The Midnight Folk

by John Masefield

  Masefield, writing at a time when the British Empire was triumphant and people could believe in the “white man’s burden,” had some ironic comments to make. Miss Twiney Pricker, whose father is part of the plot, though not quite as dastardly a villain as Abner Brown, says of her pa that he got “Negro servants from savage parts to places where they could go to school and wear proper trousers instead of the fans and things . . . which they were accustomed to where they lived in their heathendom. He . . . brought many heathen savages into the advances of civilization. Sometimes they died, of course.”

  I missed the radicalism of this when I was a child, and I wonder if one has to be an adult who was alive during the time of the vast Empire to understand now how very advanced Masefield was in his thinking.

  Moonlighting, too, means something very different today. Back a century ago in England, it was bootlegging, which was done by moonlight. Miss Twiney Pricker explains it to Kay as “what comes by moonlight, French brandy and tea and this burgundy.” She explains to Kay that her pa had seven barges with false bottoms which he took “right through a lock that the queen herself was opening.”

  The young American reader may find the world of Kay’s England (now vanished forever) difficult to recognize. Boys were usually educated at home until they were sent away to school, sometimes when they were as young as nine or ten. Even when children came from loving families, they saw far less of their parents than their counterparts in the States. But it will not be difficult for the reader to understand Kay’s affection for his stuffed animals, which of course the wicked governess has confiscated, but who, with the other good midnight folk, come to help him as he tries to find the treasure, and to restore his great-grandfather’s honor, and the honor of the Harker name. If the desire to honor the name is less familiar today than it was before two world wars ripped western civilization apart, it is not a bad desire to bring back. We need to regain a sense of honor, and I am grateful to Masefield for pointing out its importance.

  And of course Kay’s own sense of honor helps right to prevail. The treasure is found and Kay, with the help of his midnight folk, is able to rescue it, keep it from the witches, and give it back to the archbishop of Santa Barbara. The witches are routed, the bad cats reform. The evil midnight folk vanish with the dark, and the good midnight folk, the stuffed animals, the real old owl, the water rat, are all there to help Kay do his growing up.

  This poetic book makes demands on the readers, but it is well worth the trouble, and the child with imagination will find many delights.

  —MADELEINE L’ENGLE

  JOHN MASEFIELD (1878–1967) was born in Herefordshire, England. After being orphaned at an early age, he was sent to sea aboard the school-ship HMS Conway in preparation for a naval career. Masefield’s apprenticeship was disastrous—he was classified as a Distressed British Seaman after a voyage around Cape Horn—and he soon left the ship. Arrangements were then made for him to join another ship in New York. But Masefield had other plans: he deserted ship vowing “to be a writer, come what might.”

  At seventeen Masefield was living as a vagrant in America. He found work as a bar hand but eventually secured employment at a carpet factory. Thinking that journalism might allow him to write for a living, Masefield returned to England in 1897.

  Masefield’s first volume of poetry, Salt-Water Ballads, was published in 1902, however, it was not until the publication of The Everlasting Mercy in 1911 that he made his mark on the literary scene. The success of his second book was followed by the publication of several long narrative poems, including Dauber (1914) and Reynard the Fox (1919).

  With the outbreak of war, Masefield became an orderly at a hospital in France. He also took charge of a motorboat ambulance service at Gallipoli in 1915. After the Allied failure there, Masefield visited America and undertook a series of lectures in support of the war effort. In 1930 he was appointed Poet Laureate, and five years later the much-loved Masefield was awarded the Order of Merit. He died on May 12, 1967, and his ashes were interred in Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey.

  The two Kay Harker books, The Midnight Folk (1927) and The Box of Delights (1935), are Masefield’s lasting contribution to children’s fantasy literature. The Box of Delights is now an established Christmas favourite and as much a part of the season as Dickens’s A Christmas Carol.