Posted by RichardG on December 20, 2004 at 12:14:44 from 212.137.34.25 user RichardG.
In Reply to: Re: Imaginary friends posted by Robert Hill on December 18, 2004 at 18:45:02:
To understand the genesis of Peter Duck you also need to have read "Their Own Story" as reproduced in "Arthur Ransome & Captain Flint's Trunk". In that, he seems to be a "real" person who is weaved into the story that the S & A's are making up, just as Captain Flint is. His metamorphosis into Titty's imaginary friend in SD doesn't really make sense having read this, but then AR had dropped that version of the story's origins from the published version of PD and reveals to the SD reader that PD is a fantasy adventure, leaving us to assume that all the new characters in it are also made-up.
Actually, I tend to suspect that AR himself was a little unsure about the relationship between his characters' "real life" adventures and the "fantasy" ones, as although SD tells us that PD is a made-up story, we are left to make up our own minds about ML - no hints as to when and where the S&As were when they made it up, for instance.
PS - in that "AR & CF's T" is out of print, it strikes me that the publishers have missed a trick by not including "Their Own Story" in the collection of unfinished works that is published as "Coots in the North" - as far as I am aware it is the only other S&A story that exists in a fairly complete form, as opposed to early drafts of the finished stories; while it is itself a draft for PD, it is nevertheless well removed from the final book and is very readable as a stand-alone story.