by Dennis Butts
There is another formal and quite practical reason why the appearance of Mr Tod may have represented a new stage in the development of Beatrix Potter’s art, as Greene and Goldthwaite claim to have noticed. According to Leslie Linder, in A History of the Writings of Beatrix Potter (1971), The Tale of Mr Tod was deliberately different from her earlier works because Beatrix Potter no longer had the inclination to produce the number of coloured pictures found in them. (The Tale of Two Bad Mice of 1904, for example, contained twenty-seven full-page plates.) She also told her publishers that she was finding it ‘so difficult to make “fresh” short stories.’ So she adapted a new format and produced a longer text, of 93 pages compared with 59 in Two Bad Mice. This text is not divided into the short paragraphs as in the earlier books, but reads more continuously, and Mr Tod only contains fourteen coloured plates (although there are many small pen-and-ink drawings in the text). It was decided to retain the familiar size and format of the earlier books, but Beatrix Potter did want to register that her style had changed in some way; and so The Tale of Mr Tod and the following book, The Tale of Pigling Bland, had a slightly more elaborate binding with a rounded back, and were advertised as ‘The Peter Rabbit Books, Series II, New Style.’
Graham Greene was certainly right in noting changes in Beatrix Potter’s books from around 1910. They contained a good deal of darkness and were formally different in a number of ways. Whether these changes were due to ’flu and its after-effects or to deeper psychological reasons must remain a matter of speculation.
Yet, in the end, we may also want to ask whether the changes Greene and Goldthwaite noticed were quite so great. Although there is plenty of comedy in the early books, they are not without darkness: human predators shoot at rabbits, mice steal food from dolls, Jeremy Fisher is threatened by a gigantic trout, and Mr McGregor is always a menacing presence. The Roly-Poly Pudding is a particularly dramatic example. This tale was retitled The Tale of Samuel Whiskers in 1926, but was actually written as early as 1906. Young Tom Kitten is caught wandering around an old house by an enormous rat who ties him up and prepares to make him into a roly-poly pudding. In vain Tom struggles to escape but is smeared with butter and rolled in dough as a preparation for being baked. His absolutely terrifying ordeal only comes to an end when the rats flee at the arrival of a yelping dog.
However, although the rats leave the house, they have only moved to the nearby barn, where they continue to breed and multiply:
As for Farmer Potatoes, he has been driven nearly distracted. There are rats, and rats, and rats in his barn! They eat up the chicken food, and steal the oats and bran, and make holes in the meal bag.
And they are all descended from Mr and Mrs Samuel Whiskers – children and grand-children and great-great-grand-children.
There is no end to them!
Although written in 1906, this excerpt contains shades of the book Nineteen Eighty-Four.
14. Why Did Wilfred Owen Change The Little Mermaid in 1909?
Hans Christian Andersen, The Little Mermaid (1837)
Readers of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales will surely be intrigued to discover that Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) produced poetical versions of two of Andersen’s most famous tales. More particularly they may be puzzled by the way he changed the ending of The Little Mermaid in 1912.
Owen today is regarded as one of the finest English writers of the twentieth century and arguably England’s greatest war-poet. He enlisted in the British army in the First World War and served with great distinction in France during that terrible conflict. He is particularly famous for a number of poems he wrote about the war, including the ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ and ‘Strange Meeting’. Awarded the Military Cross in October 1918, he was killed in action just a week before the war ended. (His mother actually learned of his death on the day peace was declared.)
Andersen’s Fairy Tales first appeared in English in a selection translated by Mary Howitt in 1846, and this work was soon followed by other versions, although many were criticised for their errors and misinterpretations of Andersen’s original texts. The twentieth century has seen many more translations, notably by Paul Leyssac in 1937 and by R.P. Keigwin (1976). The nearest we have to a standard edition is probably Erik Christian Haugaard’s The Complete Fairy Tales and Stories (Gollancz, 1974).
However, it was not until Jon Stallworthy produced the first, and now standard, edition of the Complete Poems and Fragments of Wilfred Owen in 1983 that readers discovered that Owen had also written verse re-tellings of two of Andersen’s best-loved tales, Little Claus and Big Claus and The Little Mermaid.
When Owen left school in 1911, his family were not able to find sufficient funds to send him to university. Hoping to obtain a place at university later, Owen took a temporary post as assistant to the Anglican priest of the small country parish of Dunsden in Oxfordshire. He was already thinking of becoming a writer, and had particularly fallen in love with the poetry of John Keats. During his time at Dunsden, as well as being busy with parish duties such as helping with the Sunday School, visiting sick villagers, and attending church services, Owen wrote a good deal of poetry. Some of this is about the countryside and its people, and much of it is what is now called ‘confessional’: poems in which he wrote about his personal problems, particularly about his growing religious doubts. Among Owen’s early poems are versions of Hans Andersen’s Little Claus and Big Claus and The Little Mermaid.
Owen’s version of Little Claus and Big Claus consists of 360 lines of fairly fluent and vigorous blank verse, in which he retells Andersen’s story of the rivalry between a poor countryman, Little Claus, and his successful attempts to outwit the more powerful and rich Big Claus It is a crude, blackly comic, humorous tale, dealing with jealousy, fierce enmity and violence. Although Owen tried to distance himself (and his readers) from its unpleasantness by relating the tale in a deliberately archaic language – as if to say this all happened a long time ago and need not be taken too seriously – it is clear that Owen was not very happy with his efforts. In a letter to his mother in May 1912, he told her ‘I am dissatisfied with not only my attempt, but the story itself, which doesn’t exactly inculcate peace and happiness, truth and justice, religion and piety.’
The Little Mermaid is a much more ambitious work. Owen began it in June 1911 but did not finish until the autumn of 1912. The longest poem he ever wrote, it consists of 78 eight-line stanzas, rhyming abababcc like John Keats’s ‘Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil’; and like Keats’s poem, it is a tale of unfulfilled romantic love.
Although for Little Claus and Big Claus Owen worked from an anonymous translation of 1906, which can now be found in the Oxford University English Faculty Library, we don’t know which English translation of The Little Mermaid Owen followed. We do know that in March 1912 he wrote to his mother asking her to send him his Hans Christian Andersen, and we can only surmise that this must have been one of the nineteenth-century versions then available to him. At any rate, Owen seems to have followed Andersen’s original version quite closely.
His opening describes the under-water palace of the Sea King and his six daughters. The youngest, the heroine of the tale, desperately longs to visit the world of men who live above the sea, and on her fifteenth birthday she is permitted to rise to the surface of the ocean, where she espies a prince on a passing ship and immediately falls in love with him. When a great storm shipwrecks the prince’s ship, she rescues him and carries him safely to the shore. Her grandmother explains to her that human beings have immortal souls, but that mermaids only live for three hundred years before they dissolve into the ocean. Only marriage to a human will give an immortal soul to a mermaid. Desperately in love with the prince, the mermaid seeks advice from a Sea Witch, and, sacrificing her voice in order to obtain human legs (which cause excruciating pain), she goes off in search of her prince. At first all seems to go well, but the mermaid discovers that the prince has fallen in love with
the daughter of a neighbouring king whom he incorrectly believes to have rescued him from a shipwreck (it was, in fact, the little mermaid). When her five sisters learn this, they urge her to kill the prince in revenge and save herself, but she nobly refuses to do so. Instead she leaps to her own death in the sea, where angelic spirits bring her comfort.
Deeply romantic in form and subject-matter, Owen’s poem flows along with ease and fluency, the voluptuous picture of the young mermaid in stanza 5 reminding us of the influence of John Keats:
Her skin is delicate and freshly clear
As petals of wild rose; and in her eyes,
As in the stillness of an evening mere,
All heaven’s purple concentrated lies.
But lo! What marvel to mankind is here:
She has no feet, no knees! But mermaid-wise,
A fish’s tail, smooth-tapering from her waist,
Blue-scaled and glistering, like silver chased.
Although Owen closely follows Andersen’s narrative until stanza 75, he dramatically departs from the original ending. In the original version, when the little mermaid refuses to kill her beloved prince, she throws herself into the sea. The Spirit of the Air greets her, and tells her that she will only be able to win an immortal soul if she can do good deeds for three hundred years. Then, in an astonishing coda, as if that offer of compensation were not enough, Andersen also says that a Daughter of the Air may be allowed to enter God’s kingdom a year earlier for each day on which she finds a child who makes her parents smile. A bad or naughty child, however, will add a further day to this period of trial.
None of this is in Owen’s retelling of The Little Mermaid. When she leaps into the sea, the little mermaid achieves a kind of apotheosis:
The sun passed flaming up his azure path,
And warmed the drift of froth that erst was flesh.
She felt the radiance, and as from a bath,
Uprist into the air, ethereal, fresh.
She had not feathers, as an angel hath,
No fairy wings or clear and gauzy mesh;
But yet slid upwards, like a lifting mist,
And floated, cloudlike, through heaven’s amethyst.
Owen’s response to Andersen’s didactic ending is absolutely decisive; he omits his original ending completely. He has no interest in Andersen’s apparent attempt to blackmail his child-readers into good behaviour with his talk about the smiles of parents and of good or naughty children.
During his time in the parish at Dunsden, Owen’s duties particularly involved him with children and young people. He regularly met a group of girls for Bible study, and was in charge of the Boys’ Club. He told his mother how much he enjoyed taking choir-practice with the intelligent if ill-educated youngsters. More importantly, his regular parish-visiting of the poor and sick brought him into contact with younger children whom he befriended and helped. He asked his mother to send him picture-postcards for a young girl and toy soldiers for a sick boy of five. These experiences gave him, he came to believe, considerable insight into what young children were really like. Writing to his sister about his Scripture Union meetings, for example, he said, ‘I enjoy speaking very much. I use no notes, and spend no time in preparation; but I use no high falutin’ words, but try to express myself in simple, straightforward English.’ Because of his contacts with the children he felt that he got to know them really well. I can examine their home influences, he said, ‘for I have the entrance of every house. I know their school-influences, for I know everyone of their teachers. I know their spiritual influences, for I know everyone of their spiritual task-masters. And I have a very good idea of their amusements.’ He came to have a great sympathy and love for his young parishioners, and this surely affected the way he treated Andersen’s ending of The Little Mermaid.
In Owen’s version of Andersen’s tale, the little mermaid refuses to kill the prince; she leaps into the sea to drown, but rises up like the Daughters of the Air who tell her about their good works. In a startling alteration of Andersen’s tale, Owen, the poet-narrator, then concludes his poem by saying that he knows nothing about the little mermaid’s after-life. Perhaps, he speculates, she is still at work, helping to illuminate sunsets and to breathe scent into roses. Owen makes no mention of good or bad children and the rewards or punishment for their behaviour. He totally rejects Andersen’s moralising conclusion, and can we blame him?
15. How Many Adults Are There in Winnie-the-Pooh?
A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) and The House at Pooh Corner (1928)
Of all the books in the children’s literature canon, there are two that critics had better not be cynical about. One can be as sceptical as one likes about Mary Poppins – once Disney-lovers have encountered the actual text, there are few who will not admit that the book is essentially odd. And although one might meet with outrage from the admirers of J.M. Barrie if one regards Peter Pan as an eccentric text in the extreme, they would be willing to agree that the relationship of the books and plays with the life of their author is at least extremely complex; Peter Pan is not just a charming reflection of its author’s blameless life. The same might be said of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, whose devotees have become inured to the fact that ever since an Oxford undergraduate, Tony Goldschmidt, wrote a satire on Freudian analysis in 1933 using Alice as his stalking-horse (‘Alice in Wonderland Psycho-Analysed’), there has been wild speculation about Dodgson’s supposed sexual predilections. Fans of Kenneth Grahame may be a little edgy about suggestions that The Wind in the Willows is not a children’s book but a combination of various adult genres; but the members of TARS, the Arthur Ransome society, are likely to regard investigations into Ransome’s alleged neo-colonialism with an urbane and amused tolerance. Generally speaking, the societies that espouse a particular author, from Elsie J. Oxenham to Percy F. Westerman, are groups of dedicated, incredibly well-informed specialists, and their response to criticism is almost always measured, intelligent, and tolerant of the lesser mortals who have the temerity to attempt it.
But you criticise Winnie-the-Pooh at your peril.
There is something of a national mystery lurking here. Why do the British seem to take teddy-bears to their heart – Paddington, Mary Plain, Teddy Robinson, Rupert, Threadbear – when the original teddy-bear was an American invention? Be that as it may, Pooh Bear has become a national institution, surviving all manner of ‘adult-eration’. There has been Disneyfication and a scarcely paralleled commodification of the character. There have been spin-offs that include biting satires on literary theory (Frederick R. Crews’s The Pooh Perplex [1964] and Postmodern Pooh [2001]), and ingenious tomes on religion and philosophy (Benjamin Hoff’s The Tao of Pooh [1982] and The Te of Piglet [1982], and John Tyerman Williams’s Pooh and the Philosophers: In Which It Is Shown That All of Western Philosophy Is Merely a Preamble to Winnie-The-Pooh [1996]).
Despite this, the books survive in the public consciousness as epitomising all that is good and sweet and innocent about children’s books. Toy animals playing harmlessly (and wittily) in a safe, Sussex, ultra-English wood, with a little boy in charge. What could be nicer?
After all, the books have impeccable credentials. They were written by a famous, blameless (and pacifist) author, for his young son, using his son’s nursery toys as models (‘I described rather than invented them’). Milne had already written a bestselling collection of poems for children before Winnie-the-Pooh was published; a book which, with its companion volume, Now We Are Six, epitomises middle-class society of the 1920s. The two ‘Pooh’ books have a gentle, child-friendly humour; the stories are simple, harmless, charming; the verses are ingenious and polished; the setting is a golden, protected rural playground. Pooh is an endearing simpleton, and his relationship with the child character Christopher Robin very loving. The young child reader can sympathise with the timid (but ultimately heroic) Piglet, and feel
superior to (as well as delighted by) the wild-child, Tigger. The whole thing manages to avoid being locked into a time warp – especially in terms of class (something that the Milne’s poetry books for children do not manage, with their nurseries and nannies). And, as a bonus, the original books were illustrated by a genius, E.H. Shepard, who managed to catch their bucolic simplicity; Milne once wrote that he would be sure to get into heaven once St Peter realised that he had written the words for Shepard’s books. However, the knowledge that the author was not particularly fond of children might disrupt this idyll for the reader.