Re: Broadening one's horizons


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Posted by Katharine Edgar on July 24, 2003 at 09:02:31 from 81.96.140.67 user Katharine.

In Reply to: Re: Broadening one's horizons posted by Ross Cossar on July 24, 2003 at 01:29:23:

I also read Robinson Crusoe as a result of Swallows and Amazons, and remember being quite perplexed by the religiosity of it. I still enjoyed it, however, and looking back I'm surprised I didn't find it more confusing - there was a documentary the other week which talked about Robinson Crusoe as one of the earliest novels in the English language. The fact that 20th century kids can read and enjoy a novel from 3 centuries back, written in a completely different context, socially and culturally, is pretty amazing don't you think?

With regard to stout Cortez etc, when I discovered the real context of that quote I was surprised to see it wasn't a poem about exploration in the literal sense - the Swallows had presumably been made to learn the poem at school (it was a pretty standard one I think) and had pulled out the lines which had most resonance for them, quoting them out of context (but very evocatively). It's an understated AR joke I only picked up on recently!

Hakluyt's Voyages - my guess is that this was a less obscure text in the 1920s and 30s than now. The 1920s saw a great revival of interest in the Elizabethan period (witness all those timber framed suburban villas, or the Elizabethan pageants in E.F.Benson's Lucia books) and it's exactly the kind of book one can imagine being read from in a 1920s schoolroom, particularly a primary school. Yes the SAs are well-read, but not, I think, implausibly so....


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