Just Richmal

Arguably, it’s harder to write fiction for children than for adults. On the one hand, there is no particular requirement that the work be sophisticated and complex. On the other hand children are largely free of artifice and pretension with regard to reading, it’s hard for the author to sell on the basis of literary reputation alone. No child after all is about to read a book unless he or she can completely enter the world created on the page.

I shop often for young adult fiction for the sprogs of various relatives and friends. Fantasy and the supernatural predominate, no doubt due to the Lord of the Rings, Twilight and Harry Potter franchises. Besides this, mirroring the adult market, there is the requirement that the themes be dark and deal overtly with issues such as divorce, rape, incest, homosexuality – really nothing that you would not see during normal programming hours on television. And of course now books must compete with television and the Net for a child’s attention. To my mind, much young adult fiction now is badly written but these themes are probably entirely relevant to the average tween, keeping in mind that a young adult these days is simultaneously cautious of and susceptible to marketing (Twilight for e.g. is partly driven by its readers but also partly by a huge marketing machine).

Absent these days are the kinds of sunny tales that filled our childhood. Enid Blyton dominated our pre age 10 years but in our tweens the choice lay between William, Jennings, the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew and the like. If you read William and Jennings, you didn’t read the rest. Or you did but you were quite quite sure that they were completely inferior to William and Jennings. And of the two, the William series was the supreme treat of those years. Like with much of Wodehouse’s work, the William stories are set in an idyllic, unchanging England though the war intrudes now and then. The books largely deal with William and his friends, who call themselves the Outlaws and their scrapes. William’s parents are by and large sensible folk, his older siblings, Robert and Ethel, largely see him as a pest. The Outlaws arch enemies are the Hubert Laneites and many of the stories deal with the complications that ensue from this rivalry. Rounding off the major characters are Violet Elizabeth Bott, the blonde spoilt sort with a lisp and Joan, the girl next door. The characters are familiar from many children’s stories but it is Crompton’s treatment that elevates them. They were the funniest stories we had ever read (some bits here). To my mind they have survived even better than Wodehouse (I still read them unlike Wodehouse), in that you never tire of the variations on the theme. No doubt, like Blyton, they can be subjected to a revisionist reading and one can detect various prejudices embedded in the books but as a child, it is easy to enter both William and Swami’s worlds and find no contradictions.

Apart from arming ourselves with the knowledge that Richmal Crompton was a woman, a useful fact in establishing playground superiority, we knew nothing of the author. Few children after all care about the author! In a post google word, it’s of course mainly a matter of minutes before you have a comprehensive biography of the author. It was a fascinating trawl though a little light on works other than William (though William remains an indication of her talent in that she was able to create so plausible a boy of 11). Sadly the trawl also showed how a writer may so easily fall out of literary fashion even as her work survives in some parts of the world (a pity that certain specific forms of English literature have fallen victim to both the canon of authors like Woolf and Joyce as also political attitudes in the latter half of the 20th century). Interesting too that Crompton primarily wanted to write adult fiction and as this article suggests, there is a great deal of her work waiting to be discovered. Crompton seems an interesting person, unlike the person who lay behind the Blyton empire. Surely her adult fiction must be inflected with her feminism, her experience as a teacher, her satirical impulses so clearly hinted at in the William books? Persephone, which has done much to rescue obscure authors, seem to have at least one out and I hope others follow. Anyone who wrote the William stories will always be amongst my top ten authors.

PS: Most young girls would have also read Anne of Green Gables and Little Women but these were a different category and warrant a separate post.