The Haunted Wood, page 14
The violence of the books is of a part with their settler-colonial mindset. When the “Indians” attack, Henty takes a special, and one might think unsporting, pleasure in how heavily outgunned they are. During a siege of the estancia, a “rain of blows with hatchet and tomahawk […] instead of splintering the wood, merely made deep dents, or glided off harmlessly. Then the blows redoubled, and then a bright light suddenly lit up the whole scene. As it did so, from every loophole a stream of fire poured out, repeated again and again. The guns, heavily loaded with buck-shot, told with terrible effect upon the crowded mass of Indians around the windows.” There’s a dismaying exultation – an almost industrial satisfaction – that the white man has the superior technology. The bodies pile up, not much to be mourned.
Though it won’t rehabilitate his reputation to say so, Henty is pretty good as pulp writers go. His books for children are sausagestrings of violent set-pieces interspersed with Wikipedia-style infodumps, and their language hasn’t the slightest literary distinction. But they are vigorous, pacy, and direct and they answer compelling fantasies. He’s a good bad writer. And his immense popularity points us in the direction of a truth worth bearing in mind. Some children’s writing is of literary interest – and it’s that which tends to survive and attract the attention of scholars; William Empson took a serious interest in Alice that you can’t imagine him taking in Henty – but the heart of the successful stuff is storytelling and pace. Popular fiction tends to vanish from the record, but it shapes and reflects the culture.
That culture is evidenced everywhere in even the most fantastical children’s literature of the mid-nineteenth century: the march of empire (and the attitudes and ideas, not all of them savory, that underpinned it); the rise of the industrial cities and concerns about the conditions of the working poor; the spread and questions about the uses of education; the negotiation between the new sciences and a Christianity that remained vigorous even as it became less doctrinaire. The folktales that are many of these stories’ ancestors begin “once upon a time.” But the present moment presses on these books – even as they bathe in nostalgia. That’s not a contradiction. Nostalgia occupies the present moment; the nostalgia of every generation for an imagined past; the nostalgia of every adult for an imagined childhood.
* Alex Renton, Stiff Upper Lip, [p]
* As genres ossify, and those who consumed them as children look back from adulthood with amused condescension, that’s what happens. Think of Carroll’s spoofing the pious hymns of Isaac Watts; Struwwelpeter and Cautionary Tales sending up morality tales; or, in our own time, Viz affectionately mocking Enid Blyton, eighties photo-romance stories and seventies children’s comics.
* Down With Skool! (1953), How to Be Topp (1954), Whizz for Atomms (1956) and Back in the Jug Agane (1959).
† Searle was recruited for the project after the success of his girls’ school St Trinian’s cartoons.
* The attentive reader will notice that this is four years after his death in 1902. There were that many of the things, presumably, that it took a while for his publishers to clear the backlog.
* Raymond Blathwayt, “How Boys’ Books Are Written: a talk with Mr G.A. Henty,” Great Thoughts from Master Minds, II, 5th Series, 497, October 1902, [p].
* Price’s Adventure series, beginning with Amazon Adventure (1949), followed teenage daredevils Hal and Roger Hunt as they roamed the world duffing up rare and dangerous animals and bagging them for their father’s Long Island zoo. The books remained popular well into the 1980s, though their low-key racism and ecocidal attitudes belonged more to the 1880s. Cracking yarns, nevertheless.
IV
MAN-CUBS AND NAUGHTY BUNNIES
Rudyard Kipling · Robert Louis Stevenson · John Meade Falkner · George MacDonald · Carlo Collodi · Beatrix Potter · Anna Sewell
LATE VICTORIANS
THE GREAT FILLIP THAT THE FIRST BOOKS OF THE Golden Age gave to children’s writing was consolidated in the second half of that century. We were to see genres being explored and established – adventure stories, school stories, fantasy, anthropomorphic animal stories. But there was not, yet, much in the way of precedent to follow. These writers were, most of them, making it up as they went along and that is what gives the era so much of its vivacity and messiness.
Markets were opening up, and audiences widening. As the literary historian Peter Hunt notes, “there was a rapid expansion of both the middle-class ‘respectable’ market […]and the penny dreadfuls.”* Changing technology – from the ascendancy of the rotary printing press to cardboard book covers and photomechanical reproduction of pictures taking the place of engravings – made books cheaper and more accessible to a wide market. By 1875, one publisher’s catalog alone contained 1,000 children’s books.
The periodicals market, too, was booming. Many of the classics we still read were originally published in serial form in magazines. The Boy’s Own Paper, which started in 1879, by the end of the 1880s was selling a quarter of a million copies a week; the Girls’ Own Paper, founded in the same year, was thought to have had the highest circulation of any illustrated magazine. These publications sought to win converts (sometimes literally: Boy’s Own was started by the Religious Tract Society) from the exciting but morally disreputable “gallows” pamphlets in which the poor delighted and which middleclass children read on the sly. In 1890 the conservative press baron Alfred Harmsworth launched a weekly comic, Comic Cuts. A.A. Milne remarked that he “killed the penny dreadful: by the simple process of producing a ha’penny dreadfuller.”*
The late victorian period was also a time in which children’s lives transformed: they were coming down the proverbial chimney, scrubbing up and going to school. It had not been until the beginning of the nineteenth century that the English state started to take a serious legislative interest in child labor. The follow-up was that education, rather than work, was on its way to being the defining space of childhood. England made its first public subvention of funds for elementary schooling in 1833, and in the second half of the century universal education was starting to look like more than just an aspiration.
Church schools, Sunday schools, and modestly priced private schools were already becoming the norm – and by the 1870s, according to the social historian Hugh Cunningham, a “huge majority” of English children were receiving some sort of education.† The 1870 Education Act mandated a school in every local area, and in 1880 attendance became compulsory for children between the ages of five and ten. As Cunningham puts it, “the way was opened to a major transformation in both the experience and conceptualization of childhood, the shift from a situation where children were thought of as members of the labor force to one where they were schoolchildren.”
In England and Wales, the proportion of children between the ages of five and fourteen who were in school doubled between and 1880. By 1900, it was nearly three-quarters of that demographic. The 1918 act was to raise the school leaving age from twelve to fourteen; by 1920 or so, it was accepted as entirely natural and proper that every child should be in school until adolescence. Compulsory schooling was seen not only as a means of bettering the population but of extending the hand of the state into their lives and shaping their characters. Periodic moral panics about child delinquency, truancy, and what we now call “feral children” were assuaged by the idea that universal education would help to create a cohesive national identity.
If the British state, like Whitney Houston, believed that children were the future, that future was to be courteous, obedient, and trained for its proper role in life – whether that be needlework and cookery for girls or colonial administration for boys. You can see that dynamic variously endorsed and challenged in school stories over the years. Widening education meant widening literacy. It not only supplied new situations and possibilities for the literature of childhood; it supplied new readers.
What of the country in which those readers were growing up? This was the era in which Britannia ruled the waves and a good bit of the dry land too (Queen Victoria formally became Empress of India in 1876, and the “scramble for Africa” got going in the 1880s). The pageantry of church, monarchy, and empire continued in all its pomp. But Britain’s worldview was not as secure as its secular power might suggest. Urbanization, and the squalor of the urban poor, were changing the idea of what the nation looked like. Darwin’s discoveries, as they percolated into the mainstream, were quietly abrading the secure foundations of its God. The anxieties that shaded the works of the early writers of the Golden Age were only deepening. The “melancholy long withdrawing roar” of Matthew Arnold’s 1867 poem “Dover Beach” rumbled in the background.
* Hunt, op. cit., [p].
* A.A. Milne, “Blood and Thunder,” The Sunday Times, 10 October 1948.
† Cunningham, op. cit., [p].
The Law of the Jungle
RUDYARD KIPLING
The Jungle Book; The Second Jungle Book;
Kim; Stalky & Co.; Puck of Pook’s Hill,
The Just So Stories
ACRUCIAL FIGURE IN THE LITERARY SHAPE THAT THIS double movement between self-confidence and anxiety took was Joseph Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936): a poet who, even as he celebrated empire in his poem “Recessional,” composed for Queen Victoria’s 1897 Diamond Jubilee, was able to present a vision of how: “Far-called, our navies melt away; / On dune and headland sinks the fire: / Lo, all our pomp of yesterday / Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!”
That ambivalence runs through Kipling’s titanic contribution to children’s writing. Along with Beatrix Potter, he bestrode the later part of the nineteenth century, and he continued to write to the brink of the Second World War. His influence has gone far beyond that. Kipling was a poet, novelist, short-story writer, and fabulist with an extraordinary range of voices and styles. He produced one of the greats in the school story genre in Stalky & Co. (1899). He wrote the founding classic of Great Game spy adventures in Kim (1901). He laid, in Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906), the groundwork for the enchanted Englands of Alan Garner and Susan Cooper. He created the rich and resonant home-made fairytales of The Just So Stories (1902). Plus, as Disney would have no hesitation in allowing you to forget, he wrote The Jungle Book (1894).
His stories often see their protagonists caught between two worlds – Kim is half sahib,* half native; Mowgli is the mancub who belongs half to the jungle. To be caught between two worlds and two versions of childhood was Kipling’s own experience as a son of the Raj, and the experience is a defining one in his work. Born in Bombay in 1865 – his parents had met and courted in England before relocating, and he was named for a lake in Staffordshire – in his infancy he absorbed Portuguese and Hindi from the servants who looked after him. It was “the vernacular idiom one thought and dreamed in”; he spoke English, like Kim, only haltingly.
That ended abruptly and traumatically when he was shipped back to the old country to lodge with strangers in Southsea at the age of five. Being shipped halfway around the world and left among strangers seems a startling cruelty to us now, but it was a typical experience for the children of Anglo-Indian families. A version of the same thing is described in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princess. The young Kipling spent the next six years, as he later recalled, miserable: bullied and neglected by the couple who had taken him in, relief only coming with Christmas visits to a kind aunt in London. After a brief summer with his mother when she returned to the country in 1877, he was sent to boarding school in Devon – an experience that was to provide the basis for the boarding-school stories in Stalky & Co. Is it any wonder that the old pattern in children’s stories – of the simultaneous yearning for a stable home, and for transformation and independence – was so feelingly limned in Kipling’s work?
I have among the books piled against the wall in my sons’ bedroom a short, board-bound picture book whose cover shows a winsome, tow-haired little boy in red trunks sitting on a rock, companionably arrayed with a cartoon tiger, an orangutan, and a bear laying his friendly paw on a panther. The title says: Disney, The Jungle Book, and a strapline promises: “The Original Magical Story.” Nowhere, not on the copyright page, not on the spine, not even in small print inside the back cover, do the words “Rudyard Kipling” appear. Not only does that Disney picture book in no sense tell the “original story,” but it amounts to the wholesale erasure of the original story – and its author.
The history of children’s literature, mind you, is full of retellings, reboots, bowdlerizations, and outright appropriations. Long before Walt Disney was thought of, we had PG domestications of hard-R folktales, Robinson Crusoe without the economics, Gulliver’s Travels without the politics, and The Pilgrim’s Progress without the Puritanism. To get a clear view of the originals of very many children’s classics these days, there’s a Disney paintjob to be scraped off first. But the Disney version of the Mowgli stories is so pervasive in the culture – your first two Google hits for “Jungle Book” will be the 1967 film and the 2016 film – and so distorted that they really might as well be two wholly separate properties.*
To pick a few instances: Kaa the snake, in Kipling, is an ally rather than an antagonist of Mowgli; King Louie, the jazz-singing orangutan who rules the Bandar-log (the monkey-people who in one episode kidnap Mowgli), was invented by Disney and appears nowhere in Kipling’s stories; Mowgli, in the original, is taken in by Father and Mother Wolf after toddling towards their cave in flight from an attack by the tiger Shere Khan, not discovered by Bagheera abandoned Moses-style in a basket; the final face-off with Shere Khan doesn’t result in the tiger slinking away with a scorched tail, as in Disney, but in Mowgli killing and skinning the predator; and Mowgli’s eventual return to the man-village, accomplished in the film by a saccharine meet-cute with a girl carrying a water-pot, is nothing like that in the original. Mowgli’s return to his own kind, in the books, is never more than provisional. His first stint in the man-village ends with his fellow humans stoning him and accusing him of witchcraft, and he pays them back with the help of his animal allies by razing the human village to the ground. Only much later, as a young adult, does he take up cautiously with a human surrogate mother.
The original stories are more sinewy, more austere, and vastly richer thematically. Though not without Kipling’s humor, they are very far from being obvious candidates to turn into animated musical comedy. Written in a high style of stately formality (there’s a lot of thee-ing and thou-ing among the inhabitants of the jungle), they are concerned above all with ideas of identity, honor, law, and morality. There’s a gravity to them, a tenderness, and a high seriousness, that’s entirely absent from the pantomime world of Disney. But they aren’t dry tracts either; they are, like so much Kipling wrote, fantastic feats of world-building and narrative verve.
Also, it’s easily forgotten, there isn’t one Jungle Book but two. The first, published in 1894, and the second, a year later, are shortstory collections rather than novels – and they’re not all about Mowgli. Come to that, they’re not all about the jungle: you’re stretching any definition of the word if one of your stories is set in the Bering Strait and another among the Inuit of the Arctic Circle. Only three of the seven stories in the first book, and only four of the eight in the second, are about Mowgli – and they tell his story out of sequence. Here he’s a toddler, there he’s a teenager. In “How Fear Came,” he’s not so much a protagonist as the audience for a prototypical Just So story (of which more later) telling how the first tiger got his stripes. Other stories in the collections include the classic “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi” – about a mongoose’s blood-feud with a husband-and-wife partnership of cobras – and other stand-alone fables about the relationships between humans and animals both in and outside the Raj.
Also, ironically given that the phrase “the law of the jungle” has come to mean a primal situation of anarchy in which everyone is out for him- or herself, the jungle of the Mowgli stories is a place where law is everything. When Mowgli is first adopted by his wolf family, he must be presented formally at the Council Rock for the approval of the pack. Father Wolf pushes the man-cub into the center of the circle, where, in a lovely image of oblivious childhood, “he sat laughing and playing with some pebbles that glistened in the moonlight.” Baloo, “the sleepy brown bear who teaches the wolf cubs the Law of the Jungle,” speaks up for him, and Bagheera seconds the nomination and buys Mowgli’s acceptance with the carcass of a bull, pointing out that though he has no standing in the wolves’ assembly “the Law of the Jungle says that if there is a doubt that is not a killing matter in regard to a new cub, the life of that cub may be bought at a price. And the Law does not say who may or may not pay that price.” Not just a law, but loopholes.
The jungle is a place of fixed hierarchies, established customs, and elaborate formulaic greetings (“We be of one blood, thou and I’; “Good hunting’). It contrasts with the untrustworthy and bewildering world of the human village, where, as Mowgli reports, “they are idle, senseless and cruel; they play with their mouths, and they do not kill their weaker for food, but for sport. When they are full-fed they would throw their own breed into the Red Flower.”* Shere Khan is a villain not because he’s a predator, but because he disrupts the orderly space of the jungle – hunting man; changing his territory unpredictably; conniving with the younger wolves to depose Akela as rightful ruler of the pack. Quite beneath contempt – almost beneath mention – are the Bandar-log, the boastful and lawless monkey people who abduct Mowgli in “Kaa’s Hunting”: “They have no law. They are outcaste […] Their way is not our way.”*
