-be buyers), and covers every topic, from air operations to egalitarianism.
THE PRESENT-DAY perspective enables Owen Dudley Edwards to consider, among other things, the question of how innocent, or otherwise, certain children's authors were, in relation to implied homosexuality, sleeping arrangements, quasi-erotic situations and so forth (he's alive to the humour in all of these). Certainly, a number of Blyton titles - Mr Pink-whistle Interferes, the eponymous Mr Meddleand Mr Twiddle- might raise an eyebrow or two today. A poised and rational commentator such as Dudley Edwards can't help investigating byways such as these. But he writes with the deepest understanding of children's books and their vast contribution to the sum of human happiness. This book is a serious and scholarly undertaking, triumphantly carried out. I have nothing but admiration for it. But I can't resist tampering, for a moment, with Owen Dudley Edwards's authoritative tone, by bringing to mind an image of the renowned historian and man of letters poring over the antics of Desperate Danor Mary Mouse, or getting to grips with the Chalet school old-girl network and the intricacies of Brent-Dyer's second-generation pupils' family connections.
Patricia Craig is co-author, with Mary Cadogan, of Women and Children First: The Fiction of Two World Wars. Her memoir, Asking for Trouble, has just been published by Blackstaff
British Children's Fiction in the Second World War By Owen Dudley Edwards Edinburgh University Press, 744pp. £150