Posted by Peter Ceresole on October 12, 2003 at 10:36:51 from 80.177.22.49 user PeterC.
In Reply to: Re: Are the D's the real heroes? -why no Ds in ML? posted by Katharine on October 12, 2003 at 09:59:10:
Their role in the stories makes a link between the fantasy world where we can all sail as well as the SAs, and the real world where most of us grew up in towns and can't
I think that's the key to the Ds. AR was perfectly aware that his readers were mostly children who lived in towns, and was highly aware of commercial considerations. There was nothing airy-fairy about his writing; he wrote for a living. He wrote very well, the quality was high, but the idea was to make money; hit the Christmas market. He'd been a journo after all.
The Ds were a connection to his market. I was one of those readers- I lived in London. From the moment they appeared in WH, it was my favourite book and they were my favourite characters. I didn't know Lakeland (first went there 30 years later) or sailing. I knew nobody remotely like the Walkers or the Blacketts. The Ds were the classic bridging link. You see it in many forms; for instance in the classic Humphrey Jennings wartime film 'Fires were started' a new recruit to the fire team is given a conducted tour of their Limehouse patch by a veteran fireman. The explanations are handled in a fluent, naturalistic form. At the start of SA, there's quite a lot of explanation by AR to the reader. The Ds make that unnecessary.
I also suspect that he wanted to introduce a note of satire on writing, combined with bourgeois charm, which would lighten the feel. Dorothea to a 'T'. And Dick, as has been pointed out, 'was' AR. After all, he now realised he was in for the long haul, and needed to give himself some lighter relief. Dick and Dorothea fitted that nicely. None of it could have been retrofitted onto his existing characters without a major wrench, whereas the Ds were purpose-built. As children of prosperous Londoners, the classic 'rootless cosmopolitans', they were also a plausible link to the Broads, which opened up another field of fire.
As to why he didn't include them in ML, I agree that it would have complicated the story no end, and anyway he already had a cast of characters for his 'Peter Duck' stories, and a ship's complement for the Wild Cat- where would the Ds have slept? The schooner would have been bulging at the seams. I think it made sense for him to stay with what he'd got.